MacFox's Finds

[MacFox]

Got a random assortment of CD-ROMs, mostly Mac shareware compilations, from 1994-95.  Haven't had time to try them all since there's a lot of stuff crammed on these CDs.  I also got a TV output PC card for Mac and Windows laptops.  I don't really need it, but it was cheap and I thought it would be interesting to try out.  Also bought an NIB USB 1.1 video capture device that works with OS 8.6. 

Got an LC II recently as well.  It was an impulse buy I made because I got outbid on a Centris 650 from the same seller.  I actually quite like the LC II, it's smaller than I thought it would be, which is good because of my limited space.  I have it hooked up to a NEC 1970 NX Multi-sync montior using an adapter. The settings I use on the adapter is 1,2,3,4 on and 5, 6 off.  The LC II is pretty similar to my Classic II speed wise.  The LC II has the RAM maxed out to 10 MB and has an ethernet card.  Only plans I have for the LC II so far is just the usual writing I do on my other Macs and also running color 68k software like I have on those shareware discs I just got. 

 

[tanaquil]

Nice! I have a soft spot for late 80s and early 90s shareware. Would love to see a pic of the CDs if you ever get around to it, I wonder how many of them I have in my own collection.

The LC sounds like a good deal, maxed out at that price. I have an LC (II or III?) sitting in my project pile and I am not sure of its working status. I know I should get to recapping it sooner rather than later - got to keep practicing my soldering skills.

 

[commodorejohn]

If you get the chance, could you image those CDs and post them to archive.org and/or Macintosh Garden? Old shareware CDs are always interesting, and Mac ones are harder to come by.

 

[MacFox]

If you get the chance, could you image those CDs and post them to archive.org and/or Macintosh Garden? Old shareware CDs are always interesting, and Mac ones are harder to come by.

Haven't gotten around to all of them yet, but I have started imaging them.  I did three today.  Once I upload them to the garden, I'll post an update in this thread.

Wow, I haven't updated this thread in awhile.  Since my last post the only mac-related things I've been acquiring are upgrades for the Sawtooth G4.

Here's what I have done to it so far:

-added USB 2.0

-upgraded the VRAM to 64 MB

-added a gigabit Ethernet card

I ordered a Radeon 9000 card thinking it was the 128 MB version, but it turned out to be the 64 MB one instead.  I then ordered a NIB Radeon 9000 that should hopefully be the 128 MB version.  I installed the gigabit Ethernet card (TrendNet TGE-PCITXR) today.  Not much of a difference between that and the old built-in Ethernet port, which surprises me.

I did have to downgrade the OS X HDD from Leopard to Tiger because iWork '09 wasn't working due to only having 32 MB of VRAM at the time (though I might try Leopard again after I get my new Radeon 9000 in the mail).

 

[MacFox]

(Just to clarify: One HDD has OS X and the other has OS 9.2.2.)

 

[MacFox]

Added a Centris 650 to my collection.  It works great, but there were some issues.  The floppy drive stopped working, so I had to replace it with one from my broken LC II.  I noticed something was off with the Centris' floppy drive when I put a disk in and it was a very tight fit getting it in the drive.  It still read the disk and ejected though.  I figured maybe the case wasn't lined up with the drive (that's happened to me before).  I removed the PRAM battery while I had the case open.  It wasn't leaking, but I didn't want to take any chances.  Anyway, when I put the case back on, I couldn't even insert a disk at all into the drive.  I readjusted the case and re-seated the drive multiple times, but to no avail.  I noticed that when I inserted a disk, it kept bumping into this metal tab in the drive.  I bent the tab down using a flathead screwdriver and the disk could be a inserted (again, a very tight fit), but it couldn't eject when the case was put back on.  Then I took the drive out and held  it up so it was level with my eyes and inserted a disk.  When I did that I noticed the disk wouldn't go down onto the spindle.  Not knowing how to fix this, I replaced the drive with a working one from my LC II.  I can insert and eject disks normally now.  I stored the broken drive inside the LC II.

Another thing that happened in the process of opening and closing the case was that I accidentally broke off the head of the captive screw.  The case will close without it, but it is not as secure as it used to be.  I'm gonna try and glue the head of the captive screw to the rest of the screw tomorrow and see if that works.  If it doesn't, is it possible to replace the captive screw?

After all that, I decided to put in a 512KB VRAM SIMM from the LC II, but I'm not sure if it worked because I can't run Apple System Profiler (I guess it's a PPC app?).  After messing around with the jumper settings on my Mac to VGA adapter, I tried some settings I found in an old post here and got 256 colors at 640 x 480, which is good enough for me (as long as none of the programs I want to run require 800 x 600).  The settings I use are 1, 4, 5, 6 ON (my adapter only has six dip switches).

I ordered 2 32MB RAM SIMMs from ebay, hopefully that works out.  There's currently 16 Megs of RAM in the system.  There's an 8 MB stick occupying one of the slots and the rest is the built-in memory.  Should I keep the 8 MB stick or remove it?

 

[MacFox]

Well, the new RAM I bought doesn’t work and I can’t glue the captive screw back together.  Also that VRAM SIMM doesn’t work (must only work on LCs I guess).

 

[MacFox]

I put the old 8 MB RAM stick back in and everything is working again with 16 MB of RAM.  I wanted to upgrade the RAM because I thought I would need a lot of RAM for Netscape.  I bought an AAUI transceiver for this purpose.  Turns out 16 MB is fine as long as virtual memory is turned on.  Problem with virtual memory is that the Mac doesn't remember that you turned it on unless you have a PRAM battery installed.  I would have to restart my Mac every time I wanted to run Netscape because I need virtual memory.  Thing is, every time I restart, the picture on the display gets a strong green tint to it that only goes away when I shut down the Mac and turn it on again, which of course erases the PRAM settings.  So my options are:

1) Put in a new PRAM battery

2) Buy more physical RAM again, but this time make sure to get some that is known to be compatible with the Centris 650.

3) Upgrade to 7.6.1 because it turns virtual memory on by default.  The Mac originally had 7.5 on it, but then I did a clean install of 7.5.3.

Of the three options I think I'm leaning towards upgrading to 7.6.1.  

 

[Jinnai]

Do you have any use for this stick of RAM from my Centris 610? There's also a 1 meg ROM SIMM. I'm not sure what capacity the RAM is. It has 8 chips that read "Mitsubishi M5M417400A" and 4 that read "M5M44100A". The Centris is capable of booting, but has no drives...

 

[MacFox]

Do you have any use for this stick of RAM from my Centris 610? There's also a 1 meg ROM SIMM. I'm not sure what capacity the RAM is. It has 8 chips that read "Mitsubishi M5M417400A" and 4 that read "M5M44100A". The Centris is capable of booting, but has no drives...

I looked up one of the chip numbers and it’s for a 16MB stick.  If you are willing to sell it, how much would it be?

 

[Jinnai]

Maybe like $5 + shipping? If you happen to be in the US, shipping should be around $2.

 

[MacFox]

Maybe like $5 + shipping? If you happen to be in the US, shipping should be around $2.

I’ll send you a PM.

 

[MacFox]

Thanks to Jinnai, I now have a total of 32 MB of RAM in the Centris!  I also finally figured out how to make the green tint on the screen go away, thanks to an old thread I found here.  I found out that I needed Apple's Basic Color Monitor extension.  I found  a copy of it on Apple's old downloads page via archive.org.  According to the release notes, certain Quadra and Centris models, including mine, need this extension in order to fix the green screen problem when using Apple's Basic Color Monitor or a VGA monitor.  The extension works in 7.5.3 and up to at least 7.6.1 based on my tests.  Not sure if it would work in 7.1, the release notes didn't mention OS compatibility.  I changed the settings on my VGA adapter to switch 1 on and all other switches off. 

I tried 7.6.1 on this Mac and it has this weird problem when booting up where it makes the chime and gets to the happy Mac and then restarts itself, makes the chime again, and then continues to boot normally.  This doesn't happen when I have 7.5.x installed.  I went back to 7.5.3 then updated to 7.5.5.  I'm currently trying out a control panel I downloaded via another thread called PRAM Auto-Restore.  So far the Mac will remember that 32-bit addressing and virtual memory is set to on, but I still need to restart in order to use them.  Unsure if I'm not using the PRAM Auto-Restore control panel correctly or if I've ran into some kind of limitation with it?

 

[MacFox]

Well it turns out I needed a new PRAM battery, so I bought one off of ebay and things are working as they should.  I noticed that since I installed the new battery that the display works correctly even without installing the Basic Color Monitor extension.

 

[Gorgonops]

I noticed that since I installed the new battery that the display works correctly even without installing the Basic Color Monitor extension.

I'm guessing the green tint may have been the monitor getting wigged out by the Mac sending sync-on-green when the monitor didn't like it. With a PRAM battery installed your Mac will actually remember its monitor settings correctly when it wakes up...

You're actually lucky you got video at all without it, actually. Some Macs like the Pizza-box LC/Quadras often just give a black screen if their PRAM battery's dead.

 

[MacFox]

As promised, I'm finally giving an update about the shareware CDs I bought.  I finally got around to uploading some disc images of the shareware CDs I bought that weren't already on Macintosh Garden.  The CDs were Shareware Breakthrough, Shareware Breakthrough 2.0, and Shareware Breakthrough: Mac Multimedia Collection.

Here's some pictures of the CDs I am referring to:

 

[MacFox]

Wow, it's been awhile since I lasted posted in this thread.  I recently bought a Quadra VRAM upgrade kit from eBay still in the box.  I heard that the Centris models take Quadra VRAM so I went for it. It was $22 with shipping.  

You can see a picture of it here:



Opening up the Centris was kind of a pain, I had forgotten how frustrating it could be.  VRAM SIMMs fit perfectly.  Unfortunately, when I booted up the Centris, the dreaded blinking floppy icon appeared.  I shut the machine off, waited, then opened it up again and reseated the cables.  Powered on the Mac again and same result.  The hard drive makes the usual noise it always makes on boot, then silence.  At least I'm still able to boot from my floppy and CD drives.  Disk Setup and Disk First Aid can not even see the hard drive.  Guess I'm gonna have to buy a new HDD.

 

[MacFox]

Ordered a scsi2sd v5.5 with an 8gb micro SD card along with a gender changer and a cn50 to db25 SCSI cable, so I can use it with my AppleCD 600e drive. 

 

[MacFox]

The SCSI2SD arrived today.  I decided to set the device up for my Centris 650 first.  Using scsi2sd-util, I split the 8 GB micro SD card into three hard drives: a 2GB volume on ID 4, another 2GB volume on ID 5, and a 3.5GB volume on ID 6.  I used the patched version of HD SC setup to format and mount the drives.  I installed 7.5.3 on ID 5, and it worked perfectly.  After updating to 7.5.5, I tried to boot from the Apple Legacy Recovery CD to install other System versions on the other two drives.  Not sure if the Apple Legacy Recovery CD is not bootable or what, but I couldn't boot into it.  Holding down "C" didn't work, Startup disk control panel didn't work either.  I then tried command-option-shift-delete-3 (3 is the ID of my CD-ROM drive), but that didn't work either and the multiple restarts somehow made the drive on ID 5 unbootable.  So, I put my modified 7.5.3 disk tools floppy back in and used HD SC setup to perform a test on the drive.  The drive tested fine even though it wasn't mounted.  I initialized it again and there it was back on my desktop. 

Aside from the patched HD SC setup, another modification I made to the 7.5.3 disk tools floppy was adding the Apple CD-ROM extension.  Thanks to this, I was able to use the Legacy Recovery CD and installed a Centris 610/650 specific install of 7.1 on ID 4 and OS 8.1 on ID 6.  I have a bootable System 7.5.3 install CD which I use to install 7.5.3 on Macs with CD-ROM drives.  I rebooted and OS 8.1 booted up.  It starts up slower than 7, but I think the SCSI2SD speeds things up a bit.  After that, I put the 7.5.3 CD in and rebooted.  I held down the "C" key and I was able to successfully boot from that CD.  I installed 7.5.3 followed by 7.5.5 onto ID 5 again and it worked!  I'm glad my Centris has a hard drive again!  Was finally able to test the VRAM and that works too, giving me thousands of colors.  7.5.5 will be the main system that I use on the Centris, but I thought having the other System versions might be fun to experiment with.  I just need to figure out the best way to switch between them.

I took a break and then decided to setup the SCSI2SD with my Classic II and SE using a 2GB micro SD card I have laying around.  The plan is to split the 2GB card into three drives: one for 6.0.8 (for the SE), one for 6.0.8L (for the Classic II), and one for 7.0.1 (for both the SE and Classic II).  It was at this point, however, that I realized that the configuration information is not saved to the SD card, but to the board itself.  So I'll have to run SCSI2SD-util every time I switch between the Centris and SE/Classic II.  The SE still has a working internal hard drive, so I could leave the SCSI2SD in the Centris 650 configuration and just not boot off of it.  I was planning on using the SCSI2SD on the SE as a backup method rather than as a hard drive replacement anyway.  The Classic II can boot 7.5.5, but I'm not sure how well it runs because I have never tried 7.5.5 on the Classic II before. 

Another thing I discovered is that when I read the 8GB micro SD card in my SD card reader on my PM G4 running Leopard, I can only see the ID 4 drive with 7.1 on it, the other two drives aren't visible.  Anyone know why this is?

 

[MacFox]

Changed the configuration of the scsi2sd so that it emulates a 1.5 GB hard drive on ID 5.  It works with my Centris, SE, and Classic II.  All I have to do is swap SD cards between machines.  I don’t have to reconfigure the scsi2sd each time I switch Macs anymore.