The Beige Knight Rises - PPC 7100/66

[Bunsen]

Hello all! I am a long time reader of this AWESOME forum, but new to posting here.

I want to tell you all about my favourite new project; my old powermac 7100, but first a story.

When I was a young lad I spent many a night in the glow of my trusty viewsonic CRT and my beloved powermac 7100/66. I would creep silently to the computer room, placing my headphones in the phone slot so as to mute that massive and booming "BONG" startup. There with nothing but my self, some oreos, and my mac; creating worlds with Infini-D 4.5 and Bryce, pretending I was in space with Marathon and Escape Velocity, who knows what else. My halcyon days, those were. But time has a way of ripping us from our happy place, and soon the world had moved on. 66 Mhz was a paltry excuse for a computer according to some, and I listened. I got a shiny rev b green iMac and I moved on into the world of TLAs like USB and PCI, and eventually BSD and X86. But that 7100 never left my mind, even if it left my house. It was a hand me down computer from my dads office, anyways. So back it went, and served 5 long years as little more than an accounting computer, only to be replaced by a LCD iMac g4 when they were tossed to the wolves. So she sat, silently, in a storage locker out of the city. Waiting for the day when she would be useful again. Well ladies and gentlemen that day has come!!

I have recovered my beloved Butthead Astronomer, and I am struggling to bring her back into the fleet. Alongside a black 07' Macbook, a Dell Vostro 220, a Macintosh Classic II, and various and sundry other little computers along the way.

Loadout and Procedures:
As far as I can tell she is a standard 66 Mhz Powermac 7100, with 8 megs of ram.
She has only one card installed, it appears to be a VGA video card, but I dont recall installing it.
Battery is in decent condition, I have removed it to ensure it does not explode.
despite minor case scuffing she is in pretty good shape structurally, with no broken or bent plastic or metal components.

Problems:
- She lacks a modern Ethernet port.
- Her hard drive is no longer serviceable, I have replaced it with a Quantum 80meg drive out of an LC-3 I have.
- She lacks any modern db-15 VGA port
- No CD drive.

Intentions:
- She needs to run 7.6 at the very least, system 8 would be nice too, but without a CD drive I am limited.
- I will load it up as best I can with games and apps from my past.
- I will use it to organize a simple file server for shits and giggles
- try and get some light web-serving enabled?
- I want it to be network enabled to allow for the use of Appletalk to transfer items easily.

Secondary Equipment:
- I have a db-15 to db-whatever adapter, so she works with a standard LCD monitor.
- I have localtalk cables.
- I have a USB floppy drive
- I have a USB Zip Drive (and somewhere a SCSI one too!!)
- I have a mac with MacFUSE and FuseHFS installed so I can open and edit HFVolumes, and a windows PC with HFV Explorer.

Status:
- used my floppy drive to copy the system 7.5 install disks and installed system 7.5.? on the 80 meg drive with minor errors. Doing the installation in pieces made things easier.
- Have been able to boot into system 7.5 successfully.
- Having some headaches getting the myriad different disk image formats to write successfully onto my floppies.

To do:
- Need to find AAUI adapter (hopefully the one being offered in the trading post will materialize).
- Eventually need to figure out how to write floppies without issue. Sometimes I get them to work using HFV Explorer on windows, and sometimes using the DD terminal command on OS X. Never 100% success rating, problem seems to be the format of the disk image. With HFV Explorer .dsk images write without error, so I am using Mini vMac to help me organize and package disk images in a virtual mac and then burn them to a physical floppy with HFV Explorer. Not an ideal workflow.
- Find my SCSI Zip Drive.

ANY ADVICE RELATED TO MODERNIZING OLD MACS WOULD BE APPRECIATED! PICTURES TO COME!

[beachycove]

If you can network the 7100 to another machine, or get it on the web, it might be easier to copy disk image files and make floppies on the 7100 itself (using Disk Copy). That's what I do. Mind you, there aren't many installers from that period that you could not fit on a 100mb zip drive.

A CD drive is desirable, all the same; then, more RAM (4x32MB=128MB would be good), a cache card or perhaps a G3 accelerator, and a Jackhammer SCSI card with a 68pin drive would make the thing fly a little faster....

Location would be useful if you are looking for any gear from fellow members.

[ClassicHasClass]

My SR-7100 is a 7100/66 that got an HPV A/V card, a full RAM loadout, a 24x CD-ROM and a 400MHz G3. Even with all that it's still not as zippy as my 7300 (and the 7300 now has a G4/800, so the differential is even wider), but it'll make a nice server if the IIci handing AppleTalk has a stroke.

[directive0]

Thanks for the tips everyone, its helping me tons! More amazing news!

Went to look through the remaining storage shed and found two SCSI zipdrives, and a Mac HD 20. Though this will not help with my disk formatting woes, it will make it a lot easier to transfer things to my 7100.

I forgot to mention also that I have rescued the following macs from my father's office storage:

-Mac classic 1 and 2
-Mac se/30 - simasi but on the docket to fix once I get a suitable torx 15
-Mac plus!!!
-Macintosh portable
-PowerBook 140, 170, 540 and a 5300c

so these should come in handy if I need intermediary 68k comps.

[trag]

If you have frequent system freezes with the 7100, or if you start to do so, then pull the logic board, remove the heat sink and clean and replace the heat sink grease. The heat sink grease has mostly turned to powder on 7100s and isn't doing a very good job any more.

[directive0]

Thanks Trag, I'm writing myself a google doc with a bunch of advisories about this machine, that one is going near the top. I plan to do some basic servicing on the machine once I have some free time, maybe it would be a good idea to replace the thermal paste even if it looks fine?



GUYS! Using those zipdisks I got OS 8 installed thanks to the the most amazing disk image I have ever encountered; The Apple Legacy Recovery Disk! It includes LISA software, and even a copy of A/UX! I had to mount the zip on my old headless G4 powerbook, it still had x.4 on it, which meant it could mount and modify my HFS zip disks. Copying the OS8 image on the powerbook to the zip and then putting the zip into the powermac I was able to mount the OS 8 Installer on my desktop and run it!



I have a fully functional Powermac 7100! I am so stoked. But now the real fun begins; playing with ZIPs is nice but I want network access. Next step is acquire an AAUI adapter!

[beachycove]

Or a Nubus ethernet card.

[directive0]

I haven't really looked into that.

Are they easier/cheaper to acquire?

[beachycove]

6 of one and 1/2 dozen of the other.

Check your PMs, by the way.

[directive0]

I got my adapter! I plugged it in and was expecting to get an IP in the tcp/ip panel and when I didn't I freaked out and went to the IRC channel where the folks there steered me straight! Long story short, AAUI Adapter works great, but I am not so sure about my own critical thinking skills.

Surfing on this guy is such a reminder of bygone days. When it was my primary computer we used a modem and connected to AOL over dialup. Oh how things have changed.

I used Netscape 2.0 for a while, but it threw up TONS of javascript errors. Upgraded the 4.8, and it's butter. Well, buttery smooth as can be for a guy with a 601 and 40 megs of ram can be!

I had to test some period appropriate fare.

I spent most of the night playing Escape Velocity. God its good to be back.

I am really grateful to the help from all of you here, this community has been on my radar for years as these things sat in a storage shed, and now I can finally get to work fixing up the compact macs and getting them out the door!

Next up, OrangeMicro NUBUS DOS card, powerbook hard drive data siphoning, Simasi Mac SE/30 repair! Woo hoo!

[LCGuy]

Slightly off-topic...I still can't believe that the page for Space Jam is still up. It is awesome though.

Either way, good work, must be nice to have your first Mac back.

[directive0]

Yeah I am really happy! It's funny I sit infront of a much more powerful computer all day, but all I can think about is when 5 o'clock rolls around and I can go home and play with my powermac again.

I'm starting an Infini-D Project tonight to get some of my old 3d Models modernized with techniques I've learned since 1999, I'll be sure to post up some screenies! I'm gonna need to get some ram for the old girl, and I bet a g3 card would be awesome.

Anyone know if an orangemicro card and a g3 accelerator could be installed in the same machine?

[directive0]

ARGH!

Last night when I was installing a new SCSI cable I was taking the metal enclosure off the 7100 and SNAPPED the back bezel off! The screw column that secures it to the back panel just snapped right off the panel. I could probably fuse it back together somehow.

looks like my plan for a perfectly restored 7100 is borked.

Can you even find these pieces anymore?

[directive0]

Got my eMate working with the 7100, using it as my daily journal. Plan to use it to keep service journals for all the macs I will restore.

I have been having a blast using this little guy to get back into bad 90's 3d rendering. My lovely lady friend suggested finding a modern practical use for the 3d renderings, so I decided to start a draft for an image that would go on her cheese party invitations.

Solution in search of a problem, but what are ya gonna do?

[mcdermd]

Ha! That's awesome!

[directive0]

Got a new 7100! A 7100/80 with 100MB ram (the dual 64MB ram wouldn't work for some reason )

I did some rendering/usability tests last night; its slightly faster at raytracing than Carl (the 7100/66)! I intend to link both 7100's together and use network rendering to improve performance!

I got an OrangeMicro 486 card. Need to find the software for it!

A little yellowed, but runs great!

A shot of her guts! Installing more ram!

The OrangeMicro card. Any idea where to find old software for it??

[24bit]

I´m not familiar with Nubus PC cards, but did you try the waybackmachine?
http://web.archive.org/web/200008152242 ... dates.html
Small files are usually well preserved from vanished sites, some basic files seem to be still there, nb application disk and Win95 boot disk - does that sound about right?
Good luck!

Such a shame the math coprocessor is missing!

[directive0]

I had not tried that!

Thank you very much that looks almost perfect, I'm going to look it over!

http://web.archive.org/web/200008172218 ... dates.html

Looks like my card falls in there. going to try downloading that software when I get home! Thanks again!

[24bit]

Thats what I would have guessed, 300 Series. Stuffit7 seems to unpack the MacBinary from Wayback all right.
Muliport cable? Did you get one of those?

Thank you for purchasing an OrangePC nb Card for a NuBus Macintosh. The OrangePC nb Version 1.0.3 application is an enhancement and bug fix Release of OrangePC nb Software that support Apple NuBus machines. The version 1.0.3 software is not backward compatible with older OrangePC NuBus boards. For the current version of the older NuBus Software please contact our sales department for this upgrade.

OrangePC nb Version 1.0.3 software currently supports DOS, Windows and Windows 95 operating systems. Please contact our sales department for information on upcoming operating system support.


Orange Micro, Inc.

Phone: (714) 779-2772
Fax: (714) 779-9332
Internet: http::/www.orangemicro.com
email:
Technical Support: support@orangemicro.com
Sales: sales@orangemicro.com


Troubleshooting Tips
_________________

Problem :
The OrangePC nb Application starts up and all that it displays is a white screen.

Solution :
You must install the Multi-Port cable provided to you by Orange Micro and have the monitor portion of the cable hooked up correctly. See the OrangePC Manual for further information.


OrangePC nb 1.0.3
_________________________________________________________________________
Bug Fixes

1. Correct calculation of memory on a warm boot.


OrangePC nb 1.0.2
_________________________________________________________________________
Enhancements

1. Copy and Paste Support.

Bug Fixes

1. A better way for the BIOS to find the mouse is implemented.

2. Allow saving of the H Drive to the preferences.


OrangePC nb 1.0.l
_________________________________________________________________________

Bug Fixes

1. Increase the stability of the Cyrix 5x86 CPUs.

[directive0]

All I have is what I photographed.

I'll see what happens tonight. The page linked with the picture of 300 series card mentions nothing about a Math-Coprocessor nor does it really look like the one I have.

I'm starting to wonder if this is a rare one off.

[24bit]

Yours is not the 340, obviously. Looks like that one had a 80586 (with built in FPU).
Still your card might fit in an (earlier) 3X0 series.
If there is a VGA conector on the card, a seperate monitor should work instead of the multiport thing.
Had a similar setup with my Amiga2000 and a 80386 card with a display selector switch.
I would cross-post at Macintoshgarden, some people over there may recall about orangemicro stuff.

[directive0]

Installed the OrangeMicro software for 300 series cards. No joy. Tells me there are no identifiable cards present in any slot.

Apple System Profiler reads the card on the far slot $D I think, with a vendor name of OrangeMicro, an ID of 1152 and a card version of 1.0.

Bummer.

Getting better, but colours are still washy.

I did manage to get some more work done on my rendering! I figure I'm gonna stick both my 7100's together over localtalk and use Infini-D's net rendering tools! Haha PPC render farm!

[LOOM]

I think it's a 340 card. They came in both 486 and 586 editions. Up to 120MHz, 64MB SVGA, Serial & Parallel port.
What does the CPU say on top of it? Could also be a low-range 210-card with 486SX/33 CPU.
Also, try to find a model number on the card itself.

[directive0]

Appreciate the help!

I will collect that info when I get a chance, thanks!

[directive0]

Argh I'm a fool!

So I tried it with 200 series software and it just worked. Awesome!

Thanks everyone, here's some screenies for the trouble!

Downloaded the 300 series software

this is what happened when I used 300 series software

Huh? What does system profiler say?

it sees it okay!

Hmmm... it's there.

200 Series software! No problem!

Sweet! Now I just need some windows floppies!

Seems I need to find a PS2 keyboard?