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I've been on a bit of a vintage Mac hardware kick lately finding cheap/broken (usually both) machines and restoring them. Some to flip, a couple to keep. Pretty much everything works fine on emulators but everything (except load times) just looks and feels better on the hardware. It started in March when I saw a Macintosh Classic on Facebook for cheap in non-working order. Meet Clarissa  I figured it would be easy to fix, probably recap the analog and logic boards and call it a day...    Motherfucker  ...I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron so I set off on my project to bring this board back to life. First step, cleaning. I got it surprisingly clean.  To test, I stuck the board back in there and got this  It was enough for the analog board to spring to life and send high voltage to the CRT. I buckled down and started trying to repair the board  I got this far in before I realized that the board was just too far gone. Set up an ebay alert for a replacement logic board and set it aside to focus on the case and peripherals.  When I started the mouse and the case were the same level of yellow but here is the mouse post-retrobrite compared to the pre-retrobrite case. Unsatisfied with how long the logic board wait was going to be I hopped on craigslist and searched for Macintosh and found SErena.  Works great but overall really filthy and yellow. It also came with the original box, system 6 floppy set, the good mechanical ADB keyboard and the loudest 160MB SCSI drive you've ever heard. She cleans up nice though.  Now, I wanted to do some fun things with these and these loud and almost dead SCSI drives are no fun so I got a raSCSI kit. It's a raspberry pi controlled SCSI device emulator so you can use hard drive images on various old computers including these classic macs. You can also use it as a SCSI Ethernet adapter so I can get these machines online. There's a web interface where you can give it a URL for a .sit, .hqx, .zip file and it will mount it on your Mac as a CD ROM. It's indespensible for projects like these. So much nicer than a blueSCSI or SCSI2SD. I 3d printed a cool case for mine.  I still needed a bridge machine for making the occasional floppy and while I could use my PC and an emulator that's no fun so I got an eMac off of Facebook. eMacs are a lot heavier than you think. Especially when you've got to pick it up from a 3rd floor walkup. This is Big Bertha.  I've got OS9 and tiger on there and this is great for all of the PPC games, as well as having a nice machine to download Mac files from the internet without screwing up their resource forks to burn discs or make floppies. A large percentage of software on the various archive sites were also compressed with newer versions of stuffit and they won't unstuff on older machines so those get extracted and repackaged here too. At this point I still wanted to get the Classic fixed so I found a logic board and replacement metal chassis and when they arrived i put it all together and got  It's never easy with this machine. I recapped the logic board and washed it in the dishwasher making the whole house smell like rotten fish. No change. Then I checked the voltage on the analog board and 5v was only 4.4v. I spliced in my bench supply to the logic board with a clean 5v and...  I knew what I needed to do. I recapped and throughly cleaned the analog board, adjusted the voltage pot and now she's good as new and has taken her spot on my desk as "main old Mac" Since the SE is complete in box that one is destined for sale to sustain the hobby. The eMac is off in the distance for when I want to play some late 90s/early 2000s games. But yesterday I went back to Facebook marketplace and a new wild Mac has appeared.  As long as you don't want a Macintosh Plus (or earlier), an SE/30, a Color Classic, or an LC 575 you can get into 68k classic macs really cheaply and they all beat the pants off emulation and the spotty compatibility of running in os 8/9/X. GutBomb fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Apr 16, 2022 |
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Apr 16, 2022 13:04
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Ive ordered The Secret History of Mac Gaming and I'm looking forward to it, and that made me curious, is there any archived material like magazine or newspaper articles contemporary to the time about World Builder or HyperCard and whatever communities might have formed around them?
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Apr 16, 2022 19:17
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Oh hey, I didn’t know we had a Mac thread. My current retro gaming/development machine is a Power Mac 9600 I’ve upgraded to an absurd degree. Sorry that I don’t have any pictures at the moment. It’s got: - A Sonnet G4/1000 CPU upgrade I found on Yahoo Auctions for $300. Holy poo poo is it fast. It has a massive amount of L2 and L3 cache to work around the slow memory bus. The CPU operates at a 20x multiplier while the cache is 2-3x. You can really tell the difference with it enabled. - 512MB of RAM - a Radeon 9500, the fastest card you can drop into a PCI Mac. There’s no Quartz acceleration under Tiger (it won’t work without AGP, thanks Stebe) but it’s still plenty fast. - A PCI SATA controller flashed with Old World drivers. This means I can boot everything from System 7.6 to Tiger on one system. And Tiger on an SSD is drat fast even on this thing. - FW400 adapter with a big external drive and a CD burner. I run CodeWarrior on it and use it for working on all kinds of projects. My most recent one is USB HID support under System 7. I’ve been growing a Mac collection for years, starting with going with my dad to government auctions and convincing him to get me one of everything cool or unique. I’ve got everything from a Mac 512Ke (the education version of a Mac Plus) to a IIfx and a bunch of desktop Power Macs. Classic Mac OS is just so comfy. It reminds me of playing Escape Velocity and SNES9x on the Macs in school. Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Apr 16, 2022 |
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Apr 16, 2022 19:20
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GutBomb posted:I got this far in before I realized that the board was just too far gone. Set up an ebay alert for a replacement logic board and set it aside to focus on the case and peripherals. The Classic Reloaded boards should be either already available or available soon. You can transfer your surviving components to a new PCB. These things are a mess, even my revived Classic II has a bad via somewhere, and it didn’t experience a battery leak. I was tinkering with BlueSCSI a few days ago because I won a kit. Pretty happy with it. I’m gonna build some DB25 external variants, and finally finish off my own ArdSCSIno clone. Then I’m gonna play with Think Pascal and Sprite Animation Toolkit again. Maybe do some experiments with fast graphics in HyperCard. Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Apr 16, 2022 |
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Apr 16, 2022 20:00
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Seat Safety Switch posted:The Classic Reloaded boards should be either already available or available soon. You can transfer your surviving components to a new PCB. These things are a mess, even my revived Classic II has a bad via somewhere, and it didn’t experience a battery leak. I looked into classic reloaded and while it's cool, I think most of the components near the battery are dead and/or completely gone (the little crystal is just gone for sure) The board I ended up with was new old stock from apple service. It has been sitting sealed on a shelf since 1991 and it still had cap juice on it when I opened it up.
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Apr 16, 2022 20:57
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ive been loving these deep dives and lore posts from y'all 
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Apr 16, 2022 23:01
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CYBEReris posted:Ive ordered The Secret History of Mac Gaming and I'm looking forward to it, and that made me curious, is there any archived material like magazine or newspaper articles contemporary to the time about World Builder or HyperCard and whatever communities might have formed around them? archive.org has most of MacWorld https://archive.org/search.php?query=macworld&and%5B%5D=subject%3A%22Magazines%22&sort=date One day I will de-spine my AMWs and scan them all...
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Apr 17, 2022 00:28
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GutBomb posted:The board I ended up with was new old stock from apple service. It has been sitting sealed on a shelf since 1991 and it still had cap juice on it when I opened it up. Caps don't like to sit, especially this kind where the little rubber bung at the bottom will shrink without use and leak everywhere. Like the seals on a car engine, they gotta be exercised. The Maxell explosions are just overwhelmingly bad. I've got a IIfx where two of those little fuckers went off.
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Apr 17, 2022 04:38
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After a few hours of work frankensteining parts from a donor, my first laptop arises from the dead! (bonus serial number file and AIM in the menu up top) A Powerbook 520c with a blazing 24 megs of RAM and a 603e upgrade good for 117mhz. I still have a bunch of giant-rear end* SCSI drives in the basement I can daisy chain up and see what the hell I was doing with in 1998. Looks like I need some sort of adapter to put this on my network, which I'd only really do for the ease of moving poo poo around via FTP (I assume, anyhow). Are there any solid drive emulators/adapters/whatever I should be tracking down? The drive is stock from 1994, so it might not be a bad idea to back that bad boy up onto the tiniest SD card possible, which would still be several orders of magnitude larger than the 320 meg drive this thing has. *Physically. They weigh like 8-10 pounds each, and store between 50 and 500 megs. I wanna say there's four hard drives and one absurdly large CD drive.
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Apr 28, 2022 21:16
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Nice! Looks like it's in good condition.
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Apr 29, 2022 00:28
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The AAUI is electrically an AUI port I believe, so it should be fairly trivial to adapt to normal twisted pair ethernet.
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Apr 29, 2022 01:25
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^^ I swear I had a PCMCIA card that could do this too, once, but if I did I have no idea where the hell it went. Probably with the G3 Wallstreet (well, 233mhz so "Mainstreet?") I inexplicably lost track of.HisMajestyBOB posted:Nice! Looks like it's in good condition. That's because half of it is original and the other half is from a parts 520c I got off Ebay. In original shape, the chassis had a massive crack, there's battery corrosion all over the front compartment and the weird giant metal bracket everything seats into or around, and the keyboard was missing keys somehow. The donor was more or less fine minus the screen being wholly broken from the base somehow. Connector still works, so I think I might have an ok spare screen. Found a Mac Color Display on the side of the road a few years back, gonna fine out if it works soon. Also:  ...I got the SCSI drives out of the basement last night. Each one of these is easily two pounds heavier than the laptop, which is like 8 pounds. Time to find out what I was up to in the year 2000 (I already found some cringe emails I sent to a girl I was dating at the time). If I could find the damned G3 powerbook, I'd have an example of every generation (loosely - I mean like, processor iteration; 68k -> powerPC -> G3 -> G4 -> CoreDuo -> i5) mac laptop through to 2011, which is....weird and not a thing I explicitly sought out. George RR Fartin fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Apr 29, 2022 |
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Apr 29, 2022 14:01
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That was a bust. Each drive would bring up a question mark disk or the diamond with a number in it like I was doing target disk mode. I suspect the issue is the lack of a terminator on the first drive - apparently the 500 series are one that didn't internally terminate, so when you plug any SCSI drives into the port, the laptop can't handle them normally. I've got a $5 passthrough terminator on the way from Ebay (though I suspect at least one drive is kaput, given the noises it was making, but maybe it's just...talkative). I could've sworn these worked with the 520, but maybe I was using them with the G3 at the time? It's been a long time.
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Apr 29, 2022 20:31
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Trying to setup my eMac to boot OS 9 unsupported and I need to install OS X onto the second partition. After installing CD 1 of 4 (or technically 3 once you untick all the printer drivers) it tries to boot off the OS X partition and gets the international no symbol. Shouldn't it ask for CD 2? When I insert CD 2 it can't boot off that. I can't find a DVD image of 10.4 that works on PPC.
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May 11, 2022 12:24
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~Coxy posted:Trying to setup my eMac to boot OS 9 unsupported and I need to install OS X onto the second partition. I installed 10.4 just the other day on a 2005 G4 ibook, though I did it via USB. Does the eMac have USB ports (and support that method)?
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May 11, 2022 18:15
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Yeah, it actually has USB 2.0, I should try that. Edit: so annoying, I can't get it to boot off a USB stick through OF. I got 10.3 Install CD to boot, and it installs and asks for CD #2, so I have Panther installed now. I copied over the tbxi patches and I can boot OS 9 from Option screen, but it freezes after Extensions load.  (Or freezes if Extensions are turned off.)
~Coxy fucked around with this message at 03:48 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 12, 2022 01:34
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New member of the family I've wanted one of these since 1989. Maxed out the RAM. 128MB in a computer from 1989. (I took the picture before I upgraded the RAM)
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May 29, 2022 17:19
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