jonpurdy
Well-known member
TLDR: Centris 660av came with 68LC040, not full '040 chip and it's acting weird. Looking for advice.
Full story:
I've recently acquired a Centris 660av for a friend of mine and noticed something interesting while getting the machine set up. This 660av came with a 68LC040 chip (the 25MHz one), rather than the stock 68040. This 660av was bought off of someone who got it as part of a bundle (needed to buy the bundle to get the wanted machine), so the seller didn't notice either.
Brief notes:
- No internal hard disk, no RAM (except built-in)
- Using external Syquest EZ135 with known good cartridge to boot, known good keyboard, mouse, power cable
- Had trouble getting it to boot with 7.6.1 and 7.5.5; it would boot until the Finder opened and then would just freeze (you could hear the Syquest disk stop being accessed)
- I figured the built-in RAM wasn't enough
- Found the original Centris 660av installation CD with 7.1 and the Enabler; made 660av-specific minimal install, and finally got it to boot
- Machine shows up at Centris 660av in About this Macintosh
- Boots into Finder, but noticed some very odd behaviour
- If I single-click an icon, it looks like it's trying to be renamed (goes from name input to normal and back multiple times per second)
- I can click around and open a couple of programs, but sometimes they start to open, the mouse cursor turns into a stopwatch cursor, then the disk stops being accessed. I can still move the cursor around, so it's not totally frozen, but basically nothing happens at all
Suspicion:
- System is being confused by the lack of the FPU
- I haven't yet tried to change the Gestalt ID, but maybe if I set it to that of an LC with the same CPU, the system will not try and use the FPU? Or is Gestalt ID only a cosmetic thing that allows for programs to detect the machine they run on, but doesn't do anything to enable/disable features? (Most of my memory of this is from two decades ago when I was a kid learning this stuff for the first time)
Can anyone provide any advice, or confirm/deny my suspicion?
I'd rather not have to eBay an actual 68040 chip since those are about the same price as what this system cost, and I'd rather not eBay a whole other machine (since shipping to Canada basically kills those deals). I do have a dead Centris 610 that I picked up recently as well that I can pull the RAM from (haven't done this yet since it's not at my condo).
Full story:
I've recently acquired a Centris 660av for a friend of mine and noticed something interesting while getting the machine set up. This 660av came with a 68LC040 chip (the 25MHz one), rather than the stock 68040. This 660av was bought off of someone who got it as part of a bundle (needed to buy the bundle to get the wanted machine), so the seller didn't notice either.
Brief notes:
- No internal hard disk, no RAM (except built-in)
- Using external Syquest EZ135 with known good cartridge to boot, known good keyboard, mouse, power cable
- Had trouble getting it to boot with 7.6.1 and 7.5.5; it would boot until the Finder opened and then would just freeze (you could hear the Syquest disk stop being accessed)
- I figured the built-in RAM wasn't enough
- Found the original Centris 660av installation CD with 7.1 and the Enabler; made 660av-specific minimal install, and finally got it to boot
- Machine shows up at Centris 660av in About this Macintosh
- Boots into Finder, but noticed some very odd behaviour
- If I single-click an icon, it looks like it's trying to be renamed (goes from name input to normal and back multiple times per second)
- I can click around and open a couple of programs, but sometimes they start to open, the mouse cursor turns into a stopwatch cursor, then the disk stops being accessed. I can still move the cursor around, so it's not totally frozen, but basically nothing happens at all
Suspicion:
- System is being confused by the lack of the FPU
- I haven't yet tried to change the Gestalt ID, but maybe if I set it to that of an LC with the same CPU, the system will not try and use the FPU? Or is Gestalt ID only a cosmetic thing that allows for programs to detect the machine they run on, but doesn't do anything to enable/disable features? (Most of my memory of this is from two decades ago when I was a kid learning this stuff for the first time)
Can anyone provide any advice, or confirm/deny my suspicion?
I'd rather not have to eBay an actual 68040 chip since those are about the same price as what this system cost, and I'd rather not eBay a whole other machine (since shipping to Canada basically kills those deals). I do have a dead Centris 610 that I picked up recently as well that I can pull the RAM from (haven't done this yet since it's not at my condo).