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I was buying stuff from Japan a while back and threw in a cheap Radeon 9000 Pro AGP card. My half-baked plan was to steal its 3.3ns RAM and try to build the world's fastest Radeon 8500. I'm not up for that tedious (and probably pointless) of a project right now, but I wanted to do something with...

I just picked up a Sonnet Crescendo G3 300/1M on eBay because it was cheap enough and seemed like it would be fun to play with. This is the "big" card that Sonnet also used for G4 upgrades, vs. the smaller design that appears to have been for G3s only. I noticed that the G4 version has two...

I wanted to play with some of the last/fastest classic Mac OS-compatible PCI video cards, so I managed to find a pair of Radeon 9250s. I feel like these used to be plentiful and cheap, but they seem to have gotten much rarer and more expensive. Of course, because I'm looking for projects, I only...

I had an idea about two weeks ago: I have a lot of ideas; not all of them are good, and not all of them get seen through, but this one seemed good enough, and was pretty simple to implement, so here we go: It's a potentiometer-adjustable silicon oscillator that fits in the common half-size...

Based on the asking prices for them on eBay and elsewhere, everyone apparently loves the NVIDIA Geforce4 Ti 4600. Asking prices are not necessarily selling prices, but if you want a working one of those cards, you'll likely still end up paying a few hundred dollars. I get it, it's the fastest...

I recapped a pair of Quicksilver G4 power supplies recently. Just the secondary side; everything south of the transformers. I left the rest alone. Unsurprisingly, some of the TEAPOs were bulging, but didn't appear to have started leaking yet. So far, the recap seems to have really helped the...

I have a few G4 chips I'm trying to find the limits of, so I'm trying to come up with a good stress test, either in OS 9 or X, to confirm that they're stable. Does anyone have a go-to method for this? Maybe a long code compile, encoding a large video, or looping a benchmark utility?

Specifically, I'm looking for the "DVI" model, A1001 (EMC 1913), M8591LL/A or M8592LL/A. These have the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 GPU. I happened across a PCI card with this chip on it, and I'd like to see whether I can flash it from PC to Mac, so I'm looking for the video ROM from the...

...besides salvaging one from the logic board of a Y2K iMac? I am very skeptical of what I am seeing on eBay and UTSOURCE. Seems like these parts would be trivially easy to re-mark.

Following this post, I decided to start a separate thread about this specific phenomenon to try to understand what's going on. Here's what's happening: The machine boots to a flashing question mark, then quickly switches to a happy Mac, then back to a flashing question mark, where it sits...

I thought I got a good deal on a Quicksilver logic board on eBay, but it was DOA. Upon further inspection, I spotted these gouges in the substrate of what I believe is the KeyLargo chip, the smaller BGA on the back side of the board, near the PCI slots. The damage is in the lower right corner...

tl;dr: Remove R95 and install R94 (10k ohm 0603) to configure the PSX chip for 50MHz operation. Full story: I picked up one of my dream Macs a couple of weeks ago, a 5400/200. I met up with @dv- at Free Geek Twin Cities to collect it and return his battery-bombed Q650 motherboard I repaired...

I know these machines aren't universally loved, but I credit the 5400 for my interest in beige all-in-one Macs, and possibly Macs at all. My junior high school had them in the shop classroom for learning 2D CAD, and I remember thinking that they were so much better than the Dell my parents had...

I've been working on converting one of my SEs from CRT to LCD. It all started with picking up one of @retro apple mods' excellent kits on Etsy, but that's only part of the equation. The other parts are how to power the system without the original analog board, and how to convert the monochrome...

I was daydreaming a bit this morning and wondered how Apple implemented the software controlled screen brightness on the Mac Classic, so I had a look at the Bomarc schematic. It shows the "PBL" (Programmable Brightness Level) signal originating from BBU pin 49 through a 47ohm resistor, then...

Does anyone have a source for the black plastic push pins that hold the white plastic sheet on the back of the analog board? Somehow I'm short a few. Seems like a generic part that may not be Apple-specific, but I'm not sure where to look.

After bending a few pins by using a DIP puller to remove PGA 68030s from sockets (I know, I know) I decided I needed a better tool. I thought I'd have to design one myself, but I found this 68040 puller tool by jessenator on Thingiverse. I was able to scale it down to 68030 size, and it works...

Like most people it seems, at least in the US, I used the HWS4514 socket from Phoenix Enterprises for the 68030 on my Reloaded board, because it's under $5 with no minimum order quantity. I have to say, though, I'm not very satisfied with it. The force required to insert and remove the CPU in...

I know that there are adapters that allow a card designed for a IIci cache slot to plug into the PDS on an SE/30, and the IIci has the Apple 32KB cache card and various aftermarket 64KB and 128KB cards as options. So, why has nobody made an SE/30 cache card? Does the SE/30 lack something that...

I know this isn't unique to compact Macs because early Mac IIs also used GLUE, but I'm putting it in the Compact Mac subforum because it's related to my SE/30 reloaded build. My reloaded board isn't working; no bong, no video. In my troubleshooting so far, I've confirmed that the reset circuit...