Power Macintosh 8100 Project

[chikorita157]

For a while now, I wanted to restore a better Beige Power Macintosh that can run Mac OS 7 not just for the nostalgia, but to have better compatibility with older games, especially those that require low color modes. Back when I was a child, I only had access to the relatively low end Performa 630 and eventually the 6200, which people allegedly say that it’s the worst Macintosh Apple has made. Also, I grew up using Macintoshes in school, I think the schools I went to had Macintosh LCs and those PowerPC 5200s, until late1998, which the school I went to were using Windows.I’m not that nostalgic with Windows, since it’s never been a great OS (although 7 was okay), even today.

Yes, it was really slow, but as a child and for the fact that it was solely used my me, which is not too bad. I even got it on the internet in the early 2000s, which makes me wish I used it more than using a Windows PC. I never really liked Windows, but forced to use it although I eventually used various Mac emulators in the 2000s, until I went back to Mac in 2006 and never switched ever since.

Sure, I can use my decked out Power Mac G4 MDD with PCI-X SATA card with SSDs and a Geforce Ti 4600 (a very rare GPU that is the fastest video card in Mac OS 9), but it doesn’t work with every game given that some games don’t even work on Mac OS 9 or some rare instances require B&W/4 Colors/16 color modes, which none of the G3s/G4s can do.

The high end Power Macintosh towers are probably something I wish I had over my Performa 6200, but of course it’s overkill. I just to happen to find a Power Macintosh 8100 in decent shape for a decent price, not without the missing panels and the like. It did have a few broken “Spindler Plastics,” namely the three clips that hold on the front panel and part of the power supply brace, but those will get fixed later, when I need to recap the board and replace the power supply with a more modern one.

I went with an external BlueSCSI out of convenience and not having to deal with Spindler plastics of opening the computer up. BlueSCSI is awesome. I put a G3 in the 8100 along with maxing out the RAM, to make it handle mostly everything. However, I found out that while it handles most games well, not so much with the later ones like SimCity 3000, possibly due to the video card having no acceleration whatsoever.




That said, while the 8100 is done and upgraded, I’m looking for an Power Macintosh 8600/9600 as a backup to this, but the problem is there is no decently priced ones out there, all of that shows up on EBay are vastly overpriced or have cosmetic issues. The 8100 also can’t run BeOS as it’s only supported on PCI Macs, and I have no beige Macintoshes that have PCI.

There is a KVM that switches between the two Macs that are connected right now. A Wombat allows me to use a USB keyboard on the 8100, since you can’t add a USB addin card on it since it uses Nubus. I’m kind of interested in running PPC BeOS, or at least try it out.

The full indepth of what I did to the 8100 is in three blog posts:

The Power Macintosh 8100 Project - Ama Usa An (甘兎庵)

It has been a while since I did another project involving vintage Macs. In 2021, I got a Power Mac G4 Mirror Door and added a bunch of upgrades, including a SATA adapter with SSDs, memory, USB, and a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 video card. It’s the fastest PowerPC Mac running Classic Mac OS 9 …

amausaan.tokyo

The Power Macintosh 8100 Project - Part I - Initial Setup - Ama Usa An (甘兎庵)

As mentioned last week, I finally decided to pick up a Power Macintosh 8100, which is in pretty good shape given its age. While I have a Power Mac G4 Mirror Door Drive, the fastest G4 that can run Mac OS 9, which has the holy grail of video cards, is the Nvidia Geforce 4 …

amausaan.tokyo

The Power Macintosh 8100 Project - Part II - Upgrades - Ama Usa An (甘兎庵)

The second and final part of the Power Macintosh 8100 Project is upgrading to make it a relatively fast 8100. It won’t be the ultimate as it doesn’t have the fastest G3 or, let alone, a G4 accelerator, which exist but are rare. I eventually settled on a PowerPC G3 accelerator from Newer Tech...

amausaan.tokyo

 

[LaPorta]

SImCity 3000 is not a fair test. That was a kludge of a program even on G3s. No worries there. Playing Marathon on the 8100 works quite well...I have done it on mine before.

 

[nottomhanks]

Super cool!! A few years back I found a huge load of machines that were being thrown out, including a 8100/110 with a G3 card as well!! A friend of mine just got it up and running, so I'm super excited about it! The front bezel says 8100/100, but the logic board is 110 and says Flagship on it, which is interesting!

 

[chikorita157]

Super cool!! A few years back I found a huge load of machines that were being thrown out, including a 8100/110 with a G3 card as well!! A friend of mine just got it up and running, so I'm super excited about it! The front bezel says 8100/100, but the logic board is 110 and says Flagship on it, which is interesting!
View attachment 73735

Nice, but I think somewhere is mentioned, namely the video that 65scribe on the Power Macintosh 8100 says not to run the machine without anything populated in the PDS slot. Not sure if anything bad will happen if you don't have anything on it, but putting a G3 accelerator without a video PDS card is sufficient to meet that requirement.

I still probably need to put a more modern ATX power supply with one those adapters. I wonder if anyone that has an 8100 built one yet. I don't want to touch power supplies, but replacing caps may not be too bad

ATX adapter for 8100 and other things with a 22-pin connector

I made another of these dumb things because I'm frankly tired of the current janky harness I'm using. Find it at https://github.com/GeorgeRudolf/PMacATX I suggest you people combine orders since MOQ is 5 boards, and they can cheaply assemble the SMD bits. This has not been designed to fit...

68kmla.org

 

[Cory5412]

Looks like a fun build!

Most 1990s games that have low-color requirements should run fine even without the G3, because they'll mostly be 68k era or very early PPC era anyway, and simcity 3000 (1999) should run fine on your G3/G4.

Have you had a chance to use or bench it without the G3? I've got a 120MHz PowerComputing I'd like to play around with at some point, with an eye toward maybe benching and testing against a 7200/120 or a /120 installed in my 8500, and maybe a 6300/120 if I can find one. (I believe there's also a 5400/120 but IDK off hand how easy those are to get and TBH I really need to be reducing, not increasing )

All that said: I'm a huge fan of the idea that the best Mac is the one you have on your desk/in your hands, and, "fun" as the highest end Macs are, I do think they can be a bit boring because their destiny is preordained. Get a 2x1.42 module or a particular Sonnet card, get this specific geforce, get this sata card, boom, tiptopped, whereas the smaller midrange and even low end platforms, while they often have a lot of fun stuff, do force some specific choices about what you want to be in the machine, and the 8100 kind of rides that line because it's the biggest official 'desktop' mad of the generation, but I don't know what mot people might pop in in terms of NuBus card, vs. what's available for PCI machines.

(Plus as you alluded to, for most gaming and tourism stuff pretty close to stock for most consumer machines is what game companies will have been targeting at the time.)

Anyway, fun!

the 6200, which people allegedly say that it’s the worst Macintosh Apple has made.

With apologies because I realize this is extremely tangential, and, you probably already know this: This has been so extremely debunked it's quite frankly embarrassing LEM hasn't retracted or updated the pages about it.

This rumor started in 1997 when LEM's authors (there were a few of them at the time) were putting together basically buyers guides for people buying machines that, at the time, were just a few years old. (6200 and 7200, for example, were introduced in 1995, 8100 was introduced in 1994 with a new revision in 1995 IIRC).

I have no idea why, but instead of just saying "the 7200 seems like a better bet because there will probably eventually be some PCI cards it can use" they hauled off and just wholesale fabricated this absolutely unreasonably unrealistic architecture for the 6200 to be, even though it's very much "not".

Like, "left 32" and "right 32" is not how any of this works. It's not even a real representation of what the base 603 even is and what it means for a memory bus to have a particular width.

The actual architecture is basically "the 630" (very well liked, performant) "but with a PowerPC upgrade pre-integrated".

To that end, the 6200 is basically the same speed as the 6100, save a couple things it's actually better at - the stock IDE disk in the 6200 benches a couple percent above the 6100's SCSI disk, and the graphics in the 6200 bench a bit better than onboard on the 6100/7100/8100, because it uses separate VRAM and has acceleration for some (like five-ish?) 1990s games -- same as the 630.

The extant legit "problems" the 6200 has are:
- it's a little slow at 68k emulation, which can be resolved in software by shifting to PPC code and also using speed doubler 8 and libmoto
- there was a repair program for failures on the ROM/L2cache module, most of the failed ones will have cycled out of use by now.

So, I mean, it's core crime is having been the cheapest PowerPC Mac when it was introduced, basically until Apple efficiency'd it's lineup and introduced the iMac in 1998.

 

[chikorita157]

Have you had a chance to use or bench it without the G3? I've got a 120MHz PowerComputing I'd like to play around with at some point, with an eye toward maybe benching and testing against a 7200/120 or a /120 installed in my 8500, and maybe a 6300/120 if I can find one. (I believe there's also a 5400/120 but IDK off hand how easy those are to get and TBH I really need to be reducing, not increasing )

All that said: I'm a huge fan of the idea that the best Mac is the one you have on your desk/in your hands, and, "fun" as the highest end Macs are, I do think they can be a bit boring because their destiny is preordained. Get a 2x1.42 module or a particular Sonnet card, get this specific geforce, get this sata card, boom, tiptopped, whereas the smaller midrange and even low end platforms, while they often have a lot of fun stuff, do force some specific choices about what you want to be in the machine, and the 8100 kind of rides that line because it's the biggest official 'desktop' mad of the generation, but I don't know what mot people might pop in in terms of NuBus card, vs. what's available for PCI machines.

(Plus as you alluded to, for most gaming and tourism stuff pretty close to stock for most consumer machines is what game companies will have been targeting at the time.)

Speaking of which, here is the benchmark scores, but they were in the blog post of course. It's several times faster than the 601. The 601 does poorly with websites it can access like Macintosh Garden, but with the G3, it's just manageable.





I think back in the day, people will prop in audio interface cards, networking, and video cards, but it's quite limited compared to what PCI can do.

Well, while the LEM make the 6200 even worse than it is actually is, it was still a really slow Mac, probably because of the really slow ATA hard drive it came with. Even booting off an external BlueSCSI, it's not that bad, not sure about CPU performance though, although it's probably not the fastest thing and I saw it's barely as fast as a 601, but close to it, but faster in other areas. Thankfully, I have a model that doesn't have the bugs, which can run Mac OS 8 or higher. Believe it or not, I was using Mac OS 8 to get the on the web, which was still possible in the early 2000s.

Then again, the 6200 is the one I used quite a lot and was my machine when I was a child. Not too many children had their own computers, let along a Mac. Still, I have the desire to get the highest end as those are the machines I wasn't able to obtain as a child. Of course, there is the urge to soup them up with ridiculous upgrades or putting SSDs in old Macs. Must be watching those Action Retro and classic Druaga1 videos that makes me wonder about tinkering with old Mac desktops and laptops. It's a more of a on and off kind of thing and I eventually get back to messing with these machines. This time around, the BlueSCSI improvements got me focused on getting back with tinkering with Macs in my childhood, but with higher end machines this time. For a while, I wanted a system that can run Mac OS 7 that was better than a Performa 6200.