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Possibly a prototype Power Mac 4400

Performa450

Well-known member
Purchased this recently and it’s winging its way to me.

Initially it looks like an overpriced for untested 4400, but a closer look at the photos and the sellers description of “missing all its labels” shows that the motherboard and riser card have a -02 instead of -A suffix and the production date on the case bottom is over a month before the release of the 4400/200. Also, the case label on the bottom differs from release models, and looking at the side on shot of the logic board you can see it also has a slotted ROM card under the floppy drive unlike release models.
Hopefully it arrives OK!

The seller’s other models don’t look like anything too rare.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Purchased this recently and it’s winging its way to me.

Initially it looks like an overpriced for untested 4400, but a closer look at the photos and the sellers description of “missing all its labels” shows that the motherboard and riser card have a -02 instead of -A suffix and the production date on the case bottom is over a month before the release of the 4400/200. Also, the case label on the bottom differs from release models, and looking at the side on shot of the logic board you can see it also has a slotted ROM card under the floppy drive unlike release models.
Hopefully it arrives OK!

The seller’s other models don’t look like anything too rare.

Nice find!

The seller is in San Jose so a good location for a prototype to find it’s way to public hands.

I have two Macintosh LC prototype machines, identified by no name on front, no serial number on the case, no FCC/copyright, the power supply is slightly different on one, and motherboard serial number is really really low (like 000004 for example).

I was told by a former Apple employee that they would take their late stage prototypes and send them to training centers across the US in advance of the launch, so that employees would know about it when customers started phoning in needing help. One that was done, likely people just got to “take it home” and they went to being home-used.

There are usually 3 stages of prototypes described, EVT, DVT, PVT. I have a suspicion that some products might have had sub stages inside those 3 official stages.

On another note, I also have a IIcx prototype, missing product name on the front of the case, rear of case, and no serial number at all. The plastic is smooth and shiny instead of pitted like is normally found.

Prototype Apple products are really neat. Enjoy yours. Treasure it. Preserve it.
 

jessenator

Well-known member
It's definitely interesting! Keep us up to date on what you find :D

The employee training videos for the StarMax a ROM socket populated on the board as well. And from one pic it definitely looks like there's no surface mount ROM!

I'd be interested to see high res shots of the motherboard out of the case: see what differences there are to the production models and so on.

Interesting it has the comm slot ii riser. The 3x PCI must've been a Europe thing for the 4400

Very cool!
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
sorry to go a bit further on the offtopic side here;
jessenator I always did wonder a bit about regarding the 2pci+comm versus 3pci risers but only can hazily guess that it might be due to isdn having been a lot more popular around europe than north america since I've only seen isdn cards for pci alone afaik (an isdn comm slot card has to be really rare to make in first place I would say?)
 

Performa450

Well-known member
Heya, this did arrive, just had a chance to have a look at it. The case is incredibly tight fitting, not very well made and a complete pain to open up! All appears to be as it should be, so I tried to boot it up, remembering to switch the PSU to 230 V instead of 110 before connecting it up.

Unfortunately I didn't get much further - i couldn't get it to boot from either the installed CD-ROM drive or a second drive from either a 7.6 or 8.0 CD. I suspect both drives are faulty. I'm not sure what I have on a hard disk, but it won't boot from anything with a disc in the internal CD and drive I could get an "unsupported system" error from an old IDE disk I had handy.
 

joshc

Well-known member
The case is incredibly tight fitting, not very well made and a complete pain to open up!
Yeah, it's a 4400 - they're all like that unfortunately. This was a 'lets cut costs everywhere' kinda machine to compete against clones and wintel PCs at the time. Apple was dying when this machine came out.

Which CD-ROM drive does it have? Could need a lens clean. Also are your 7.6 and 8.0 discs original or copies? Older CD drives are fairly picky about what they'll read, CD-Rs written at 1X or 2X are best.

Mactracker says the original OS was System 7.5.2 (System Enabler 827) so if your old IDE drive has something older than that on it, it won't boot from it. It could also be a 68k only install on your old IDE drive maybe?
 

Performa450

Well-known member
Yeah, it's a 4400 - they're all like that unfortunately. This was a 'lets cut costs everywhere' kinda machine to compete against clones and wintel PCs at the time. Apple was dying when this machine came out.

Which CD-ROM drive does it have? Could need a lens clean. Also are your 7.6 and 8.0 discs original or copies? Older CD drives are fairly picky about what they'll read, CD-Rs written at 1X or 2X are best.

Mactracker says the original OS was System 7.5.2 (System Enabler 827) so if your old IDE drive has something older than that on it, it won't boot from it. It could also be a 68k only install on your old IDE drive maybe?
Heya, it's got the 8x drive, the other drive I tried was a DVD ROM from an MDD. The 7.6 and 8.0 discs are original.
I'm going to have a dig around in the loft later as I have a CD150 and I think a 4x or 8x drive up there somewhere.

I have no idea what's on the IDE drive - may well be a Powerbook 1400/5300/190 install, but I'm not going to get much further without a working optical drive.
 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
If you have a generic ATA optical drive, you can give that a go. Most 4400/Tanzania models in my experience will play nice with generic drives at boot. Of course you'll need some third-party extensions for it once you've installed the OS to the hard drive but they'll generally boot off the CD without fuss.
Also be sure you're setting the drive to MASTER and not SLAVE or CS. These models only support one drive per ATA channel.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
To my knowledge (according to 65scibe’s video on the 4400), 7.5.5 and 7.6 won’t actually run on a 4400. Apparently, you need 7.6.1 or OS 8. Just thought I’d add that for what it’s worth.
 

jessenator

Well-known member
No. I love 65scribe's work, but it (a garden variety 4400 or StarMax) will run on 7.6—I can even think of a standalone 7.6.1 boot media, unless the Apple legacy recovery has it—but I've done it. That was the original media from both Motorola and Power Computing when 7.6 debuted. The PCC disc actually has the 7.6.1 updater on it, but the Motorola disc will actually boot, and is my favorite to start from with the LPX-40/Tanzania lineup.

The additional bonus of the Motorola disc is that it has 3rd party CD-ROM installers, should you want them.

That said, if it's a prototype, the x factor might be the ROM, so I can say if that could foul it up.

Macintosh garden also has the original 4400 discs, including the "small business" variant, the regular one, and it's UK counterpart. Those are 7.5.3, and should likely work just fine. That's probably the safe bet.
 

jessenator

Well-known member
Well, I guess I was wrong then. Sorry about that!
Not your fault :)

I've peddled my fair share of misinformation from other sources I considered data-driven. It happens. The problem with video media is annotations are ...hard :ROFLMAO: whereas articles can be edited and changes called out. I mean, honest mistakes are just that. I can do a better job of tactfully approaching them, too.
 

Performa450

Well-known member
Not your fault :)

I've peddled my fair share of misinformation from other sources I considered data-driven. It happens. The problem with video media is annotations are ...hard :ROFLMAO: whereas articles can be edited and changes called out. I mean, honest mistakes are just that. I can do a better job of tactfully approaching them, too.
Yeah I tried 8.0 as EveryMac says it won't run 7.6 either https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powermac_4400_200.html - however it doesn't even bomb out, it isn't reading discs... yet.

This one also seems to have the issue that "early 160 Mhz" machines have where the HDD isn't recognised if the CD drive isn't attached.
 

Performa450

Well-known member
OK - found a spare internal optical drive - it's a 24x CD-RW from a G4 Digital Audio - this is working fine. I'm now installing 7.6 onto a period-inappropriate Intel 520 60 GB with an IDE adapter
 

jessenator

Well-known member
I'm super fond of the CF adapter, myself :) theres just enough room for it under the drive chassis. Alternatively, you could do one that fits in an empty PCI panel and then just attaches with the ribbon cable.

Go for a Cisco router CF card, as they have low writes on them and are generally very robust. I've had luck with other brands as well, as long as the adapter is DMA capable.

Nice work!
 

Performa450

Well-known member
Actually was just applying 7.6.1 to it and found this in the release notes (7.6 does appear to work so far though):

"The following Macintosh models were not qualified for the release of Mac OS 7.6. It is necessary to use the Mac OS 7.6.1 CD to update these CPUs to 7.6.1. The models are as follows:
Power Macintosh models:
  • 4400
  • 5500
  • 6500
  • 7300
  • 8600
  • 9600"
Machine reports as a 200 Mhz with 32 MB RAM.
 
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