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If it’s your bag then go ahead and try. Just be realistic when it comes to asking someone else to do it. Working early rev. iMacs are at this point pretty thin on the ground and, I know this is editorializing, they were never that much to write home about. Owned a couple myself, did the ATX mod...

The TL;DR about the mezzanine slot is it's *basically* a PCI slot, although all the discussions about it which really had any technical details are at this point almost two decades old. To go a little further, an oddity of the iMac and some of its contemporaries (Pismo and Lobard Powerbooks, for...

Hah! Okay, then. Do you have a dev blog or something where you've been storing these juicy details, by any chance? Google needs to know about it if you do, the "varying the voltage" thing reads like an urban legend everywhere I saw it. :) Again, I would *hope* that a registered GAL on an...

Reading the datasheet it looks like "Medium" refers to a specific subset of combinatorial mode. (The GAL16v8 and 20v8 can emulate a bunch of older PAL devices, the difference between "Small" and "Medium" mode is the latter supports tri-stating the configurable I/O lines.) If you can get a...

Do you have an actual trusted source that goes into detail about this? I've seen vague mention of this on some electronics forums, posts going back to at least 2011 referencing some German Amiga fan who was very squirrely about documenting his methods. Frankly this sounds like a great way to...

If the GAL is just using combinatorial logic there are github projects out there for using an Arduino to bitbang out the wire map if the protection bit is set. If there is any registered logic then, yeah, life gets a lot harder. Do you know broadly where in the circuit the GALs live? (Are they...

FWIW, every single Mac that had the original 802.11b AirPort card slot and USB 1.1 ports also had an Ethernet port. And they also sell WiFi to Ethernet port adapters that can be powered off of a USB plug or power bank. So… I mean, yeah, it’s a slightly awkward workaround but technically you can...

The Netra T 1125 wasn't ringing a bell for me; I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat after nightmares about the little Netra T1 1Us or those gawdawful Enterprise 220/420 monsters. Looks like this was basically a Telco-racked version of the deskside Enterprise 250? I'd call you a monster for...

I think I would more interpret Cory's quote as simply meaning that running OS 9 on those machines is a "waste of potential", not that OS 9 objectively runs any worse on them than it does on any other late-stage PowerPC Mac. Although there are some specific pain points, I guess, like obviously...

To cut to the chase, yes, it essentially boils down to a lack of drivers for the hardware. The Quadra 610/650/800 were all considered “professional“ machines (or at least the 650 and 800 were and the 610 shared the same architecture) and thus made the cut to get the development work, while the...

FWIW your bog-standard FIFO 16550 UARTs from 90's PCs *could* in theory support 1Mbit/plus baud rates but they're limited because the standard clock they're driven by in PC compatibles is 1.8432MHz and the minimal divisor is 16x. (1,843,200 /16 = 115,200) Old-tyme PCs never got faster crystals...

I had a TRS-80 Pocket Computer II that I bought for almost nothing at one of those "Where-Is-As-Is" sales that Radio Shack used to do in the 80's that had a miniature plotter like that in a little "docking station" thing; it may have actually used the same pens, just on cash register size paper...

Hey, at least it lasted longer than your typical MacBook power supply cable. ;)

I'm not going to say this definitively because I haven't tried them on the era of machines we're dealing with here but the scuttlebutt is that issues with not supporting some of the more obscure data transfer modes is a significant issue for many IDE->SATA adapters. (And by extension those...

If you can lay hands on a schematic that'd be a good start, it's no doubt floating around out there... Okay, it looks like progress on the Applefritter thread, I second chasing that regulator is a place to start. You're lucky the Apple III uses proper regulators; I've been digging into...

I can’t think of a good reason why the 40 pin adapter works while the 44 doesn’t, they have exactly the same guts on them. If it’s easy for you to chuck it into another machine I’d sanity check to see if it could be defective. (That’s a downside of these super cheap electronics from China, I...

So... I remember when I went on a rathole scavenger hunt a few years ago for more information about the origins of my Syscom II I stumbled across evidence there were rotgut Taiwanese clone puppy mills back in the 80's that offered pre-built systems like this. (IE, an Apple clone motherboard...

... re: the above, finding CF cards that were reliably compatible with my XTIDE devices was also a huge PITA. I actually formally tested over a dozen cards I'd scavenged from various places (most of them "industrial" card pulled from old network equipment) in a range of sizes from 128MB to 2GB...

To second/third/whatever: the devices to do this are widespread and very inexpensive, and come in both 44 pin laptop PATA and 40 pin desktop flavors. The average price you'll pay for either format is about $15, but I recently ordered a pair of those $11 laptop ones I linked above (that exact...