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The Performa 6200 wasn’t really a road Apple - here’s why:

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Greetings!

It’s long been editorialized that the Performa 6200 series is a road Apple.

Countless articles and opinions have been made about the subject, and I had a realization yesterday when pondering something about the LC630’s inability to use the Apple IIe card.

Few know this, but the compatibility of the Apple IIe PDS card, long sought after by collectors and enthusiasts, doesn’t include the Quadra/LC/Performa 630. The reason being that this card’s software requires 24 bit memory addressing, and the 630 is one of only a couple machines that only supports 32 bit memory addressing.

That got me thinking: critics of the 6200 cite that it’s just a mangled insertion of the PowerPC processor into a 68040-based design, glued and taped by some radical Apple engineer to carry the base design into the PowerPC era. My new theory on this is actually the opposite. Hear me out.

The 630 was introduced in the fall of 1994. PowerPC computers were already shipping for 6 months before the 630 launched. I think Apple wanted to get one last “kick of the cat” with the 68040 processor, but also wanted to not have their engineering work be a waste of time and money.

The solution? Design a 68040-based logic board around the new technology of the PowerPC, so that a PPC chip could be installed on it in a future iteration of the same logic board design. So, it’s my new opinion, that the 6200 wasn’t a PowerPC shoehorned into a 68040 platform, it was quite the opposite. The 630 was designed to be a PPC platform from the start, and the lack of 24 memory addressing is part of that.

Does it make the 6200 a road Apple? I don’t think so. It makes the 630 a last-edition, state of the art 68040 machine. The 6200 is just a regular PPC with the limitations of the 603cpu.

Thoughts ?
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Very interesting theory based on timing. I don’t know any specifics about any of this, but it could logically make sense. Perhaps some past Apple engineer knows a thing or two.
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
@Cory5412 has a fabulous article to link here that debunks every last bit of LEM's unintentional, totally misguided disinformation smear campaign.

To sum it up: pretty much no computer can function in the configuration as presented in their woefully uninformed analysis of 6200 architecture?
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
@Cory5412 has a fabulous article to link here that debunks every last bit of LEM's unintentional, totally misguided disinformation smear campaign.

To sum it up: pretty much no computer can function in the configuration as presented in their woefully uninformed analysis of 6200 architecture?

I think the issues with the 6200 that people have are:
1. It shipped with IDE drives, which were slower than the SCSI drives people were used to
2. It used the 603 CPU which really needs a cache card like the 601 to really shine. I think the Performa 6200 shipped without the cache.
3. On its own, the 6200 isn’t a bad machine per se, but when compared to the Quadra 630 or LC475 that someone may have upgraded from, it likely ran slower. Most individual people weren’t the type to buy and upgrade software, they’d likely try and reuse what they had. If a buyer of the 6200 had a software package from an older Mac, it wasn’t PPC native. Running that under emulation on a machine without a cache card and from an IDE disk was likely not the best experience, in comparison to where they may have come from.

I’ve run tests on a 6200 and the 6100/66 with a cache card generally beats it. Especially in emulated software or on earlier versions of System 7 that were more emulated.

However, a buyer who is coming to the Mac for the very first time, buying new PPC native software, and running Mac OS 7.5+, likely would have found the 6200 perfectly useable.
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Performance falloff of IDE has been debunked in benchmark testing here fairly recently, that bit of disinformation may have originated in the Q630 implementation?

People were very much mistakenly under the impression that SCSI was fast, we all know it wasn't these days. This was based mostly upon high end use cases in the workstation market and in Fast/Fast Wide arrays on NuBus cards in high end Macintosh workstation builds for content production.

IDE was inexpensive, which in no way translates directly into "slower."

LEM: Apple also used an 8-bit IDE controller for the hard drive instead of the more expensive SCSI used in earlier Macs. (This is the kind of thinking that had crippled the LC with a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit bus five years earlier.)

Du'oh! SCSI on Mac is an 8-bit bus/controller, so whazzup with LEM's thinking?

Reminds me of the LEMfable that 190/5300x/1400x Ethernet on PCMCIA was slower than "built-in Ethernet" of the Blackbirds because it's on only a 16bit bus. Couldn't find the reference on LEM in a quick look, but with a cursory examination of the Blackbird block diagram it's clear as day that the entire I/O subsystem of the Blackbirds was a bridged 16bit bus as in every NuBus architecture 'Book with split bus for fast CPU support.

Spot on with your lack of cache comment. ;) The 6290 a fellow NYMUG member/developer type gifted me has perfectly acceptable performance for a machine in its market segment for that period.
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Good points - I agree with your theories on the 630/6200 hybrid design. The 6200 can make for a great vintage Mac nowadays, cheap to find, cheap to upgrade, nice design.

However - I knew of someone that purchased one of these new - for just under < $4000 AUD which included a small RAM upgrade and matching CRT, this wasn't a budget price. While it was advertised as an entry level PPC, previous models (6100/7100/8100) were such a big step up from 68K, and this model wasn't up to entry level. It performed so badly in both 68K and PPC programs they wanted to return it for a slower 68K machine. So absolute rubbish then, but good now.
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
In that use case you have to give the 6200 a bit of slack. Q630 was the bottom of the product line released four months after the x100 disaster. 6200 was released thirteen months worth of horrific fat binary ports to PPC.*** It was a very, very nasty period in the Mac's development for hardware, OS AND software. ~8-b



*** harbinger of the horrid, ridiculously slow in coming ports to first release OSX to come.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Performance falloff of IDE has been debunked in benchmark testing here fairly recently, that bit of disinformation may have originated in the Q630 implementation?

People were very much mistakenly under the impression that SCSI was fast, we all know it wasn't these days. This was based mostly upon high end use cases in the workstation market and in Fast/Fast Wide arrays on NuBus cards in high end Macintosh workstation builds for content production.

IDE was inexpensive, which in no way translates directly into "slower."

LEM: Apple also used an 8-bit IDE controller for the hard drive instead of the more expensive SCSI used in earlier Macs. (This is the kind of thinking that had crippled the LC with a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit bus five years earlier.)

Du'oh! SCSI on Mac is an 8-bit bus/controller, so whazzup with LEM's thinking?

Reminds me of the LEMfable that 190/5300x/1400x Ethernet on PCMCIA was slower than "built-in Ethernet" of the Blackbirds because it's on only a 16bit bus. Couldn't find the reference on LEM in a quick look, but with a cursory examination of the Blackbird block diagram it's clear as day that the entire I/O subsystem of the Blackbirds was a bridged 16bit bus as in every NuBus architecture 'Book with split bus for fast CPU support.

Spot on with your lack of cache comment. ;) The 6290 a fellow NYMUG member/developer type gifted me has perfectly acceptable performance for a machine in its market segment for that period.

Do you have a link to the IDE drive testing you mention? I couldn’t seem to locate the post.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
It's Christmas in July! I've been saying this for years.

The whole "Road Apple" concept has literally never sat well with me and most of the machines on that list are basically "That way" because they were affordable and aimed at a non-pro market and the compromises Apple made mostly don't actually impact their usage for those markets.

Also, above and beyond this machine, the assertions made on several of the "road apple" machines are literally, provably wrong. The best example of this is the cacheless "Mainstreet" PowerBook G3/233, which roundly outperforms every predecessor machine, up to and including the PowerBook G3/250 "Kanga". (This mostly comes down to "platform enhancements" - faster bus, graphics, disk interface, etc etc etc, the Kanga is basically a 3400 with a G3 upgrade preintegrated whereas the "Mainstreet" was a full G3-first platform, essentially a miniaturization of the desktop PowerMac G3s.)

The Cacheless G3/233 probably does deserve criticism because of the small passive-matrix display, low overall configuration compared with literally everything else (especially for over $2200 in a moment when the iMac and desktop G3s had better configs for $1299). (The magazines at the time absolutely panned it for that screen, especially given that in the moment you could still buy old-stock PowerBook 1400/166es with better screens, bigger disks, and sometimes more RAM for significantly less than what a PowerBook G3 cost, and get a much nicer machine if your work didn't actually rely on that G3 speed or upgradeability the 1400 didn't have.)

But, it doesn't deserve criticism for its performance, because it had excellent performance for the time.

LEM kept up the whole "road apple" thing for so very long and doubled down on these assertions for literally decades in the face of people writing in to correct the info fairly regularly.

This stuff is why I'm so vocal about the fact that I think spec-dexes should avoid editorializing macs or to be honest, even "contextualizing" them because people who don't themselves fully understand the context get this stuff wrong all the time. (e.g. assertions that the IIvi/vx/P600 "replaced" the IIci, or that the Classic II replaced the SE/30.)

To make this all worse: The fact that LEMisms get taken as gospel here in the year of our lord 2022 when the whole thing was written as a secondary computer buyers guide litearlly 25 years ago is arguably so damaging to the hobby overall. I regularly continue to see people recommend against "problematic" machines that are often significantly easier to deal with and more logistically convenient than "the good ones" because of the misinformation/disinformation and its continued propagation. That leads to people vying for a relatively limited pool of pro oriented machines when their needs (often literally in line with what Performas were for when they were new) would be met by something much simpler and prices could stay lower for everyone in the hobby. That's a significant reduction on the overall dynamic of literally anything vintage as a hobby, but you get the idea. People ignore good inventory and then that inventory goes away and people fight harder over the remains.

fabulous article to link here

Thank you! Yes, here it is: https://www.taylordesign.net/classic-macintosh/the-mythical-road-apple/

Your summary is exactly correct.

This is all more or less borne out by Apple's own documentation in terms of the developer notes, which have been floating around online for anyone who wants to have, for at least 25 years. The team over at Low End Mac could have known this back in 1997, but decided not to.

The 476/605 is a cut down 610/650. The 630 is an updated 475/605. The 6200 is a 630 with a PowerPC upgrade pre-integrated onto the motherboard. The same thing happened a few times in the wintel industry around the 486/Pentium changeover, which, as with the Mac (68ks were on sale until mid-1996) took a long time.

In terms of benchmark numbers:
The 6200/75 and the 6100 (both /60 and /66) are neck-and-neck for most things. The 6200 wins disk benches (your own posts on reddit last year show this) and graphics. The 6100 wins a few other things, especially with a cache.

The 6200's weak 68k emulation performance is because of a small L1 cache compared to every other PPC model, 16 vs. 32k - you can mitigate that by running some slightly newer software, using PPC native applications, and using tools like Speed Doubler 8. 7.6.1 + SD8 is a sweet spot for the 6200, in my experience, but 8.1+SD8 should also work well, especially if you need or want HFS+.

Even the 6300, 5300, PowerBook 5300, 1400, and 2300, which share an underlying "it's a 630 with a PPC upgrade bolted on" architecture to the 6200, are typically thought of as "not having this problem". (Because they all have the 32k L1, although some PowerBook 5300/1400/2300 models don't have any L2 cache, while the desktop 6200/6300 and AIO 5200/5300 have 256k of L2 stock.)

Interestingly, something like a 1400/166 is meaningfully slower than, say, a 7600/120. The 7200/7500 likely also outperform it, and something like the 6360/160 should also outperform it. Again, all because of that cost-saving architecture. Although, ultimately these speeds were all "basically fine" for their markets.

I have a 6100 and a 6200 and can likely pull them out in the next few weeks, my results in MacBench 4 are also on vtools. I believe I also did some testing in a 68k native app, that's in Public on vtools.

Do you have a link to the IDE drive testing you mention? I couldn’t seem to locate the post.

I deleted my reddit account a few months ago, but I seem to recall that literally your own testing showed this.

That said, one of LEM's newer authors got their hands on a 6200 and tested it, their numbers show the 6200 marginally beating the 6100 at disk performance, that article is here: https://lowendmac.com/2020/the-golden-road-apple-how-i-discovered-that-the-worst-mac-ever-wasnt/

However - I knew of someone that purchased one of these new - for just under < $4000 AUD which included a small RAM upgrade and matching CRT, this wasn't a budget price

I'm curious as to what the comparables and other Macs were selling for at the time.

In the US, the 6200 and 5200 typically sold for $1800-2500 or so. I think I'm quoted somewhere a few years ago saying $1200 but I think that may have been, like, edu pricing on an LC version. So, you can have bought like three 6200s and some LocalTalk gear for what a single 9500 cost. 6100 variants (including the Performa 6100 variants) were selling at the upper end of that range or above it and the PowerMacs 7200 and 7500 were solidly above that line.

Though, like, it's worth mentioning that the Mac retail supply chain was usually LOADED with old inventory for YEARS after a model had been discontinued, so if something like a Quadra 650 or 800 was being firesold alongside a 6200, there could have been plenty of reasons to consider going for the 650 or 800.

Apple had hilarious ("bad") rules around displaying prices and who, specifically, was allowed to even sell Macs at the time so we don't have an awful lot of print pricing examples for most Macs from that era, that starts being a thing in like 1997 or so.

The other thing is -- I've basically literally always heard Apple's pricing is unfavorable globally (you can read this as: "literally everywhere outside the United States") between things like not updating prices as exchange rates and picking the same numbers even when a currency is worth significantly more than the USD, which I believe has hit Canada and Australia hard sometimes.

6200 was released thirteen months worth of horrific fat binary ports to PPC.***

FAT binary should have been fast on the 6200, and any PowerPC Mac. Although, it's worth noting that system 7.5 on PowerPC was an almost completely unmitigated disaster and the x100 hardware was, in reality, often not all that hot even running native code. UniversalBinaries during the PPC -> Intel transition also performed excellently, above and beyond the Intel Macs being so fast that they usually outperformed the machines they were replacing even in emulation.

You also, really, "should" arguably be comparing like for like in terms of price:performance and whether or not something is a "worthwhile" upgrade. So, compare the 6200 not to the 840av, but to the 605/630. Although that does fall apart a tiny bit because 68k had such a long tail, and the 630 really is such a good performer for its price tag, at least if you ignore the fact that it postdates the powerMac x100 family.

2. It used the 603 CPU which really needs a cache card like the 601 to really shine. I think the Performa 6200 shipped without the cache.

Sort of! I mentioned this above but it bears mentioning again: The 603 in the 6200 has 16k of L1 cache all 5200/6200 models and variant had 256k of L2 cache as stock. That's globally. As far as I have ever seen, there was absolutely no "Cheap International Version like the cacheless 6400/180" as was common on models both before and after the x200/x300 groups.

The best explanation I've seen for the root of why 68k emulation in particular is so slow is because the 68k emulation code thrashes in and out of the L1 cache. I don't know what specific trick Speed Doubler 8 does to make this happen but it works around that problem somehow. Speed Doubler 8 is supposed to also help basically all PPC Macs at 68k emulation, especially in the 7-8.1 era. 9 itself also had an updated 68k emulator from Apple that is likely better than SD8's but on the machines where it'd be relevant (6100/6200) 9 is really too heavily to actually use. (Although IME 9 does win benchmarks on the 6200, I'll have to pull out the macbench results but 9 on my 6200 turns in bench results a few percent faster than 7.6.1, even though it's markedly slower to actually use.)

The 6300/5300, and the PowerBooks that share this architecture (5300, 1400, 2300) all have the 32k of L1 cache, but some of those PowerBooks do not have any L2 cache, which does impact those models performance, sometimes significantly.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
On its own, the 6200 isn’t a bad machine per se, but when compared to the Quadra 630 or LC475 that someone may have upgraded from, it likely ran slower.

A note about this: in my experience, normal people do not buy a new computer every year, or every single time there's a new model. This type of comparison ("how much faster is it than literally the directly previous model") makes relatively little sense in consumer computers because most people don't push the limits of what their computers can do, and for the most part, literally never have.

People in the market for machines to do things like "technical computing", multimedia authoring, software development, etc etc and hobbyists and enthusiasts usually put themselves in higher price brackets because they do prioritize that kind of thing, even if in reality that group (enthusiasts specifically) also isn't upgrading every single generation, mostly because they can't afford it and there's no economic reason to.

The "professional, as in getting paid" segments of the technical computing, multimedia, and software development markets are typically the one for which there's an economic reason to upgrade every single generation and to be honest: in my experience those people don't upgrade every single generation either, even if they do upgrade slightly more often. I feel strongly like "if my video renders ten minutes faster I can start editing another video and make more money per day" is probably largely a myth.

Not to say that there aren't performance incentives for a "professional, as in getting paid" high end user to upgrade, I bet they're process related more than anything else, because, well, rendering videos isn't what gets them paid, making creative decisions is. (This is highly context dependent though, and is likely literally dependent on the individual person.)

So, yeah, the 6200 was likely slower at Mathematica than the 630. But also, your average 630 and 6200 buyer wasn't running Mathematica on it. They were running ClarisWorks, HyperCard, and [period appropriate, platform-native] games and edutainment on 'em.

(I realize the very next post is going to be about someone who somehow did end up with a 6200 and had to run the 68k build of photoshop 3 using 100-meg files on a system with 8 megs of ram and swap on and how it was terrible. You're valid but that's also almost certainly incredibly uncommon.)
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
FAT binary should have been fast on the 6200, and any PowerPC Mac. Although, it's worth noting that system 7.5 on PowerPC was an almost completely unmitigated disaster and the x100 hardware was, in reality, often not all that hot even running native code.
Didn't make the point clearly enough, the 68K code wasn't the problem I mentioned, it was the TERRIBLE PPC PORTS during the fat binary era. Same for crappy ports when they finally appeared for first release X. Horrible times in both cases.

As for 'Books, the bridged 68030 slow I/O bus wasn't much of a limitation at all. These were all early implementations of split bus architectures and 68030 processor bus was well understood and supported across the board by developers of hardware and drivers for it. I'd call that a wash, how fast does anything really need to be for PowerBook I/O after all? NuBus architecture PowerBook was an adjunct to daily drivers. Severely limited screen technology alone limited portability to second tier hardware use cases.

Laptop as primary computer was several years into the future, long after the switch to PCI architecture. Maybe my Pismo with BookENDZ dock and a single display at 1600x1200x24bit in clamshell mode might have cut it back then, but that was already the era of multiple screen computing.
 
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joshc

Well-known member
The 6200 can make for a great vintage Mac nowadays, cheap to find, cheap to upgrade, nice design.
Yep, and even back when it was a current Mac, it was fine, for basic computing needs. It was always a cheap, low-end model. Nobody was pitting this thing against high-end Power Macs or PCs. I used a 6200 as my main machine for years, and I've owned 4 of them. It was the first machine I learnt to program on. I even did 3D rendering on it with Bryce 2, it was slow but it did it. I've always found them to be very reliable, software and hardware wise. The power supply leaves something to be desired, but that's Mac power supplies for you. I'm glad that at least some people are finally realising that the 6200 was not a road Apple.
 

ymk

Well-known member
I have three 6100s and no desire to own a 6200.

It was a bean counter job... the LCII of PowerMacs.
 

demik

Well-known member
Didn't make the point clearly enough, the 68K code wasn't the problem I mentioned, it was the TERRIBLE PPC PORTS during the fat binary era. Same for crappy ports when they finally appeared for first release X. Horrible times in both cases.

As for 'Books, the bridged 68030 slow I/O bus wasn't much of a limitation at all. These were all early implementations of split bus architectures and 68030 processor bus was well understood and supported across the board by developers of hardware and drivers for it. I'd call that a wash, how fast does anything really need to be for PowerBook I/O after all? NuBus architecture PowerBook was an adjunct to daily drivers. Severely limited screen technology alone limited portability to second tier hardware use cases.

Laptop as primary computer was several years into the future, long after the switch to PCI architecture. Maybe my Pismo with BookENDZ dock and a single display at 1600x1200x24bit in clamshell mode might have cut it back then, but that was already the era of multiple screen computing.

Totally correct. The 68030 bus was used by devices who didn't need better (well maybe Ethernet could use better, but MacOS wasn't able to handle faster rates on that CPU anyway).

I've three of them (5200/6200/5320), while running them with the stock 7.5.1 is a fine field, 7.5.5 is a little better, they are way more stable in MacOS 8. I would argue that the stabilities were dues mostly to the stock 7.5.1 than the hardware itself.

Also as @Cory5412, the 5320 feels way faster (like 3-4 times) than the 5200 due to double cache (16K vs 32K).

The only big major drawback of that 630/6200 architecture is the Memory controller : it's 32 bit wide where the PPC could fetch 64 bits at a time, hence why on other PPCs you needed to use SIMM72s by two.

The GPU (Valkyrie) is also a dog, the one from a LC475 is faster
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
@Cory5412
I remember testing a 6200/75, and I remember posting about it. Sadly I have searched for 90 minutes trying to find a post or even a photo of the benchmarks on my phone without success.

I seem to recall disk speed was very slow. My recollection was it compared to that on the IIsi, about half that of the 6100/60. I would like to verify again though. I guess it’s time to pull out the 6200 and repeat the benchmarks. Edit: I found the photo!

Here were my disk benchmarks:

4FD6ED71-3217-4887-B72A-67F079559522.jpeg
 
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Melkhior

Well-known member
The issue with the 6200 was the same as for all 603-based machine: the PowerPC 603 itself (but not 603e). The split L1 caches at 8 KiB each are too small, in particular for the dynamic translator required to run 68k code. The external L2 doesn't make up for it, latency is too high. The 601 had a unified 32 KiB L1 that was much, much better for translation. The 603e and 604 had 16 KiB L1I and L1D and were more adequate for translation as well; the higher frequency of those models also helped with the comparison to '030 and '040 running native code.

Native PPC code only, the 603 would have been OK compared to the 601. But for running 68k code, it was woefully inadequate.

Additional historical note; the lesson was learned. Processors designed for binary translation, such as the Transmeta Crusoe or NVidia Denver, usually had L1 cache larger than their contemporary competitors. DEC's FX!32 (binary translation software to run x86 code on Alpha) was introduced for the Alpha 21164, which had small L1 caches but introduced the on-chip L2 cache, which combined with the raw frequency of the Alphas was enough to make FX!32 viable (didn't help Alpha in the end, but still, it was perfectly usable).

Unfortunately, NetBSD doesn't support either the x100 or the 6200, so we can't compare them with a fully native operating system :-(
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Totally correct. The 68030 bus was used by devices who didn't need better (well maybe Ethernet could use better, but MacOS wasn't able to handle faster rates on that CPU anyway).
Don't recall when anything faster than 10bT became adequately supported on the Mac?

Wikipedia: Fast Ethernet was introduced in 1995 as the IEEE 802.3u standard[1] and remained the fastest version of Ethernet for three years before the introduction of Gigabit Ethernet.

So nothing was even available to support until well after the Quadra 630 and development period of the May 1995 Performa 6200's release. When did Fast Ethernet become viable on the Mac and how much of the 10bT pipe was the Mac capable of filling, much less swamping the interface?

Lost in these considerations of relative performance would be the unprecedented expansion capabilities of the Quadra 630 platform along with its 630LC and Performa 6200 offspring:
_____ no consumer Mac had been released with built-in Ethernet?
_____ Q630 CommSlot supported 10bT NIC AND its stock Modem card in those days of all but exclusively dialup, early WWW access.
_____ ISTR Q630 came with a new, improved, yet backward compatible LCIII expansion slot standard, or was that the 6200?

I cannot express enough the importance of the revolutionary development that was the video slot in a consumer market tier Mac.
LEM: video slot for either Apple’s Video System Card or TV/Video System card and if that's not enough, the DSP card supported PhotoCD/VideoCD. With the P6200's PPC capability added to the Q630 architecture, DSP option was no longer needed for such? Those were very early days of video capture and editing, also never seen in a consumer level Mac and great intro into that rarified atmosphere. Had great fun with the rug rat playing with that. Q630 was the TV/CD home entertainment center in his bedroom on 17" Sony Trinitron with its original, first release credit card remote control. His PC afflicted friends were so jealous of that setup well into the Pentium era. :p

In support of the TV/Video System, VGA/SVGA (missing from the earlier x100 series?) became mainstream on Macs for the first time. 16" resolution support was retained for better than SVGA display. XGA would have been wonderful along with more VRAM, but again these are consumer Macs. This was definitely a step down from Q605 support of 19" and 21" resolutions. Such was not supported on the Q630 form factor logic board until the 6500 board, which never made it into the Q630 form factor case, but those were standard VGA resolutions.

PC Compatibility Cards became mainstream in a consumer level Mac after the Q630, coming into their own with intro of the 6200 IMO.

P6200: one hella expansion platform as compared to its slot starved Q605 grandpappy.
 
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Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
So in your testing, SCSI/IDE is a wash performance wise in the 6200 with IDE running away in price/MB and dirt cheap CF/SD compatibility quite handily?
 

Dude.JediKnight

Well-known member
This was the first Mac we had after moving up from an old Apple IIc, and it served my family well enough during my Middle and High School days.

We eventually maxed out the RAM and it did great for schoolwork with our StyleWriter 2400 printer, and countless hours of fun with games like Civ2, Railroad Tycoon, all the Maxis Sim games, Dark Forces, and the X-wing and TIE Fighter games - though an ADB joystick was required for serious flying. We also had a Zip drive and many disks for storing important stuff once the 1GB drive got close to full.

I’m sure a lot of it was just the nostalgia factor, but it brings back a lot of good memories for me. Without having any point of comparison to other period Macs, I feel it met our needs well enough at the time.

I still have the computer somewhere in the house, but it hasn’t been turned on in ages. There are too many other projects of a higher priority to really warrant doing much to it as it currently stands.

Really the only bad thing I remember about the machine itself was it not being the fastest when dialing in to AOL’s chat rooms when we first got online. The lack of Ethernet on it and those stories of slow network performance really don’t fill me with confidence about upgrading it beyond what it currently has.

I also remember that the included monitor (Multiple Scan 15?) when we bought it (from Sears, if I memory serves) had a defect and eventually everything got tinted blue! We ended up getting a decent VGA monitor and VGA to MAC monitor adapter from CompUSA to replace it.

Eventually it got replaced by our iMac DV and a new printer, but the old Performa did great by us and kept us buying Apple tech stuff to this day.
 
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