Yesterday, for the first time in about a year, I tried powering on the Macintosh Performa 450 (LC III) from my past writeup about Apple’s backwards capacitor.
It didn’t work. The screen was black, it played the startup sound, and then immediately followed up with the “Chimes of Death”. Nothing else happened from that point on. Here’s what it sounded like:
This was a little frustrating because last year I had already replaced all of the capacitors and cleaned where they had leaked, so I didn’t expect to encounter any problems with it so soon. The machine had worked fine the last time I’d tried it! But despite all that, something was failing during the power-on tests in Apple’s ROM, prompting it to play the chimes of death. I remembered that people have been working towards documenting the Mac ROM startup tests and using them to diagnose problems, so I decided to give it a shot and see if Apple’s Serial Test Manager could identify my Performa’s issue. Where was the fault on this complicated board? Sure, I could test a zillion traces by hand, but why bother when the computer already knows what is wrong?
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