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Looks like that was a ceramic cap, actually. They can also develop shorts as seen in several YouTube videos where people diagnose computer components that won't power on. Usually the short causes the power supply's protection circuit to trip before damage is incurred and the easiest way to find...

Yes the support aspect for continued Windows development on non-Intel platforms would've been huge (for example, this is why Sierra, who had a Half-Life port ready to go for Mac back in 1998, didn't release it: they didn't want to deal with supporting the platform). I'm sure there's a...

This is an interesting bit of history isn't it? WRT ISA and other PC oddities (including MCA for some reason), it was probably originally meant to facilitate transition from x86 to PPC and was folded into the CHRP standard from PReP. Remember that in the mid-90s there were multiple OSes...

Do those 7200 upgrades work in Amigas? I didn't know that. I saw two of the G3 400 varieties show up once from the same seller. I bid $200 on the first one, even though it had a broken RAM slot, and still lost it last-minute to the only other bidder. So I went to bid on the next one, and the...

Old Macs can be touchy about ATA-to-SD adapters, mostly because their built-in ATA interface is old and fairly limited and can't figure out how to talk to the SD card's ATA interface. Most people have better luck using a direct CF adapter rather than using SD for this reason since CF cards'...

For the era, on a Mac? I'm not sure. I don't really have an extensive library of Mac games to compare but it's not uncommon in PC land for stuff to not work properly with less VRAM but run fine with more, even on the same chip. From what games I do have at hand, The Sims 2 and SimCity 4 for Mac...

Ha. Of course they did. Do you suppose that was intentional or a "happy accident" on their part? But yeah I'd second the older MacOS thing. 1997/98 was System 7.6/OS 8.1 territory so BeOS is probably geared more toward working with those. I tried to download a copy of BeOS (MacWorld Preview...

plz delete

I think I ran across some info at one point that with some updates you can get original AirPort cards to work with WPA while running under OS X but they'll still be stuck at WEP under OS 9. I don't think I've ever really bothered to try the OS X thing though. 802.11b really should be run on its...

At its core it's basically the same (167MHz bus, 1GB RAM max, PATA hard drive, etc) but the 1.5GHz model comes with a 20% CPU speed bump and of course double the video memory. You probably won't notice the graphics improvement day-to-day unless you do lots of video-intensive stuff but if you...

AFAIK, there were really only two special WGS models: the WGS 95 and the WGS 9150. The WGS 95 was at heart a Q950 but it had a special PDS card with L2 cache and fast/wide SCSI and this is what turned it into the WGS 95. The WGS 9150 was only sold as a WGS for some reason (I really think they...

Ha. Yeah they weren't terribly pretty, were they? Akia in Japan made a rebadged version of this with a slightly different front panel and a stand to orient it on its side instead of as a desktop. Anyway UMAX were one of the more interesting clone builders in that these are Alchemy-based systems...

I can almost guarantee that the 20MB mech in any SE (at least, from the factory) is the MiniScribe 8225S; I've never seen anything else and the only other 20MB drives Apple used were the 3.5" Rodime mech in the HD20 and the 5.25" ST-225N in the HD20SC. The MiniScribe drives are slow and loud...

That ZIF socket was originally used in RS/6000 systems (same as the slots for the older PPC cards), so if you find some weird ZIF sockets or bizarre 604 cards that look like they should go in a Mac but are just cryptic and weird, they're probably for an RS/6000. I'm not sure if any of the...

The 9600/350 was indeed factory-equipped with the 604ev Mach 5 (unless yours has had a logic board swap at some point). It was the early run <300MHz ones that may not play nice with a Mach 5 card because they weren't qualified to run it. I'm not entirely sure what differences exist between the...

If that's aimed at me, I'm excluding them because I'm unaware of anything that works properly in pre-OS 8 environments. I've heard of and even performed a few hacks to get stuff to work in some otherwise unsupported machines but all of my experience has been that there's nothing that works in...

I guess that's sort of like the early LCs with the "Apple Confidential" EPROMs in them. I got one of those LCs years ago and thought it was special but apparently it's just an early production unit where they used up some of the DVT stock they had. Could be the same story here, or they didn't...

I'm not sure if there were 3rd party USB drivers for classic Mac OS or not. I think LaCie may have had something but it was probably just enablers or accelerators or whatever for their specific products and they interacted with Apple's core drivers for basic functionality. Apple would probably...

Easiest and most available option is probably an SCA drive with an SCA-to-50-pin adapter and a passive terminator for the end of the cable. Bonus: the SCA drives are enterprise-rated and so are faster and more robust than their average desktop SCSI counterpart (which are already better than...

Looks like a topic worthy of a proper write-up and a pin. I have a fair number of screens from various machines across the eras that would benefit from a new polarizer but I'm not sure where to start in most cases because there's such a variety of sizes and quality (STN, TFT, mono, color). I...