Retro Geek

Tom, I'll take one of the hard drives. I just found an Apple CD-ROM on Craigslist here.

Send a PayPal invoice to me at my first name (matthew) at my last name (sparby) dot com.

So I can calculate shipping, pm me your address.

Do you want any SCSI cables or terminators?

I picked up the AppleCD 600e today for $10. It works great. I was able to daisy-chain the DaynaPORT off of that so now it's fully functional... except I can't seem to get TCP/IP working correctly so no Netscape Navigator 3.0 for me.

The TCP/IP problem was fixed when I switched it to use OpenTransport. Netscape Navigator 3.0 was just too crashy to do anything. I downloaded iCab 2.9.9 and I can now do some basic web browsing. Not very practical but should be good enough for downloading other software.

I dug through a box of junk and found a 32MB SIMM that works in this thing so now it has 36MB RAM. Unfortunately, only 8MB of that is usable unless I turn on 32-bit addressing mode. The Apple IIe card can only be used when it's set to 24-bit addressing so I have to change the setting and reboot if I want to use the IIe card and then change it back and reboot again if I want to do something more memory-intensive.

I'll definitely need that bigger hard drive from you, Tom. I have less then 10MB free on the 80MB drive that came with this thing. Heh.

It's been fun playing Shufflepuck Cafe, Maelstrom, Spectre, Mario Teaches Typing... once I get the bigger drive I'll install AfterDark so I can play Lunatic Fringe.

I had two all-in-one boxes before this. There was the Performa 550 which I used as a donor for the motherboard that is now in the Color Classic as well as an LC 520 which had a dead hard drive in it and used one of those annoying CD-ROM drives that required a caddy. I pulled the motherboard from that and put it into the Performa 550 case. So the 550 is functional now albeit at half its original speed since the 520 was only a 16MHz 030. It does have an Ethernet board, though. This means I can set up both the 550 and the Color Classic on the network now to play Spectre. Woohoo!

Spectre - loved that game...

This has turned into Vintage Mac weekend for me.

I'm trying to keep up the momentum in order to get rid of some junk and organize the rest.

I resurrected the PowerMac 7300/180 that has been gathering dust. It has a G4 upgrade in it as well as an IDE controller and 256MB RAM. It's now up and running with a fresh install of System 7.6.1 on an 8GB IDE drive. I'm going to try to install MacOS 9 if I can find an install disc that will work on this machine.

Next up, I'm getting my old Blue & White G3 going. It has a G4 upgrade in it, too. OS 9.2.1 is installing right now.

I seem to remember that these G4 upgrades needed some kind of supplemental utility installed in order to enable the L2 cache on them. Anybody know where I can get ahold of those utilities for classic MacOS?

At the bottom of low end mac entries is usually a trove of information in case you have not already been there...

example

http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/blue-white-power-mac-g3.html

http://lowendmac.com/macdan/md10/power-mac-sata-ssd.htm



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/20/2011 04:42PM by El Jeffe.

I got a G3 accelerator for my Twentieth Anniversary Mac, and I have the enabler it required. I do remember that the other upgrades needed them, too. It's been a long time since I thought about that stuff.

I was able to get the PowerLogix CPU Director software installed.

I'm posting this from the B&W G3 via iCab.

So now this system is functional as well, I can shut it down and decide what to do with it. I might put it up on Craigslist as a freebie or something or maybe I'll just put it in the server room to serve files to my vintage Macs which can't connect to my Snow Leopard boxes.

You might want to burn a "restore" CD now, with the intalled System Folder and prefs, CPU enabler, and browser. Very useful if a new owner isn't as savvy as you, and if you keep the Mac it could save you a lot of hassle down the road.

I assume sites like sonnet tech and other CPU upgrade mobs are all long gone...

I got the hard drives from Tom today.

I'm formatting (err... Initializing) one of them right now. I forgot how long it takes to initialize a hard drive on a vintage Mac. I remember it taking a long time and that was in the days when the drives were only 80MB or so. Formatting a 4GB drive takes forever. Actually, I wish I knew how long it really was going to take. It's been going for 30 minutes or so now and there's no progress bar or anything so I have no way of knowing how much longer I have to wait.

Well it's tomorrow now. Did it finish?

Yes, it did. Ended up taking about 90 minutes.

I have it set up with a 10MB ProDOS partition as well so I can run the Apple IIe emulator board from the hard drive.

I need to learn more about ProDOS, though. I was a Commodore guy back in the old days. When it comes to Apple II stuff, all I ever did was put the disk in the drive, turn it on and use it.

I think I have my original ProDOS disks.

Not directly relevant, but in case anyone (lurkers included) are interested, I kept pretty much ALL of my Apple developer disks from the years (1993-2006ish IIRC). For anyone trying to piece some of this stuff together, it might be a treasure trove. I'd hate to just throw it all away (not immediately imminent, but probably the destiny).

Yeah, I had to cull mine. I tried to keep the ones with GM OS releases, but even those have gone missing over the years.

The most wonderful thing about ProDOS that I remember was the ability to type ca ta lo g and it would still recognise the command. Now that's programming. (I also liked VMS' commands)

DPBD

I still have the original System 7 release box with everything in it, books, floppies.

I still have some of the boxes JW culled, namely NeXTSTEP developer kits. Also a couple of very old Apple ][ manuals, including some third-party that were just xeroxed pages.

I also have a .Mac box that I never used because I didn't want to get hooked into the pay service, but is still supposed to be good for MobileMe. Think I should bother signing up now? :)