Macintosh II

The Macintosh II was the first desktop business model in the Macintosh series capable of displaying color. It used a 68020 CPU running at 16 MHz — quite a luxury for the time — and even came with an FPU as standard. If I recall correctly, the 68030 came out shortly afterward.

Like the Macintosh SE released around the same time, it used the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) interface for keyboard and mouse connections — a feature carried over from the Apple IIgs.

The logic board was huge, and interestingly, it used two different types of capacitors depending on the location. I suspect it was somewhat experimental as a design. My first impression when I saw it was simply: “Why is it so unnecessarily big?”
Most Macintosh II models came with massive 5.25-inch hard drives that sounded like airplane engines taking off — incredibly loud.

As a side note, the Japanese version included a Kanji ROM card installed in one of the NuBus slots, similar to the Dyna Mac. The standard hard drive at the time was only 40 MB, so to save that precious disk space for users, the Kanji system was implemented in ROM instead of being stored on the hard drive. This allowed the system to display Japanese characters directly from the ROM card without installing large Kanji font files on disk.

Recommended Hardware Mods

Memory Card

This part was a bit irregular — *I’ll double-check the details later — but the system required sets of four identical RAM SIMMs. I believe Bank A wouldn’t accept 16 MB or 4 MB SIMMs unless you were using IIx (SE/30-equivalent) ROMs. I’ll confirm this later.

If you want to go for the maximum 128 MB, that’s perfectly fine — that means using eight 16 MB SIMMs. You can usually find these on eBay or OWC.
That said, even 32 MB was a huge amount of memory for that era. Using eight 4 MB SIMMs would be plenty, and any software from that time would run just fine.

You can also make 4 MB SIMMs yourself. If you have a 16 MB 72-pin SIMM, you can repurpose it into four 4 MB 30-pin SIMMs. For details, see my project linked here.

ROM

The system originally used four ROM chips. However, if you remove the two ROM sockets near the memory slots, you can install a 64-pin SIMM socket and use a ROM SIMM instead. If you happen to have a spare SE/30 (IIx-equivalent) ROM SIMM, you can install it to enable support for the SuperDrive (1.4 MB floppy drive).
In practice, you’ll also need to replace the IWM floppy controller with a SWIM chip. Unfortunately, ROM SIMMs from the Macintosh IIsi are not compatible.

Floppy Drive

As mentioned earlier, once you replace the ROM and floppy controller with a SWIM(344S-0061) chip, you can upgrade to a 1.4 MB drive. That means you can replace the original 800 KB drive with a SuperDrive — and the Macintosh II can actually hold two of them internally.

BlueSCSI

For one, the original 5-inch hard drives made a rather unpleasant spinning noise, like a jetliner taking off!

On 68k Macs, BlueSCSI is a lifesaver, and the Mac II is no exception. It doesn’t just emulate hard drives—it can also handle CD-ROMs, even SCSI floppies. Pair it with a Wi-Fi model, and suddenly your Mac II can browse the web through vintage Mac-friendly browsers, showing up as a SCSI Dynaport device.

NuBus Graphics Cards

The Macintosh II came with an official Apple graphics card, but there were plenty of third-party options from companies like Radius and SuperMac.
It’s hard to compare their raw performance since the differences weren’t huge back then, but each had its own character — for example, different color rendering — which made them fun to experiment with.

Accelerators

I personally haven’t used an accelerator with the Macintosh II, but the Radius Rocket 33 and Rocket 040 were legendary — even their startup sounds are famous among enthusiasts.

Serious users typically combined a NuBus video card with a CPU accelerator from DayStar or similar brands. Professional users, especially those in DTP or CAD fields, would first add a Radius or SuperMac video card, then upgrade the CPU with an accelerator — that was the standard workflow back then.

I do own a Macintosh II myself, but I feel like I haven’t really made the most of it yet.
If you have any tips or advice, I’d love to hear them.