I was very happy with my Power Computing clone. I went from a Quadra 660AV to a Power Center 150. These two machines got me through engineering school!
@BollingHolt
Жыл бұрын
That's so cool. I didn't know that Motorola had a branded clone. I kind of liked the design of some of those mid-90s Mac clones. I never had one, but I had one friend who had a clone. Being a PC guy, it was bizarre to me seeing one! Ah, I love the aesthetics of System 7... Probably my favorite out of all of them. Great video!
@Toonrick12
Жыл бұрын
It makes sense, Motorola did help make the PowerPC CPU with Apple.
@ericwood3709
Жыл бұрын
Yep, System 7 was top-notch for interface. Just a shame it lacked preemptive multitasking and protected memory! It could have been the one OS to rule them all.
@michaelmullett7327
Жыл бұрын
I got me a StarMax 3000/200 MT and went through the same thing you did but I am so glad you tried the updated tool kit for the CD-ROM Drive that helped me recognize my Kenwood Drive so now all is well and I updated my OS to 9.1!
@VicTheVicar
Жыл бұрын
Dang! a Mac84 video released on a Friday night! This is going to be a pretty wild pre-party 🥳🍻
@toddholcomb1
Жыл бұрын
Great video - Action Retro's got some competition! 😀
@ToddsNerdCave
Жыл бұрын
I briefly had a UMAX clone back in 97 or so. I believe it was one of the C600 series. Neat machines!
@fsfs555
Жыл бұрын
Nice. You got one with the 4MB SGRAM video DIMM. Those are hard to find. The Tanzania-based clones were probably the most prolific since they were LPX-based boards that any licensee could CTO from Apple with either a 40 or 50MHz bus and a 603 or 604 CPU and then slap into a generic LPX PC case. There were only a handful of differences among the various models but the big one here is that 5-slot riser card. The PSX chip nominally supports 3 PCI slots so for the extras, that DEC PCI-PCI bridge chip is used. Sadly, there are bugs that prevent some devices from working behind a PCI bridge in this era of Macs, so they were often troublesome. Some, such as the big UMAX and PowerComputing models (which also used a PCI-PCI bridge), would work properly with a later version of MacOS (usually OS 8 or later), but the PSX-based machines (including Gazelle models) were finicky about PCI bridges regardless of OS.
@cheesetoast99
Жыл бұрын
I had a starmax 3000/180 603e. Was a great machine. Had to get rid of it because Voodoo2 cards wouldn't work in it. Some sort of incompatibility with the PCI riser card. I had sold my LC 575 and bought the starmax for almost the same amount I got for the LC 575.
@kenfagerdotcom
Жыл бұрын
Great teardown in this video. I peeked inside mine, but didn't do anything yet to upgrade it.
@minty_Joe
Жыл бұрын
Gerd jorb, Steve! Now see if you can max out the hardware to its limits with CPU upgrades, RAM, HDD, etc. EEP!
@Mac84
Жыл бұрын
Haha thanks, I will certainly see how much punishment I... err... the system, is willing to take!
@minty_Joe
Жыл бұрын
@@Mac84 Great to hear!
@derek20la
Жыл бұрын
Collaboration with Action Retro
@minty_Joe
Жыл бұрын
@@derek20la I hope that includes white board guy...
@FrankConforti
Жыл бұрын
One add to my long comment… In the 1980s I wrote several articles in Mac User Magazine and CAD/CAM for Professionals magazine. I did reviews on Mac engineering software in the day… and I wrote it all on either my Mac 128/512 or my Mac II. Yup, I made pocket money on the side using these sweet systems. Oh, and wrote books on CAD (Bentley Systems MicroStation) written entirely on Macs… By the time I got to my third book I was getting free hardware but I can’t talk about that. Let’s just say, I’ve been to Cupertino a few times ;)
@JapanPop
Жыл бұрын
These are so bizarre!😂 That InWin case…I built a 5x86 in one of those ATX cases. The sliding motherboard tray was always appreciated on my builds.
@PgWsLRoiEeyZFdXRWGMPNyiFrWpmSo
Жыл бұрын
The dead battery you took out is rated 4.5V, so a 3V 2032 might not be sufficient. If the PRAM battery isn’t supplying enough voltage I could see it having trouble remembering which startup disk to boot from, which would be why the CD never booted.
@Mac84
Жыл бұрын
Yes, I mention this in the video. It remembers the startup disks, the CD image was not bootable and was probably not ripped correctly. The other Power Macs I have with the same battery all work fine with their 3V replacements. Heck, I had one work where the battery only had 1.5 volts left!
@ericwood3709
Жыл бұрын
I drooled over the StarMax towers in the catalogs back in the day. I was stuck with a Performa 6214CD with a pitiful 75 MHz 603 processor. That thing seriously felt slower than a 68k to me at times.
@msthalamus2172
Жыл бұрын
I ran into a lot of issues with recordable media and older CD drives, but I finally found a solution. What I've found to always work is to buy media specifically labelled as "Music CD-Rs". These are manufactured to work in all CD players, including ones that came out 40 years ago. In my experience, using these and burning at the media's slowest setting creates discs that even my 72x Kenwood True-X is always happy with. The specific media I've been using is Maxell CD-R Music Media 625156. They're still available on Amazon! :)
@uzimonkey
Жыл бұрын
To get those wraparound cases off I used to get the short leg of a PCI slot cover (pick a sturdy one) between the case and cover at the back and use it to pry it back in several places. Even the most stuck cases would pop right open like that.
@SuperPowerBrosTV
Жыл бұрын
Really cool demo, never heard of these. Thanks!
@Claes_Isacson
11 ай бұрын
Nice one Steve! 👏
@john_ace
Жыл бұрын
The Rage II can run 3D games. ATI had a pretty good RAVE implementation and most QD3D RAVE games were directly geared towards ATI HW. Nanosaur and Weekend Warrior are most likely going to work well. Quake will most likely be a bit slow in 640x480. Unreal ist most likely too new for the Rage II.
@gkhaled1
Жыл бұрын
My first mac was a starmax 3000. I still have it along with the original restore CD and printed user guide. I still have the original box too lol. The computer is at my parents house on the other side of the planet. Next time I visit I will image the CD and upload it to the Macintosh garden. Mine came with an IDE hard drive, it was a cost cutting measure. I recall Macs of the time had SCSI drives instead.
@Mac84
Жыл бұрын
Wow, awesome! Glad you still have yours, they are pretty cool systems. Thank you kindly for offering to upload the disc ❤️
@keithyakouboff8755
2 ай бұрын
Love your vids bro. Another YTer did one about a DayStar clone with FOUR 604es, that could also run BeOS. I love this stuff. I wish I had more money and time, just to see what could be done today.
@Mac84
2 ай бұрын
Thanks! Yes, Colin and Sean are good friends - I’m glad to see others tinkering around with this crazy stuff. I’m also thankful I got 90% of this old junk before anyone thought it was valuable 😅
@keithyakouboff8755
2 ай бұрын
@@Mac84 Me too :)
@Ragnar8504
Жыл бұрын
I loved the idea of these when I was a kid and barely getting into computers because they looked so unassuming, like bland, boring PCs, but worked more or less like a proper Mac. Years later I even toyed with the idea of modding something like a Performa 475's guts into an early-90s PC desktop case but eventually gave up. Too much metal fabrication involved for teenage me to make it work. I also felt slightly guilty about taking a saw or angle grinder to a poor 486, generic case or not. I actually own a two-button ADB mouse and all the right mouse button does in 7.x is highlight file names in Finder like a long click if I remember correctly. I'm not sure I've ever tried plugging it into my G3 running 8.x or 9.x but if I find it somewhere it might be interesting. Probably won't work though. I had a two-button USB mouse throughout most of my 8.x/9.x time but that came with Logitech drivers, which might have had something to do with the right mouse button working as expected. The connector style on the power supply is known as an AT connector but this most definitely isn't a standard AT power supply. ATs only had one row of pins instead of two and never supported soft power-on, they either had a built-in switch in the power supply or a dangling one on a short bit of cable to be installed behind the front panel of the PC case. Apple loved custom power supplies, some quite sleek, like in the pizza boxes, others massive but most of them very proprietary designs, down to using the oddest capacitor values inside from what I've heard. Apple didn't make those but had them custom-made by companies like Sony. One German computer retailer, possibly Gravis, sold off NOS clones dirt-cheap as late as the early 2000s and I was severely tempted to get one but in the end never did. I faintly seem to remember they were Motorolas, older ones, somewhere around 150 MHz or less but that was 20 years ago. Gravis even offered their own brand of Mac clones, the Gravision series.
@abx42
Жыл бұрын
I've definitely had days like that!!!
@ActionRetro
Жыл бұрын
Hey now, everything's easy when you're cheesy
@mlthmp
Жыл бұрын
Thats a hell of a machine. I'd love one of those
@abx42
Жыл бұрын
Have you tried sacrificing a goat and offering the blood to the computer??? Sometimes that works for me 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@RetroTechIIfx
Жыл бұрын
I've only owned 1 clone - the Radius 81/110, analog of the PM8100. The build quality of the 81/110 was actually better than the actual 8100. Would like to get a PCI clone someday just to have both sides of the oddity that was Mac Clones. The case bezel on the StarMax line looks like a vauge cross between 1994-5 Dell and Micron.
@schnuder
Жыл бұрын
What is the slot at the bottom of the motherboard next to the video memory?
@fsfs555
Жыл бұрын
GIMO. It's a video passthrough primarily intended for use with the PC Compatibility Card.
@PetarsPlace
Жыл бұрын
I wonder if the StarMax CD was like the original Apple CDROM Drive cd, where they actually recorded the hard drive volume clusters to the cdrom format. It was quite a weird way to make bootable mac CDs that seems to be only supported by very early versions of cd mastering software like Astarte Toast 1.x series. It's a neat trick though and that's how I used to boot some of my macs before I got a zip drive. Just used that cd in a drive and most every mac booted right from it since it was "special"
@dennisud
Жыл бұрын
As I have said before, I have a 1/2 dozen old CD-Video games (Doom, Quake, etc ...) and was wondering which of the early to Mid 90's Mac based computers Could be used? These games insist to stay in the CD player as the games is used. Thanks for any help.
@LastAirshipGames
Жыл бұрын
Thanks dude
@AnonymousFreakYT
Жыл бұрын
CyberDog! Wow!
@halfsourlizard9319
11 ай бұрын
How the hell did Apple do such poor research that they didn't realise that their computers were priced above what competitors could do profitably!? Wouldn't have taken a genius to work that out.
@davidboda1640
8 ай бұрын
Clarisworks omg
@oidpolar6302
10 ай бұрын
What about macosx on this?
@Mac84
10 ай бұрын
It's technically possible, but I've ran Mac OS X 10.1 on a 300MHz 604e and it was painfully slow. Comparing it to a 333MHz G3 was night and day.
@ToTheGAMES
Жыл бұрын
Sean just lets white board guy do all the difficult/tedious stuff.
@erichkohl9317
Жыл бұрын
Always nice to see an old Mac freshened up, even if it's a wanna-be-Mac. ;-)
@redleader6442
Жыл бұрын
5:06 That was literally less than 6 seconds worth of a foreshadow. You really ought to stop jinxing yourself, Steve. Don't even mention fingernails next time. lol
@Mac84
Жыл бұрын
It was probably more like 50 minutes while filming it!
@redleader6442
Жыл бұрын
@@Mac84 Oh fair enough. Still, it was easy to guess that you were going to hurt your fingernail right after mentioning the possibility of it. That's the one reason I like working on Apple's ABS cases. Brittle, sure, but I almost never hurt my hands opening them.
@minty_Joe
Жыл бұрын
Why is there a number 4 in the shadows? That's a poor way to treat a number! Hahahaha!!!
@redleader6442
Жыл бұрын
@@minty_Joe Smartass. Lmao
@redleader6442
Жыл бұрын
@@minty_Joe At least it isn't 9. 7 8 9, after all. 4 can keep to the shadows. It's safer there.
@SeñorDossierOficial
Жыл бұрын
i can see traces of your blood all over the computer 😱😱
@tommyontrip
Жыл бұрын
Fun to see again. I had a Power Computing tower in those days, and also played with BeOS on it 🙂 The computer is gone now though, I threw it out during one of my many many house moves.
@bentboybbz
Жыл бұрын
À
@memadmax69
Жыл бұрын
This was the only time that apple made a really good move but like the dog that got the bone didn't know what to do with it. For starters: You turn macos into the same pay model as windows. Let it be free and run on anything and charge $100/pop per license. Open up the mac and make it upgradeable and everything else just like the PC, set the mac FREE... But no.... apple acts like I dont like you so therefore I wont compete with you....
@5th_SS_re-enactor2003
Жыл бұрын
Your videos are truly entertaining and underrated, love your videos!
@MrKsoft
Жыл бұрын
I like how unassuming the Mac clones are. I have a StarMax 4000/160 (Tanzania I board), but it only boots when the CUDA reset button is pressed - even with a fresh battery. I've never been able to figure out how to fix it.
@PetarsPlace
Жыл бұрын
Your trials and tribulations related to bootstrapping the machines rivals my adventures. Great information and neat to see the clones that I don't have in my collection. Mine are all PowerComputing so far. Love your videos.
@I_am_Allan
Жыл бұрын
Steve, if ya ain't bleeding after touching a computer case built in the 1990s and early 2000s ... you're doing something wrong. I'm glad they use heavier steel (mostly), now a days.
@purplepioneer5644
8 ай бұрын
Believe me, the cheap cases you can buy for $20 and stuff, hell even some $50 cases are still razor blades. I know from experience.
@mjrhondaguy
5 ай бұрын
I had this exact same machine back in the day and LOVED it. It was the last Mac OS device I ever purchased...was completely done with Apple products after they killed the clones.
@RetroReviewYT
Жыл бұрын
The max Ram you can put in these later clones is 160 MB
Ah! The BlueSCSI(cables) that every one is talking about!
@kirishima638
Жыл бұрын
I had a Radius clone back in the day. Far superior to the PowerMac of the same spec and built like a tank. Wish I still had it.
@EricsEdgeVideos
Жыл бұрын
Why would have allowing clone sales just a few years earlier have made it smoother for Apple?
@Mac84
Жыл бұрын
Apple was healthier in 1990. Their eventual decision to license the Mac OS in 1994 came from their poor financial health and the threat of Windows 95, leading to some questionable decisions being made. Former Apple CEO Michael Spindler had previously squashed any licensing attempts... only to eventually support the plan as a last resort. I believe that if they licensed the Mac OS sooner, or ported it to Intel processors, they may have been more successful in selling more Macs and creating strong partnerships with these Clone manufacturers. But then again, who knows what could have happened!
@brianarmstrong234
Жыл бұрын
The idea was that the lower cost clones would attract people who were turned away from Macs based on price. Which was hoped to have the affect of increasing the marketshare of Mac OS compared to Windows. This line of reasoning could have worked through the mid to late 80's but by the time the mid 90s had rolled around, platform lock-in and network effects had started to take hold. Many had started making computer buying decisions based on 3rd party software availability in addition to price. So the effect of the clones was giving existing Mac users a way of acquiring cheaper hardware to run Mac OS. Honestly the licensing. should have been done on a sort of sliding scale. Low cost machines would have paid a lower license fee for the OS where as higher end machines would have paid a much higher fee for Mac OS.
@kirishima638
Жыл бұрын
@@Mac84 I don’t think it would have worked earlier either. Cloners making better macs in 1990 and stealing Apple’s own market would have just lead to earlier bankruptcy. The Microsoft licensing model only worked for software running on commodity hardware built to an open standard. Apple needed to build a better product, not license their product for someone else to sell.
@minty_Joe
Жыл бұрын
"Apple Confidential 2.0" by Owen D. Linzmayer pretty much explains it all. Well worth the read on Apple's history up to 2004.
@Mac84
Жыл бұрын
We'll never know, but the Mac OS had a strong GUI advantage in 1990 that quickly eroded away a few short years later with Windows 3.1 (1992) and Windows 95 (1995). If Apple did license the OS (with some restrictions*) they may have been successful... or at least more successful. Or they may have just gone out of business and never even jumped to the PowerPC platform! *About those restrictions: At the end of the clone program Apple continued to license Mac OS 8 under certain conditions. This included ensuring that the remaining companies (like UMAX) sold lower-end systems that didn't challenge Apple's highest end offerings. This may have been a better way to let the two offerings coexist... but who knows if that would have worked out for the better. The AIM alliance and subsequent standards being built around PowerPC systems (CHRP) could have provided a standard where PowerPC systems from IBM, Motorola, Apple, etc. could all boot the Mac OS and other operating systems. The first Mac clones shipped in 1995, just when Windows 95 hit the market. Intel PCs with Windows 95 was deemed "good enough" by most businesses so the appeal of an easier system (the Mac) was lessened. Plus, most PC manufacturers had to pay Microsoft a Windows license ...even if their PCs shipped without an OS or with the Mac OS! (this would later land Microsoft in legal trouble) So when Apple approached PC makers about selling Mac clones, and paying an extra licensing fee for the Mac OS, you can see why there was little adoption. It may not have worked out either way, but if Apple was earlier they may have fared better.
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