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Interesting. I had read that there were a few attempts to get SAS into a G5 but they were non-bootable, sadly. Maybe the problem is the use of hard-coded configs that conflict? Like the Ethernet controller wants to be ID 5 but the SAS card is also ID 5 and it overrides because it's earlier in...

Power Macs may be ok since they support NuBus '90 (20MB instead of 10MB/s) in most cases. Alternatively you could interface to the PDS instead, which would get you a minimum 30MHz, 64-bit bus to play with. If you're already doing a combo framebuffer there would be minimal loss from having to...

I was also curious about the battery connector. Sometimes you can find the part number molded on the original and find the same or a very similar part. I did this for the 5x0 series a while back and something turned up but they weren't in stock or active production and minimum order was...

Sounds like either something's getting stuck/misaligned or your eject solenoid is defective/disconnected. Most of the internal Zip 100 (and probably 250) drives were mechanically the same so it shouldn't be too big of a deal to fix the eject problem if you have a donor or demonstration drive. A...

Yeah basically if a ZIF upgrade has an L3 cache it will downclock a B&W/Yikes! G4's bus. Otherwise the 7400 or 7410-based upgrades should work fine at 100MHz.

Yikes. Well Sonnet sometimes does have a disclaimer about stuff like that, at least with some of their later upgrades, saying 'sometimes parts are speed-binned for an order but the order is cancelled so the chips are re-qualified and sold at higher ratings even though the badging may be for the...

^ what he said. The Classic was meant to accept a Classic II logic board as an official upgrade by Apple so they're mostly interchangeable with the exception of the Classic and its special RAM card vs. the Classic II and its special FPU/ROM expansion card. Neither model was intended to have any...

If you have external data storage available (Zip, HD, even network) you can use Disk Copy 6.3.3 to make a complete, portable image of the drive that can be opened by any other Mac (though support may have been dropped in the later versions of OS X). It's usually better to boot from something...

It used to be that the main reason to go CF is that it was a direct ATA interface; no expensive chip required. They were usually higher capacity than most SD cards up until ~2010 or so. Also, do CF cards do any sort of wear leveling or other management functions? If so, I'd probably prefer them...

That is really impressive. I didn't realize BUG was around for so long. I have a couple of their earlier NuBus video cards but haven't really even bothered looking for software for them. Nice to know I can try to use them now. Now if only someone could find a data hoarder from Interware. I...

Yeah they're tightly-packed power bricks, much more involved than the 1x0-series types. There are a couple big caps and then a ton of smaller ones on a couple different boards. I'm not fond of repairing them, but they're not too much worse than their contemporaries. Case plastics, too: people...

Yeah it's sad that DEC fell apart so badly that Compaq bought them out, then Compaq murdered discontinued development of the Alpha in favor of the mythical performance of the forthcoming Itanium, a product which turned out to be completely over-hyped, overpriced, and under-performing, ultimately...

Yeah I buy those power bricks as often as I can when I see them for reasonable prices. Sadly a good number of them have succumbed to bad caps and the case plastics are brittle so it's difficult to repair them without destroying the housing in the process. I usually end up piecing the chunks back...

I completely agree: personally I think going totally bananas with stuff like this is a little pointless, at least from a practicality standpoint. Stuff like what Action Retro does on his YouTube channel is cool and all, but at the same time: why? You can play Minecraft under OS X on a new...

Thinking about it for a minute and yeah you're probably right: there was precious little in an early '90s PowerBook even capable of running at 32 bits outside of memory so it's not a big deal to run the ATA controller (16 bits), SCSI controller (8 bits), Ethernet (10b-whatever was fine on 16...

The worst plastic bits for the G3DT are the power button and the air deflector over the PCI slots (both usually broken if not missing). Also the little flip-out support stand and its associated prop on the underside are often broken. Not that they're essential but it's often annoying if they're...

Details can be sussed out of various dev notes and things at your leisure, but basically: The PowerBook Duo 280, PB 5xx, PB 190, PB Duo 2300, PB 5300, and PB 1400 share many if not most of their logic ICs. The only major differences are between 68k and PPC-based models, which use either the...

Sadly the 6100, if they didn't come with one, is often hard to fit with the requisite adapter for either the AV card or the more rare NuBus adapter. But if you have the option, an AV card (the 7100/8100's HPV card may fit but the VRAM SIMMS may interfere with the HD or CPU heat sink) is the best...