JC8080
Well-known member
A couple months ago I was browsing Offer Up and ran across a Color Classic. I had never been a huge fan and did not intend to add one to my collection of compact Macs, but I figured what the hell and went ahead and bought it. The case was in good condition with mild yellowing, no damage. The seller didn't know anything about the machine and did not have a power cable or keyboard to power it up, which was fine with me. I did ask them to check and see if the battery had leaked and it had not. I paid $200 for it which wasn't a steal, but not awful.
My plan was to recap the logic board and analog board before I even tried to fire it up. When I got it home, I pulled the LB out to take a look at the condition and found there was a Sonnet Presto '040 25mhz accelerator installed. The LB was in pretty good condition with mild cap leakage. I cleaned it thoroughly and installed new caps, same with the AB. The time came to fire it up, and... nothing. Long story short, I suspect the CUDA chip is bad and started looking for a replacement but ended up buying a recapped LB from @defor. I put that board in and it fired right up to a grey screen with a cursor, so my AB recap had been successful.
Unfortunately the internal HD had failed - it would spin up for about 10 seconds, spin down, and repeat this over and over. The heads never moved. I loaded 7.1 onto my BlueSCSI with the correct enabler and it loaded the OS fine. Once I was convinced the system was working properly, I downloaded the Sonnet Presto driver from MG, installed the driver and card, crossed my fingers and powered it up... It powered up fine but was a bit unstable. It would freeze randomly, and when I tried running diagnostic apps it would often crash. This wasn't good. I was using the v2.0.1 drivers, that was all that I saw with my first search on MG. I was definitely worried something was wrong with the card. Then I ran across another thread where it was mentioned that MG had newer versions of the drivers. I downloaded versions 3.1 and 3.2 and tried both. Long story short again, 3.2 froze on boot every time, with both 7.1 and 7.5.5. 3.1 worked but would crash when I tried to use Snooper or APD to run diagnostics. Eventually I figured out that 3.1 actually seems to be working fine, and I think Snooper 2.0 and APD 1.1.1 just don't like the accelerator. Norton System Info works fine, as do Speedometer 3 & 4, and MacBench 2 & 3. Tattle Tech also correctly identifies the card. The system seems completely stable other than with Snooper and APD. I'm calling that a win.
I ran some benchmarks with MacBench 2.0 with and without the accelerator and compared them to the included LC575 (Mystic) and IIfx. Not surprisingly it is much faster than the stock Color Classic, and much slower than the Mystic. The 16 bit data bus really hurts performance. It does however make the machine plenty fast for regular use, it definitely does not feel slow.
Though I had never gone out actively looking for a Color Classic, I'm glad I ran across this one and picked it up.
My plan was to recap the logic board and analog board before I even tried to fire it up. When I got it home, I pulled the LB out to take a look at the condition and found there was a Sonnet Presto '040 25mhz accelerator installed. The LB was in pretty good condition with mild cap leakage. I cleaned it thoroughly and installed new caps, same with the AB. The time came to fire it up, and... nothing. Long story short, I suspect the CUDA chip is bad and started looking for a replacement but ended up buying a recapped LB from @defor. I put that board in and it fired right up to a grey screen with a cursor, so my AB recap had been successful.
Unfortunately the internal HD had failed - it would spin up for about 10 seconds, spin down, and repeat this over and over. The heads never moved. I loaded 7.1 onto my BlueSCSI with the correct enabler and it loaded the OS fine. Once I was convinced the system was working properly, I downloaded the Sonnet Presto driver from MG, installed the driver and card, crossed my fingers and powered it up... It powered up fine but was a bit unstable. It would freeze randomly, and when I tried running diagnostic apps it would often crash. This wasn't good. I was using the v2.0.1 drivers, that was all that I saw with my first search on MG. I was definitely worried something was wrong with the card. Then I ran across another thread where it was mentioned that MG had newer versions of the drivers. I downloaded versions 3.1 and 3.2 and tried both. Long story short again, 3.2 froze on boot every time, with both 7.1 and 7.5.5. 3.1 worked but would crash when I tried to use Snooper or APD to run diagnostics. Eventually I figured out that 3.1 actually seems to be working fine, and I think Snooper 2.0 and APD 1.1.1 just don't like the accelerator. Norton System Info works fine, as do Speedometer 3 & 4, and MacBench 2 & 3. Tattle Tech also correctly identifies the card. The system seems completely stable other than with Snooper and APD. I'm calling that a win.
I ran some benchmarks with MacBench 2.0 with and without the accelerator and compared them to the included LC575 (Mystic) and IIfx. Not surprisingly it is much faster than the stock Color Classic, and much slower than the Mystic. The 16 bit data bus really hurts performance. It does however make the machine plenty fast for regular use, it definitely does not feel slow.
Though I had never gone out actively looking for a Color Classic, I'm glad I ran across this one and picked it up.
