• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

I wasn't too excited about this Power Mac 5300 until I saw the back

I recently came across this Power Mac 5300 on FB marketplace. It's a decent all-in-one, but I wasn't planning on picking it up until I saw the back of it. Seems to have all the bells and whistles. I'm looking forward to playing around with this and seeing how well the capture works.279041628_5246731952052475_1098217279706074823_n.jpeg279425885_5108792955902771_2426081831885285636_n.jpeg
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Beautiful!, very nice find. Enjoy your playtime with it. VidCap at the consumer level was pretty neat back in the Quadra 630 day and remained so into the PPC generation. Is that the Presentation System video out port I spy?

I used one as my TV for a while when I was turning the kitchen corner of my sign shop into an Artist In Residence space. Keep your eyes peeled for the MPEG Media System for more fun in the future along with a CS(1) NIC, at that point you'll have about everything fun you can possibly fit into that drawer.
 

alectrona2988

Well-known member
I have a pretty basic 5210 coming in from Sunrise Land. :)
It's a terrible financial decision, but the shipping change was unexpected too. What I want to do (if it arrives intact and if it even works at all), is to use a 6400/6500 board and install my 6360's upgrades into that.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
I really want to find one of these systems sometime, love the case design despite how much hate it usually gets. That one looks to be in good shape without much yellowing! Enjoy it!
 

alectrona2988

Well-known member
I got mine with a proxy service through Yahoo Auctions Japan.
It's a long story. I haven't heard great things about these after I bought it, apparently... and the day I bought it wasn't a great day for me at all afterwards.
It is just part of the newfound omens haunting my mind, I guess...
 

techknight

Well-known member
I got mine with a proxy service through Yahoo Auctions Japan.
It's a long story. I haven't heard great things about these after I bought it, apparently... and the day I bought it wasn't a great day for me at all afterwards.
It is just part of the newfound omens haunting my mind, I guess...

youll be lucky if it arrives in one piece. these 5XXX machines are peanut brittle.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Welcome in!

That looks like a fun machine! Looks like the video capture card, the TV tuner, and the presentation system port, which created a mirror of the built-in display for use with a projector, since these were option used in education.

This is often already known, but just in case: The talking points about the 5200/6200 aren't true and these perform "fine", if a little slow in accordance to the fact that they were consumer machines. The 5300/6300 have updated CPUs (and, critically, more L1 cache) and are reasonably faster than the 5200/6200. The PowerBook 1400/2300/5300 which also use this architecture typically have the upgraded L1 cache, although not all of the PowerBooks have any L2 cache, and all 5200/6200/5300/6300 have 256k L2 cache. (6360/6400 and 4400/6500, that cache was optional, but L2 became standard in the L3 and the main differentiator was "how much" with consumer Macs having 256-512k and pro Macs having 512k-1M.)

Curious to see how well the capture works. It should work great as pass-through but even higher end Macs from this and slightly later eras aren't really "good" at capturing video, the way midrange software tended to do it was to use serial controlled VCRs and capture until a frame dropped, then stop, rewind, and continue from that point. (DV software does this too, with firewire devices.) You can turn down the size and frame rate or just do smaller segments by hand, as well.
 
Last edited:
Welcome in!

That looks like a fun machine! Looks like the video capture card, the TV tuner, and the presentation system port, which created a mirror of the built-in display for use with a projector, since these were option used in education.

This is often already known, but just in case: The talking points about the 5200/6200 aren't true and these perform "fine", if a little slow in accordance to the fact that they were consumer machines. The 5300/6300 have updated CPUs (and, critically, more L1 cache) and are reasonably faster than the 5200/6200. The PowerBook 1400/2300/5300 which also use this architecture typically have the upgraded L1 cache, although not all of the PowerBooks have any L2 cache, and all 5200/6200/5300/6300 have 256k L2 cache. (6360/6400 and 4400/6500, that cache was optional, but L2 became standard in the L3 and the main differentiator was "how much" with consumer Macs having 256-512k and pro Macs having 512k-1M.)

Curious to see how well the capture works. It should work great as pass-through but even higher end Macs from this and slightly later eras aren't really "good" at capturing video, the way midrange software tended to do it was to use serial controlled VCRs and capture until a frame dropped, then stop, rewind, and continue from that point. (DV software does this too, with firewire devices.) You can turn down the size and frame rate or just do smaller segments by hand, as well.
Thank you for the welcome and for the info!

I am excited to try this (I'm wanting to try to use it as a monitor for a C64), but I have a backlog of other machines that I need to get to. :(
 

alectrona2988

Well-known member
I'm lucky my 5210 is saveable. Plan to paint it blue, and calling it the "one-winged Performa", a reference to an anime that I've invested much of my time into lately.

Being a 5200 is suffering.
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Curious to see how well the capture works. It should work great as pass-through but even higher end Macs from this and slightly later eras aren't really "good" at capturing video, the way midrange software tended to do it was to use serial controlled VCRs and capture until a frame dropped, then stop, rewind, and continue from that point.
Wasn't great, but at the consumer level nothing was where it existed at all. Tons of fun to play with. Worked a treat using Timbuktu Remote to take clips to confirm visually that my my plotte and its job server at the shop had or had not yet finished a long run. If the vinyl was still on track in the VidCap/test routine I took from home I could then start up the next job. Fabulous even over dialup.

Apple really missed the boat by not implementing a rudimentary video conferencing setup on the 630 drawer based consumer class machines in that time frame. All the parts were right there but the VidCam, later WebCam as things moved in that direction.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Video conferencing would have been neat. I would be zero surprised to find out Apple was thinking about it, they announced the Quicktime Conferencing Camera in Februrary 1995 (shipping in the summer), just a few months after the 630 itself.

However, the overall kit and doing conferencing absolutely required PowerPC, and the initial way they deployed it was as part of ISDN video conferencing as part of the kit, later on. Given that the 630 shipped after the 6100/7100/8100, I think Apple presumed people who needed video conferencing at the time were just going to buy the pro oriented machine. (one of the wikis suggests it 'works" with the 660/840, it's just an NTSC camera so you can plug it right into a TV -- working and doing something useful are separate things though.)
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Not just neat, they missed the Killer App of the Consumer Mac/Performa era doldrums.

Given a cheap 320x240**** webcam/microphone, AOL era grandparents would have eaten up regularized teleconferencing over dialup with the kids and grandkids no matter how slow the frame rate, especially on a direct call system sans ISP. I'll wager a lot of generous holiday gifts would have had the rainbow logo inside and out. There was nothing comparable that I recall on the PC side at that price point, certainly nothing that could be shipped in a single box to the distant offspring via mail order.

Education was a lost cause by the 630-6300 era. Didn't work out at all for Apple as a focus.

NEVER underestimate the love, affection, need for connection with the kin and buying power of gray panthers. Apple likely thought them too uncool if they ever even deigned to consider that set as a customer base. All the toys were right there from the 630 on. I ooked into doing something along those lines myself after I discovered the power of audio/video eavesdropping and remote control of production systems over a Timbuktu remote connection.

Apple tax made it unworkable, but Apple themselves could have pulled off and marketed such a bundle easily and grown market share across generations at a time when they sorely needed any leg up they could get.

HUGE mistake!

/Pretty Woman


***** For those not up on the system spec. its native resolution is 320x240 which is pixel doubled to 640x480 for display at full screen. So the camera and bandwidth requirement for this theoretical teleconferencing setup was for only one quarter of a 640x480 image. I watched VHS on a TV/Tuner Mac from 2000 until about 2010 on TPD Displays when I finally got a 32" 720p TV. I'm still convinced that pixel doubled 320x240 on the tuner system displayed on a high end Radius Trinitron TPD is sharper and more saturated than a VCR feed on that 720p panel or any TV I've bought or dumpster dived since . . .

. . . but of course, size matters! :cool:
 
Last edited:
Top