Finally a Quadra 700

[netfreak]

I've always liked the look of the Quadra 700 and wanted one for years. One came up on ebay last week within Canada and was already hit with a stack of offers and over 10 watchers, but the buy it now price was still far less than any other I've seen so I went nuts and bought it.









Had the original battery in it so I popped that out. Zero leakage. Appears to have 20MB real memory but the vram bank is oddly empty. Original 250MB drive still works but naturally its noisy so I won't be using it. I picked this model specifically to be a permanent A/UX box as my other 040 machines won't run it.

 

[jessenator]

Very nice! I remember seeing that one Nedry uses in Jurassic Park and thinking, "how did they turn a IIci on its side but switch the apple logo?" Oh, 10 year old me's thought process…  :quadra:

Don't they have 512k soldered onto the board?

 

[netfreak]

Very nice! I remember seeing that one Nedry uses in Jurassic Park and thinking, "how did they turn a IIci on its side but switch the apple logo?" Oh, 10 year old me's thought process…  :quadra:

Don't they have 512k soldered onto the board?

Yeah Jurassic Park is also one of the big reasons I wanted the Quadra. It also must have SOME vram since the display works but the whole system is in french so I won't figure it out until I put a new system on there. I've got some spare SIMMs around here too so I can throw more in there I think.

 

[Cory5412]

Nice find!

Q700 has 512k video ram onboard, it's expandable to a total of 2MB. http://www.ralentz.com/old/mac/hardware/dale-adams/video-quad700-900.html

It can do 8BPP (256 colors) at up to 800x600/832x624 with its onboard RAM, or 24-bit ("Millions") up to those resolutions with 2M installed, or up to 1152x870 at 8bpp with the 2M installed.

 

[netfreak]

Nice find!

Q700 has 512k video ram onboard, it's expandable to a total of 2MB. http://www.ralentz.com/old/mac/hardware/dale-adams/video-quad700-900.html

It can do 8BPP (256 colors) at up to 800x600/832x624 with its onboard RAM, or 24-bit ("Millions") up to those resolutions with 2M installed, or up to 1152x870 at 8bpp with the 2M installed.

Yeah I managed to find some old 256K VRAM simms kicking around my pile. It looks like I can do a 1MB config but that page indicates a 1.5MB config is a no go. That'll be good enough for my uses I think.

 

[Unknown_K]

68K Quadra VRAM (they made 256K and 512K I think) are hard to find anymore.

 

[trag]

The VRAM chips are still available, so it should be possible to whip up some SIMMs.   However, folks with stock of the chips still want too much for them, IMO.   There can't be much use left for the old chips.  There are thousands or tens of thousands of them on offer.    You'd think they'd be happy with $1/chip, but they all seem to think they're worth $7 each or something.  

There are some 256K X 16 chips available (good to make 512KB VRAM) on Ebay at 5 per about $18.

I also saw some 256K X 8 chips at a lower price, but since the VRAM SIMMs are 16 bits wide, those don't really help unless you'd just rather use two of them instead of a single 256K X 16 chip.

Prices on Quest Components are well over $5 per chip, but they list thousands of them available and in stock.

I guess to make the Quadra 9/700 VRAM you'd need 128K X 16 or 128K X 8 chips.   I didn't look for those a few days ago.

 

[Unknown_K]

I should have said SIMMs are hard to find not chips.

The 1MB VRAM SIMMS for PCI macs used to be so common and cheap I used to rip off the chips for old VLB era video cards.

 

[netfreak]

I've got a handful of 256K VRAM SIMMs so I've added a couple to the system. Won't be doing a whole lot of graphics heavy stuff anyway.

 

[trag]

I should have said SIMMs are hard to find not chips.

No, you were clear.  I was just pointing out, that when it gets to difficult/expensive to find the VRAM SIMMs, we can make more.  I'm the one who should have been clearer.

 

[Unknown_K]

People  don't want to recap boards you think they want to start making SIMMs?

I don't know how many you would need to make to get profitable or if there is a big enough market for that. Some people will design them themselves and maybe give the data to others to support the community I guess.

 

[trag]

I agree.  It is generally not worth the trouble, but doable.  The materials cost isn't too bad with services like Seed Studio available now.  The sweat cost is high, though.

 

[LaPorta]

Someday it might be worth it. It’s like WWII airplanes: once they got rare enough, it became worth it to make expensive parts for them. We simply are not there yet.

 

[netfreak]

I've succeeded in my plan to install A/UX 3.1.1 on the system. I went with a SCSI2SD after failing to get any of my 68 or 80 pin SCSI drives to be recognized using adapters. I've also found that despite having added another 512K worth of VRAM the system still doesn't offer me any higher monitor resolution, and I'm still at 256 colors. I'm using a VGA adapter without the switches so maybe I need to manually dial it in.

I think I'll also dump 64MB RAM in there too.

EDIT: ok yeah I dialed my Griffin VGA adapter to the higher resolution and it seems to work that way. The OS is too old to deal with my switchless adapter.

 

[netfreak]

Things are happening... I ordered more RAM for it too.

 

[nglevin]

I never did play around with A/UX much to see Commando, the Mac-friendly way to interact with a UNIX shell. Instead I did the dummo thing of trying to run as many Mac apps as I could, which sort of misses the point of what it's good at.

Did you put Bash on there? 

 

[netfreak]

I never did play around with A/UX much to see Commando, the Mac-friendly way to interact with a UNIX shell. Instead I did the dummo thing of trying to run as many Mac apps as I could, which sort of misses the point of what it's good at.

Did you put Bash on there? 

Yep there is a pre-compiled bash on a jagubox mirror, and I've also grabbed a bunch of other stuff such as gcc 2.7.2. The first time I ran A/UX back in 2001 I also didn't do much UNIX with it but I've got plenty of better Macs for doing Mac stuff so this machine can just be my retro UNIX workstation. I'll probably fail miserably to get anything interesting compiled but I'm planning to spend a good amount of time on this project. I'm also putting together a complete noob guide: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Newbie_Guide_To_A/UX_(Apple_UNIX)