Quadra 660AV

[mac57]

Hi All, I am new to the 68K Liberation Army forums, but thought I would weigh in to this forum - I just picked up a Quadra 660AV and original 15" Apple monitor off of eBay. Now happily loading it up with software, which is a challenge - 68K software can be maddening to find. Still looking for an image viewer program called ...ahem.. ImageViewer, but have just about everything else I wanted for it. I have a bit of an emotional connection to this machine - I used to have one very like it at work back in the mid 90s.

My "new" Quadra gets added to my PowerMac 7500/100 (now sporting a NewerTech G3 upgrade), my PowerMac G4 Cube, my PowerMac G5 Quad and two early Macs - a Macintosh SE and a Macintosh Classic. All told, looking at Mac OS, I have System 6, System 7, Mac OS 8.6, Mac OS 9.2.1, Mac OS 10.4.11, Mac OS 10.5.8 all up and running on their "native" hardware, and of course my "main" and current iMac, running Lion.

I have sort of fallen into being a vintage Mac collector without planning to, but it *is* getting to be quite a collection!

Very glad to find MLA! I think I will enjoy it here! :b&w:

 

[ClassicHasClass]

A 660 is a nice little box. Welcome.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Welcome aboard, mac57, It's nice to have another seasoned veteran enlisting. [] ]'>

 

[Unknown_K]

Never ran across a 660av but they do look interesting.

 

[CelGen]

If you can find the NuBus adapter cards for them they have the same DAV connector the 840AV has. The SpigotPower AV JPEG card works nice.

 

[Unknown_K]

Never seen a Nubus adapter with DAV connector on it for a 660av.

 

[Bunsen]

They're not exactly easy to find. I've been trying to track one down for a few years now.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I've never seen a pic of that board, does anyone have one to post?

There was a vanilla NuBus adapter for the 610 on eBay recently. Did anyone pick it up?

 

[CelGen]

Looks like this:

 

[onlyonemac]

Hi All, I am new to the 68K Liberation Army forums...

Uhh... You joined a year ago???

 

[beachycove]

Adding a Nubus slot is useful, and I have one of these cards as it happens, but I am not sure how useful the DAV slot itself would actually be in a 660av, given the relative lack of vram (very important in the Quadra AVs), and given that the only cards that took advantage of the DAV slot in the 040 AV Macs were video cards. The 840av, with 2MB vram, was more realistically equipped for very modest video work, and of course both machines were good for audio out of the box, which has nothing to do with the DAV slot.

There were only ever a handful of Nubus cards that were manufactured to use the DAV-Nubus slot in combination, that combination being present in one of the 840av Nubus slots and in the 660av via this specific adapter as pictured. What these cards basically did was to pre-process video input so that the machine could then record 30 frames per second of NTSC or PAL input in near-broadcast quality in (as I recall) thousands of colours. The cards, in other words, took the heat off the built-in AT&T processor. Even an 840av so equipped, however, was never a substitute for the professional video studios of the day, though I suspect that they could have been used for professional audio work.

I have two of the Centris versions of the 660av (the same as the Quadra but for the badge), and have used them for different purposes in the past. Both are now idle, but one in particular used to get a fair bit of use. We moved from the UK to Canada fourteen years ago with two small children and a ton of VHS tapes in PAL format, which the new TV/ Video player could not handle. So I set up a convoluted system by which the kids could watch their videos, with the 660av doing PAL to NTSC conversion on the fly. This worked rather well, and it might interest you to know that the 660av was as good or better at this than the much more powerful 8600 that I later tried. Postman Pat was pleased.

I also had a 660av set up with a Geoport modem (the external one, on the dongle) as a telephony system at one stage. I only ran it for a few weeks, and for fun, but I do recall that it was very versatile -- you could call in and get your voicemail, forward messages automatically, set up multiple voicemail boxes and Applescripts to forward message reminders by email, etc. The quality of the audio both sent out and recorded over the phone line was astounding. It was like having your own reception system, which at the time was something shiny and new. The 660av was good for these kinds of little tricks.

I seem to recall that that worked best under 7.6.1 and one of the later iterations of the telephony software.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

THX, I take it the two NuBus bridge chips are on the other side of the card?

 

[classic]

The Centris 660av was my first 68k mac. Long since gone. Lamented.

I enjoyed its PlainTalk capabilities, although I remember it worked better with an American accent

I fired up AppleScript once and made some custom plaintalk scripts.

I also remember there being a sound extension, the name of which eludes me, that you had to install manually from the Mac OS 7.1 CD

Once installed it could only be accessed through the sound control panel.

It took advantage of the DSP and gave you a range of sound output options, Concert, Hall etc

I hooked up the plaintalk microphone, put it inside my acoustic guitar and pumped up the volume on the connected stereo!

That was fun.

On the video side of things I had a VHS and TycoVideo Cam connected.

There was another extension called AV Digitizer Options that gave you are range of video capture options otherwise inaccessible.

A few useful ones here:

http://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu/Utilities/AV%20Mac%20specific

All the best with your Quadra 660av!

 

[Bunsen]

audio / which has nothing to do with the DAV slot.

Well, the signals are present, it's just that no-one built any devices to make use of them.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

http://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu/Utilities/AV%20Mac%20specific

As the maintainer of gopher.floodgap.com, direct access using OverbiteFF is strongly advised:

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu/Utilities/AV%20Mac%20specific

 

[Bunsen]

audio / DAV slot.

the signals are present

It occurred to me a while back that it would be relatively easy to hook up a S/PDIF converter IC, so you could pipe the digital audio out to a better external A/D/A.