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Mac that's not a Mac

RadRacer203

Well-known member
Just picked up this Powerpc Mac clone yesterday and I was wondering what exactly it was. I got it for making disks/imaging drives on my compact Macs because it has ps/2 and vga and fits perfectly into my kvm setup. I know it's powerpc with something like 128mb ram but apart from that and it running OS 7.5 I have no idea whatsoever lol

IMG_20201230_205025.jpg

 

lobust

Well-known member
I have seen a couple of differently branded clones with that same case, so I have no idea who the oem was. PowerCity and Computer Warehouse (UK retailer of the time) Manhattan - if you google either of those you should find identical looking machines. CW machines as as far as I am aware used generic apple tanzania motherboards, idk about the powercity ones. I am not very familiar with any of the clones, maybe someone else knows more...

 

Torbar

Well-known member
Can you post some more pics(back of the case, and inside)?  Would be cool to see 

Nice find!

 

RadRacer203

Well-known member
Can you post some more pics(back of the case, and inside)?  Would be cool to see 

Nice find!
Will do when I get a chance! Gotta clean up this disaster of a basement after like 3 full carloads of computer stuff in a row lol.

I actually just got an Amiga 2000, I wonder if this could make disks? I know my PC's can't

 
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Torbar

Well-known member
Will do when I get a chance! Gotta clean up this disaster of a basement after like 3 full carloads of computer stuff in a row lol.

I actually just got an Amiga 2000, I wonder if this could make disks? I know my PC's can't
Not sure about writing disks with a Mac, but there's a way to convert a PC floppy drive to plug into the parallel port of a PC, so you can write Amiga floppies

http://m1web.de/ADTWin/#Cable

 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
Nice. Where did you buy it? Motorola was a major licensee of Apple and was permitted to sublicense to others such as Tatung, APC, Centralen Norrland, etc, so there were several makes with the same case but a different badge. The lack of badging here suggests it was sold in Europe by unauthorized resellers just after Apple decided to kill cloners: Motorola passed off all of their unsold computers to European vendors like Computer Warehouse and PowerCity (mentioned previously) for resale in overseas markets where Apple didn't have quite so much reach to be able to shut them down, at least not before they could clear out their stock. Sometimes the PowerCity badge doesn't stick very well (the models I found were too large for the recessed area so overlapped it) and have fallen off over the years. Really the only clue to their origin was the notice in German near the power supply. 

Anyway it's basically a Power Mac 4400 internally: maybe slightly faster, maybe slightly slower, maybe with a couple extra PCI slots; it really depends on the specific configuration which you won't know unless you run TattleTech and/or open the case.

 

RadRacer203

Well-known member
Not sure about writing disks with a Mac, but there's a way to convert a PC floppy drive to plug into the parallel port of a PC, so you can write Amiga floppies

http://m1web.de/ADTWin/#Cable
Yeah, I saw that, I think I'm definitely going to try that or I saw another way to use an arduino and a pc floppy 

Nice. Where did you buy it?
I got it from a prop guy in upstate NY actually. No idea on the story of how it got here. Thanks for the history on it, very interesting! 

 

Kitraxian

Member
I wonder if this is a Umax, they made some apple clones for a while.

*Does some googling* nope this is a motorolla one, just missing the label.  Umax made some similar cases but this ones almost certainly Motorolla.

 
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demik

Well-known member
I wonder if this is a Umax, they made some apple clones for a while.

*Does some googling* nope this is a motorolla one, just missing the label.  Umax made some similar cases but this ones almost certainly Motorolla.


Yeah Umax always had their logo printed. They also had doors on most models. Looks like a Motorola. 

 

jamie marchant

Well-known member
I wonder why they went with VGA/PS2, would think that would confuse people.(I just got this Mac keyboard but it does not work on my clone). 

 
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