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There are few computer sounds more iconic than the Sony auto-inject floppy drives. The sounds of an early '90s Quantum hard drive are probably a close second. Third is probably the Apple ][ 5.25" startup disk seek. PC specific sounds are probably the BIOS beep and the startup seek of a 3.5"...

As I understand it, you should be able to run a 5300 off a 3400 battery, but it won't charge it. Back in the day, Sony's battery division built the new high-capacity LiIon cells for the 5300, but production problems (likely stray metal shavings causing internal shorts, a problem that would...

The Pioneer MPC-LX100 used a ~500MB Seagate Medalist ST3630A, a relatively low-end drive (the old-school black 4200RPM models with brass mounting rails). The GX-1 was a Quantum drive, the ProDrive ELS/Maverick in roughly 500-800MB capacity. The GX-1 Limited was basically the same as the regular...

In the 630, 575, and 475-style logic boards, the LC PDS and Comm Slot* are both connected to an emulated 030 bus generated by one of the support ICs. This bus is designed to run only one PDS device because, to simplify design, the card assumes it's the only other device on the bus and so only...

The PowerPC Upgrade Card works in a Quadra 660av, which has a lot of the same features of the 840av including the DSP.

The overly tight heatsinks on Sonnet cards often lead to warping of the cards. Whenever feasible, I take them off, especially on the G4 tower upgrade cards since the Apple heatsinks are often better, if not at least sufficient (and the little fan Sonnet puts on theirs is typically kind of loud)...

Honestly, if you have enough RAM that you don't need to use virtual memory, an IDE-CF adapter and a 4GB CF card is perfect for those things. Even a non-industrial CF card would be fine to use without worry about burning it out, and they're generally a lot cheaper and less fiddly than IDE to SD...

Interesting question. LEM's guide doesn't mention the only 40MHz Mac, the Quadra 840av, as being compatible with the PPC Upgrade Card, so maybe a 40MHz bus upsets it (beyond the obvious overclocking of the CPU). Apparently the official Apple version of the card doubles the host machine's bus...

Supposedly, since the LCD is still functional, you can just replace the polarizer film. There are discussions about it in multiple forums. Apparently you can get the film from various online stores. Then you carefully peel off the old film, clean the bare LCD, and reapply (in the correct...

Do 800k disks formatted in that drive work reliably in that drive? If so, you'll want to realign your track-0 sensor using a universally known-good disk. If not, you can try to clean the heads. Ideally you'd use one of those foam-tipped sticks and 100% isopropyl alcohol but cotton swabs and 70%...

I have seen examples of double PDS devices used on LCs before. I think the secret is to design the cards together so that there are no conflicts, and even then it's usually a CPU upgrade paired with, typically, an Ethernet card (where basically, the second PDS slot talks directly to the upgrade...

You can always get a PPC upgrade card and turn it into a Power Mac. You'd get the looks of the Q700 and the performance of a 6100 or thereabouts, though its RAM ceiling is kind of limited unless you get aftermarket 16MB 30-pin SIMMs. Nobody loves the first-gen Power Macs so they're pretty cheap...

Try opening iTunes or iMovie or some other Apple program in addition to macports when this happens. I'm curious if, like my air-cooled DP 2.7s, the system starts running the fans and drops temperature.

Sounds like it may have lost its alignment or possibly track 0. Does it have important data on it? If not, if it shows up in Disk Utility (assuming you're booted from a floppy or something) you can try a low-level format.

9.2.1? Really? That's odd to me. I guess it makes sense, sort of: both the iPod and 9.2 were late 2001. You'd figure they would've supported older versions of Mac OS (at least back to 9.0) but I guess not.

From what I've read in Apple's developer notes, SCSI cells integrated into Apple ASICs never supported anything over 5MB/s (as explained in this dev note for the beige G3 that uses the Heathrow I/O controller) whereas the 53CF96 and its clones could do up to 10MB/s. Maybe it's a terminology...

The PowerBook 500 series w/100MHz PPC upgrade isn't too far off the mark of performance for a 5300, and that's partially because the 5300's architecture basically adapted the PPC bus to old '030-based chips to shorten development time and keep costs down, but also to share chips with the Duo...

These (and their 190 siblings) were notorious for broken power jacks. Sometimes you could just resolder them to the logic board, other times they were broken to the point you had to replace them. Either way there's not much further testing to be done without a known-good power board.

ROM dumping is easy if you have a chip programmer (such as the XGECU TL866). You just pull the chip, drop it into the programmer, read it, and put it back in the drive. If you don't have a programmer, don't worry about it. It's mostly an optional tech archeology sort of thing. If your drive...

Looks like our old friend the Miniscribe 8425S. Assuming the disk drive functions, first I'd consider getting a dump of the PROM. The caps appear to be solid, so they should be fine. Don't rotate the interrupter unless, when the drive spins up, the interrupter doesn't move at all. If it...