a Power Macintosh x200 Ever drove you Crazy? Trying to use?

[uniserver]

well waiting for a web page to load is fun with these



trying to print to my Personal Laser Writer 300 is also fun, takes like 2 full minutes to spool,

waiting for this to boot, takes along time

ok so here i think was apples vision for this computer,

sitting in a jr. high computer lab, turned on the morning, left on all day, no internet, no printing,

Just something to play Number Munchers, and oregon trail.

because both of those it does quite well seems,

Typing tutor,

ok well maybe the occasional word processor, save your document to floppy when done

likewise with an xls doc.

 

[uniserver]

It plays the Orginal sim city pretty good as well, But that's more of a game, not really educational .

Also it would be nice if it told you the printer port is dead if you try to use it with a network card installed in the comm slot, but I guess shame on me for thinking I can transfer files reasonably with out choking up.

The apple personal laser printer 300 works, pluged into the modem serial port

 

[Dennis Nedry]

Do you mean Power Mac / Performa 5xxx? 5500 is considerably better than some of the lower numbered 5xxx Macs.

 

[uniserver]

well i have a 5260/100 that i'm talking about,

but LEM calls them 200x series for some reason

Performa and Power Mac x200 Issues

Covering Performa and Power Mac 5200, 5300, 6200 & 6300

http://lowendmac.com/tech/x200.shtml

 

[FlyingToaster]

I have a 5200 LC 75 that is yellowed but still functions properly. I responded to a local ad for a mac classic and this was a freebie being tossed in. It is missing the stand but still sits upright just fine. If anyone is around the Chicagoland area and wants it (60190), it is free to pick up. PM me if interested, I'll send some pictures. I have too many macs and this one gets the least amount of attention since I have 6 more all-in-ones laying around. I think it has 48MB of ram..

Someone please rescue "Big Yellow" from collecting dust.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

That'd be x200 . . . I''ve edited your thread title to reflect this. [] ]'>

No, none of mine have ever given me a problem, but I never expected one of them to be a replacement for a real Mac!

As a matter of fact, ISTR being given them as gifts from friends who'd made that very mistake. :lol:

They're great AV Machines and they'll run PPC versions of Appleworks and such, but I NEVER loaded Illustrator on one! :

Fontographer would probably run fine on one though.

 

[uniserver]

thanks for fixing that i guess i have dyslexia ,

yeah i was reading LEM's article, because with this board design x200 series they use a PPC that is 64bit,

and basically it takes the processor 4 cpu cycles to complete 1 process, because the board technology is a quadra 630 '040" design with a PPC upgrade...

so if it says that is 100mhz its really only 25 mhz, worth of performance!

that is if i understand Low End Macs article properly,

i like the my machine, the 5260, its super clean, and still has its normal color of plastics,

i have much better machines i can use but i feel sorry for this one for some stupid reason that is why i keep it on my desk

because if i put it in the garage it will just sit there.

and it has almost a negative value, nobody wants one of these!

i'd dam near have to pay someone to come and get it...

it does have 32mb ram, and a 40 gig ide hard drive and a comm slot NIC card,

but still nobody wants it lol

 

[beachycove]

If the machine is in good condition, then you could give it some extra life by swapping in a 6400 logic board, which would pep it up very nicely. A 6500 l.b. could do even better, but I am not sure about the compatibility of the power supply.

I had one of these years ago -- worse than yours, in fact, as it was a 5200 -- and it was indeed truly dire as a general purpose machine. The analog board died in the end, and I could not bring myself to have it repaired. That would have been around 1999, when a 6400 logic board upgrade was still a realistic upgrade for "real" use, but the demise of the analog board as well made it too expensive a fix. I was not prepared to put money into it, truth be told, as I thought it such a piece of crap. That 5200 is only of only a couple of my machines that I have happily trashed.

Anyway, after it died, I used an old 68030-based machine as a tie-over for a couple of months, until I went from the 5200 to a used Wallstreet G3 @ 266MHz, and then within a couple of months added a G4 Cube to my toolset. Oh, the raw speed!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

A 6360/6400 board won't work correctly, no 3.3V rail on the 5260 PSU. The 6500/5500 board makes its own 3.3V power for the PCI Slot, so those should work fine.

Sonnetize the x500 MoBo and the G3/L2 Cache will make the 5260 a whole new experience.

 

[beachycove]

A 6360/6400 board won't work correctly, no 3.3V rail on the 5260 PSU. The 6500/5500 board makes its own 3.3V power for the PCI Slot, so those should work fine.]

You sure? I thought it was the other way round.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

YEP! :b&w:

2.2.5 — What's the deal with 3.3V regulators?
If you have an Alchemy (6360, 5400/6400) board, you'll need to add a 3.3V supply line in the wiring harness as shown on the Takky wiring diagrams page. If you have a Gazelle (5500/6500) board, you might be able to get away with leaving it out. If you have problems booting, however, you should add it and see if the problems go away. If you're running a G3/G4 upgrade, have the RAM maxed out, or have any PCI cards installed, you'll almost certainly need the regulator. If you have one of the "Road Apple" x200/x300 boards, you don't need the 3.3V supply at all.

http://colourclassicfaq.com/mobo/takky.shtml

The equivocal information about needing a 3.3V supply when loading out the Gazelle Boards is probably due to the weak CC PSU. Assuming the 5260 is a bit more robust in the wattage department, maxing a Gazelle board may pose no problem. Check the specs of the Road Apple's PSU output against the 5500's to see if any additional power might be required.

I'm no TAKKYfication expert, but I usually remember what I read. When I don't, the booboos tend to be doozies! :b&w:

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

thanks for fixing that i guess i have dyslexia,

De Nada, comrade. While my brain has an interesting touch of dyslexia, apparently my fingers are riddled with the malady.

yeah i was reading LEM's article, because with this board design x200 series they use a PPC that is 64bit,and basically it takes the processor 4 cpu cycles to complete 1 process, because the board technology is a quadra 630 '040" design with a PPC upgrade...

so if it says that is 100mhz its really only 25 mhz, worth of performance!

As I read the reviews in the past, that may be true of general I/O and memory operations, but on die, there's no such speed limitation. I doubt you'd see a quartering of real world performance.

A Q630 that can execute PPC-ONLY Code is still a LOT better than one that can't. Remember, Apple made PPC Upgrades for the, half again as narrow, 32 Bit IIci Cache Slot so that the huge installed base of those old DTP Workhorses could do the same trick . . . even more slowly.

Keep in mind: being a Road Apple doesn't make a Mac useless, it just limits its usefulness as compared to the front line Macs of the same era. They're usually a nice speed or CPU-specific code crunching bump from the previous generation's LowendMacs for reasonable price bumps and ofttimes gullies. The prices of low end and mid-range systems reduced significantly over the years in question, IIRC.

 

[coius]

Most of the problem is that the CPU is involved in almost all bus transactions. Sound stuttering was common from CD-ROM when doing other things like HDD access because the CPU would have to halt what it's doing, and process audio from the IDE/SCSI Channel to send it through the processor just to go the the audio chipset. Causing almost all it's doing to stop. Which was partly the reason why just playing a CD would cause the cursor in a text program (appleworks/etc…) to crawl and/or lag. It was a half-assed design to save cost on chips by almost using the CPU as the main chipset, as well as the CPU. These days, you have a north/south bridge or UniNorth (combined chipset. the nForce 630 on a PC board is an example where it has the north, south and a GPU all on the same chip. I have one of these boards and it works fine as they segregate the die of the chipset into 3 areas to do the same thing and route all the lines from the board into it)

Anyways, they released an updated board and OS 9 would not load unless you had it. It essentially caused the timings of certain components to take a backseat so certain high-data transfering could occur without waiting for other things, while it upped the priority of things like the ADB Bus (so typing wasn't affected).

This was the reason why the PM 5xxx/6xxx checker app was included on 8.5/9 discs as it checked to see if the board was RMA'd and replaced with a modified.

it wasn't technically a 68k board as much as it was a re-use of the chips from the 68k era, combined with money saving techniques to reduce the chip, and put as much on the processor as well. It was almost an indication that apple just wanted to reduce it's stock from the cross-over to the PPC world, while making people think they got the next gen, and it ended up ticking people off. (I seem to recall someone on the boards saying their friend bought one of these and took it back to the store and got a different machine because whenever they typed the CD ROM audio would stutter/and or the typing would be dog-slow)

It was a road-apple for this very reason. Now keep in mind, the 5400/6400/5500/6500 didn't have these design issues as they put a proper chipset. Also I seem to recalled the 5200/5300/6200/6300 all had either a PDS or a Nubus slot as the old chipsets had those in mind. Any time you see one of these machines with a PCI slot, you are almost guaranteed a better experience as the PCI required a full PPC chipset that took care of all the bus transactions.

I find it interesting that even the latest G4 didn't utilize bus-mastering on PCI, only the G5 seemed to from what I recall. This allowed certain things to occur on the bus without requiring an IRQ interrupting the processor. An example would be a TV Tuner calling directly to a PCI video card to output video or encode it without requiring the CPU and/or northbridge to process the data and re-direct it to the video slot. While cool in itself, it was very rarely utilized in PCI, but the parallel PCI bus made it possible (Impossible with PCI-E as those are tired directly to the Northbridge or processor directly and those handled it, but no PCI-E slot can see any other directly).

DMA didn't seem to come into play until the G4 series either. Which would reduce drastically the amount of CPU time involved in processing something as simple as access to an IDE/ATA Harddrive. Why apple waited so long (the Pentium Pro chipsets already included this as well as some later ISA chipsets) leaves me guessing, as DMA on the PCI bus would've made macs much faster, Especially with PCI capture cards and the like. Multi-processing while doing video capture anyone?

 

[techknight]

ok so here i think was apples vision for this computer,

sitting in a jr. high computer lab, turned on the morning, left on all day, no internet, no printing,

Just something to play Number Munchers, and oregon trail.

because both of those it does quite well seems,

Typing tutor,

ok well maybe the occasional word processor, save your document to floppy when done

likewise with an xls doc.

And you hit that nail directly on the head. Back in the late 90s, I was in jr high. And it was the same way. we had a lab full of these, the 5200/75. They had At Ease, and was used to do exactly that. I used to piss the computer lab teacher off because I would hack At Ease and drop into finder, he could never figure it out. Only way I stopped was the threat of suspension. He was running At Ease 2.0 i believe. Hell i cant remember how I did it, but I loaded finder through the debug prompt. The bad thing about it was the fact it only worked one out of 5 times due to System Error, Address Error bombs.

However with a twist, there was a workgroup server and everything was wired via coaxnet, because the program called CCC which is a math lab program, used the server to store user database information. So, CCC required an appletalk share to be mounted before it would run.