Performa 6116cd

[Papichulo]

Hey!

 I just got a performa 6116cd working with a monitor keyboard etc. It only has System  7.5.1 but it runs great but what can i do with it? Its really boring so far and i dont know if i can upgrade it or something. Anyone know anything about this machine?Thanks 

 

[Cory5412]

(As I say about all Macs) - These are neat machines! 

A lot of information about them is availalbe here: http://www.kan.org/6100/ 

The 6116 looks like it would have started with one of the higher end configs. You can run anything from 7.5.1 (there's a small chance the 7.1.2 install from a 6100/60 would work too) up to 9.1 on them, although you'll want more RAM for 9.1 to be even a little bit comfortable. 8.1 or this may be a rare case where 8.6 might be worth looking at - because you'll get a lot more PPC code, which will be good for a 601 (versus running things in 68k emulation) but still a lower memory usage than 9.1 (supposedly, TBH resources on a stock or near-stock 6100 are typically slim enough I'd suggest looking at 7.6.1 or 8.1.)

It's pretty ho-hum, it was the mainstream business desktop when the Power Macintosh family launched in 1994, so it supports up to 832x624 displays on the onboard graphics, and up to 1152x870 at 24-bit/full color if you put in an upgradeable high performance video card from a 7100 or 8100.

What kind of stuff do you like? It's a reasonably competent tourism machne if you just want to look at MacOS, ClarisWorks, HyperCard, and Oregon Trail. It should be ~ok~ at 68k and early PPC gaming. A solid quadra is going to be faster than it at almost anything "68k" but that doesn't make it a bad machine per se.

If you like hot-rodding there's the aforementioned HPV video cards, a DOS card, a nubus adapter and also G3 upgrades, with various combinations available. People were using these as dailies into the early 2000s with these kinds of upgrades. 

If you prefer "not very upgraded" but "not too upgraded" but "not too not upgraded" you could look into what cache yours has (none stock, there are apparently 256k, 512k, and 1m modules) or can have added and then look into getting the HPV a/v or graphics cards, which will make the system feel very sprightly. Add in some RAM and you have something that'll probably even benefit from the extra speed of a SCSI2SD v6, over a v5. (I've been meaning to test effective v5/v6 speeds on mine.)

 

[Papichulo]

Good info and I wish there was a way to add more software on it. I just dont have any at all. I want to updrade it to mabie 7.6 or 8.0.. there's a 40mb ram card in it and 2 other empty slots. I probably would like to add games or emulators to it. Other question why wont any cd player read blank cdr discs? I want to transfer files over from the cds. 

 

[Cory5412]

Another option is to get an account on vtools! (PM me here or email at the link on the site) 7.5.1 should be able to run the necessary updates, which you can get off of S7T. (Vtools can also be connected to with FTP and the updates are on it, to then connect with appleshare.)

the old CD drives don't do well with CD-RW discs, it should read CD-Rs but that's up in the air for a 25+ year-old CD drive as well. My 6100 and 840 do okay with CD-Rs but not CD-RWs, and the fragility of those and most other era-appropriate removable media are most of why I set up vtools for myself.

They won't write CDs though, if that's what you're trying to do, you'd need a burner and that didn't become common on Macs until 2000 or later. (Though there are plenty of powermac G4s with working CD burners that would do perfectly at writing CDs for older Macs.)

40 megs is a pretty solid amount of RAM. I think these things have a cache slot and 2 RAM slots, so if something doesn't fit don't try too hard.