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FWIW, the user requested we hide his post because he now believes the whole thing may have simply been an electrical problem caused by repositioning the wire harness when swapping the original "real" hard drive for a SCSI2SD. Hopefully they'll be able to determine this for certain and will update.

If at least one of the two macs has Gigabit ethernet then it supports auto-MDX, IE, no crossover cable needed. Looking at the specs both the iMac and the eMac were 10/100. Now there *are* 10/100 ethernet MACs (Media Access Controllers, not "macintoshes") that also support auto-MDX; I seem to...

Not an iMac, but I did (technically still do, I should see if it still works) have a B&W G3 that came with a 400Mhz G3; I swapped straight over a 400Mhz G4 ZIF card (I could have messed with the jumpers to try to make it go faster, but as I said, 500mhz probably would have been the hard limit)...

Yes. So here’s the long and short of it: the first couple versions of the G4 (7400, 7410) were pin compatible with the ‘original’ G3, the 750. (750 with no letters after the number.) This means you can literally just desolder the 750 and drop in a 7410; presumably you‘ll also want to tweak the...

I also vaguely recall reading they replaced a few routines in the 64k ROM that were “tight but slow” with versions that consumed a little more memory but were faster, but I certainly can’t point to anything specific off the top of my head.

Just as a point to chew over, I would say there's one reason why vintage Macs are probably a less prime target for an FPGA-based upgrade or replica than, say, the Amiga: the Macintosh was never a very "hardware dependent" platform. From the very beginning the Mac was structured around...

Just to be clear, that C to VHDL thing can't magically translate all/arbitrary C code into Verilog. It's designed to allow an FPGA to accelerate software algorithms which would benefit from the sort of "parallel-ality" that it can provide. (Think of like the sort of matrix operations Altivec was...

I had a Microtek Scanmaker E3, which was the budget color model around 1997 or so, and it was decent. Microtek made a lot of different SCSI models, but be careful if you shop eBay because they did sometimes make SCSI and PC parallel port models with dangerously similar names. Anyway, I fondly...

No, not really. An FPGA that has a PowerPC core wedged into it (which, FWIW, was a thing ten years ago but it doesn't look to me like they sell it anymore) could certainly be used to create essentially the equivalent of an Apple PowerPC upgrade card "easily enough". IE, again, you'd essentially...

It was the "NTX" that was the high-end one. There was also a brain-damaged IISC that lacked a real imaging image, it took a bitmap over SCSI. (Which, ironically, might mean it was faster than the higher spec ones if your computer was enough faster to make up for it.) Nope, it'd just make it...

It's kind of shocking today just how slow those early Postscript printers with 68000 CPUs were. You really want to have a good time, try sending a Postscript page to an HP LaserJet II with a Postscript language cartridge in it. (CPU's just a little over half the speed of the IINT's.)

I spent some time digging around for that thread, to no avail. Apparently I'm just not good with the search engine terms today. Anyway, FWIW, my vague memory of the takeaway from that discussion was that the architecture of the 24 bit versions of these cards (the 3MB RAM models) is essentially...

… re: that suggestion of somehow doing instruction translation with an FPGA but then having some other CPU behind there to execute the resulting “micro-ops” that doesn’t sound to me like it’d fly at all. (Or at least be worth it.) The 680x0 is a CISC CPU with an extremely complicated ISA (maybe...

The “Apollo Core” used by the FPGA-based “Vampire” Accelerators for Amiga computers claims to perform at around the equivalent of a 500 MHz 68040, and about the only feature I believe it’s lacking is a full MMU. The 68040 was a big complex chip in 1991 but 30 years of silicon advancement is a...

As noted, the big issue with an upgrade board is the bus is completely, irrevocably different between the 970 and G4. To make it work you'd have to invest in developing an entirely new bus translator chip (essentially a substitute for the CPC925 or CPC945 northbridge chips Apple used in the...

Look up the history of the various abortive PowerPC "Amiga" projects, like the X1000 and X5000. If you're willing to pile up a lot of money and set it on fire it is certainly possible to source "modern" PowerPC processors and package them on new motherboards. The end result will be a square of...

I'd be pretty surprised if you don't own an Apple IIe 80 column card if you own a IIe; if your IIe has 128k then it has one, and 64k IIe's are... pretty rare? I mean, I guess I'm not the one to ask but I think maybe I've seen one un-enhanced IIe in the flesh and even it had the "un-extended" 80...

I'm not entirely sure you can put those Videx cards in a IIe, I think the IIe's ROM natively emulates the same BIOS hooks they use for their own 80 column mode. (Which on a hardware level is implemented completely differently.) The "right" thing to have sitting on top of this would be a green...

If you feel like sharing the schematic once it's complete I wouldn't mind staring at it for a few minutes and making a wild guess what the registered one might do. As for the non-registered one, you might want to consider using one of those "bitbang it with an arduino" methods to at least get...

My vague recollection is that either a firmware update or a change to the "New World" soft-rom file broke the floppy drive hack a year or two after the iMac came out; said firmware update was supposedly non-negotiable for one of the OS 9 upgrades? Don't take this as gospel, it's a *very vague*...