A couple modded Color Classics

[Franklinstein]

I bought a Takky'd Color Classic earlier this week and today it arrived in the mail. I haven't played with it yet because yesterday I bought a Takky'd Color Classic II that has been taking most of my attention today.

The first one apparently is dead and for some reason has a Quadra 630 board, which really isn't worth the trouble of Takkying a CC because a 475 would be the same or better. Maybe they were planning on a future upgrade? Either way I'll have it running in Power Color Classic guise by the time I'm done with it.

The second is a Color Classic II that was sitting in the junk section of a recycle shop, which I of course had to buy. The total of its mods include Takky with a late version 100MHz 53xx logic board and the trace-cut hi-res. For some reason the previous owner decided to use a SCSI hard drive internally, so the first thing I did was pull the SCSI cable and install a lengthened ATA cable for using a standard (and readily available) ATA hard disk. I also cleaned up some of the mod work and added a L2 cache, cleaned out the floppy drive (which was filled with plastic shavings from the original mod work), and installed a 4GB HD; I didn't see the need for anything bigger at this time. It now works, but the display needs more adjustment thanks to the hi-res mod. It's a Rev. D analog board so it would be difficult to use the mod listed in this forum, but I may compare components when I ultimately re-cap the analog board.

I may switch the badge of this CC II with a stock CC, then put a CC II board in the newly rebadged unit. Because of its rarity I don't like when people mod the CC II.

 

[Byrd]

Crazy that you have found not one, but two modified CCs in a week!  They are quite useful in 'PPC guise and I imagine popular machines to modify in Japan due to their small size and I assume small buildings they were used in.  Being a hack, it can either be done very well or poorly just to get it running, so no surprises you are finding some odd hardware inside (and hardware choices - I though you needed to make up a voltage regulator to get 5x00 and 6x00 boards running, so perhaps a Quadra 630 board was the easiest and cheapest upgrade at the time).

I've a CC with a 6500 board and G3 L2 upgrade, and VGA mod.  Done well, but has some oddities mainly revolving around power usage.  I'm going to strip it down one day, double check it over and choose some low power choices.

 

[CC_333]

I though you needed to make up a voltage regulator to get 5x00 and 6x00 boards running

I think that's just to get the 3.3V needed for the PCI slots, and some 5xxx and 6xxx models roll their own (I can't recall which ones).

c

 

[Franklinstein]

I bought the one on Yahoo! Auctions because it was relatively cheap and already hacked up, so I didn't have to ruin one of my existing ones to experiment with the Power Color Classic mods. The other was just a lucky find at about 1/3 of the price and would have been silly to pass up. If I decide to sell one in full working order it would apparently fetch a good sum at auction. I don't expect the crazy $1k+ that some of these eBay people want for theirs, but it seems $500 would be easy.

The 54/64xx and 6360 boards require the external 3.3v regulator, but the 55/65xx boards don't (it's built into the boards on these). 52/53xx boards don't need it either but they're the slower non-PCI units.

Usually the hi-res/VGA mods result in odd screen behavior. The two that I have both do different things: one needed the capacitor installed to get the width down to within the viewable area, while the other has sort of a notch at the top right that I can't tune out. Maybe recapping and/or upgrading choice components on both of them would reduce or eliminate the problems but these are both Rev. C or later analog boards, thus different than the earlier boards identified in the mod thread in the Compacts section.

These things were quite popular in Japan, most likely for the aforementioned reasons. There's a seller on Yahoo! right now that's buying these up, stripping the internals, and installing a Mac Mini with an LCD in their place. The final product is in the $400~500 range and apparently they sell pretty well. The only good thing about this seller doing this is that they turn around and sell the old internals starting at about $10 (with free shipping, no less), and I've bought a couple sets of guts to repair or restore a few CCs.

 

[techknight]

Nice. I keep a spare CRT around just for these reasons. 

 

[Franklinstein]

I think I'm done with these for now:

On one I built a 2A@3.3v regulator into the harness. Not my prettiest work, but it's small and unobtrusive and gets the job done. I also cleaned up the various harness cables so it wasn't such a mess and also to improve air flow. It is sitting with a 160MHz Alchemy board with 128MB RAM and a nice double-partitioned (for 7.6.1 and 8.5.1) ATA Fireball hard drive. The floppy drive has been reconditioned and had the mushy orange ejector gear replaced. A nice little unit, responsive and capable of pretty much anything you'd want to use with a ~9" 640x480 screen.

The other I tried to install a 225MHz Gazelle board into (without a 3.3v regulator, because it supposedly has one built in to the board), but for some reason it won't play nice with the ATA hard drive. Maybe it actually needs the 3.3v regulator? Every other board I tried in this machine works with the hard drive (and this board works with ATA drives in other chassis), so I just dropped in a 120MHz 53xx board with 64MB RAM and called it good. Its floppy drive was also reconditioned and the harness cables cleaned up. It works well enough, though it would be nice if the stupid L2 cache would work. It's also running a double-partitioned hard drive with 7.6.1 and 8.5.1.

I bought an IDE-to-CF adapter to use with one of these but discovered that I don't have any free CF cards. Since I'm only using HFS formatting for maximum software compatibility I didn't really see the use for a huge hard drive anyway. Maybe one day I'll switch it out or instead get an IDE-to-SD adapter; I have stacks of SD cards but the adapters are 2x more expensive.