UPDATE: someone told me how to get FPS to display on Doom II for Mac and on the 6100-80 it averages around 30fps. To get FPS to display on Doom II just change screen size and then change it back. + or - on the keyboard. UPDATE 2: turns out that I was wrong that the outer pins on the Pentium overdrive are all power and ground. There are some pins related to cache out there too.
Holy cow, this is such a great video! I'm not saying this in hyperbole or just to be nice... I honestly think you're making some of the best vintage computer videos right now. Historical context rooted in first-hand experience from the era, just the right amount of "what if" wonderings, benchmarks, upgrades, cameos, fun editing and a killer closing animation... this has it all!
I suggest testing Quadra 840 AV with 8.1. and Photoshop 3.0 or 4.01 and DSP in action against PM 6100/66 or 80 with 8.6 or even 9.1 (already very much with PPC code). From what I've read, things like Appearance, Apple Guide, AppleScript, AppleShare/File Sharing Extensions, Contextual Menu Extension, QuickTime 3.0, Sound Manager, Video Startup (use in AV macs), Apple Menu Options and Control Strip and Date & Time were never rewritten to PPC code and until the end in Mac OS Cassic were as 68k code
Also... your scenario theorizing about what family computer to buy? That was EXACTLY the situation my dad was in, in 1994. He had to replace our aging Amiga500 and a family friend steered him to the Mac. I didn't know anything about Mac then, and was way too young to contribute anyways, but the friend helped him land on an LC630. It was wildly exciting for me at the time, but buying into a dying chip platform meant that I had a narrower and narrower library of apps and games to run... I looked at my friend's 7100 (purchased around the same time) in envy. Even if it was slow, it still RAN the new games when my old 630 simply couldn't... and there seemed to be better upgrade options for the first PowerPC Macs to extend their life. I LOVE my 630 now, but late-90s me resented the choice.
I had a very similar experience with a Q610 that my parents purchased instead of shelling out the extra money for a 6100. There were a few games that came out that my Q610 couldn't run and it made teenage me feel like we had made a bad choice, but I didn't consider the extensive back catalog of software our Q610 could run like a champ and could be purchased really inexpensively used. I still have fond memories of that Q610.
Working in the UNH computer lab, I found that people were pushing the power button on the 6100 thinking it was a floppy eject button... sadly had my students lose everything they were working on a few times. Rough.
This is a phenomenal video! It has.. serious production quality in a way that a Netflix documentary would have. Historical context, explanations, "what-ifs", etc; just like others have said I'll echo it too: Bravo. - Mark
Apple was quick to release updates for their OS that sped up the emulation layer (way before Mac OS 8), they also gradually made more parts of the OS PPC native, that helped as well. Love the video BTW!
When I was in High School, I had a friend who's brother worked for Apple. I remember being over at his place the day his brother bought home a prototype 6100.. it was pretty awesomely fast :D
Very good video covering a total blind spot in my mac knowledge that everyone seems to be familiar with already and will not go out of their way to showcase like you just brilliantly did!
Great video. All I know is that I picked up a 475 at discount in fall of 94, for under $600 brand new at retail. I used it until the spring of 1996, and upgraded to a 7200/75 for the heavily discounted price of under $1000, opting to sell my 475 for nearly $500 still. A $500 upgrade. The performance of that 7200/75 was quite a bit better than the 6100/66, and probably also a bit better than the 7100/80 or 8100/80. For thousands less, just two years after the original PPC machines shipped. It was worth the wait, and the frequent upgrade cadence I went through. Going from a IIsi to the 475 in 94 was a good option at the time, as most software that I used was not even PPC native. Edit: forgot to mention, it's possible now to overclock a 475 to 50Mhz and beyond using just a software control panel and extension. While 50Mhz is a bit more of a challenge, 40Mhz is quite easy. So most people with both a 475 and 6100 in their collection could do their own testing between them.
Thanks! I was watching an old NASA film from the 70s the other day and it had this at the end and I thought it was the perfect thing to learn Final Cut Pro motion graphics for.
Basically I made 1 text element that said gutbomb and rotated it and had it follow a swirly path. Then I copied it 7 times and gave each one a lower opacity. And delayed each one by a few more frames than the last one.
It was never really called TaligentOS, except as a marketing term. Taligent was the name of the project, after it was decided that "Pink" was too informal a name. (later spun off as a company.) It was agreed that both IBM and Apple would create operating system products based on the shared code in Taligent. For Apple, it would be a new version of the Macintosh Operating system. For IBM, it would become their Workplace Operating System. In the end, Workplace OS would only see the light of day as an OS/2 for PowerPC beta, with a Mach microkernel, Taligent middleware, and an OS/2 personality (I have a copy). And Apple's Taligent offering would be severely reduced, as Project Copeland. The Taligent object orientation framework would ultimately be spun off as CommonPoint, to be used in some obscure enterprise middleware deployments in the late 1990s.
Apple did a disservice to the PowerPC processor by making the L2 cache optional in the initial low end PowerPC models, as many PCs at the time included L2 cache as a standard feature. This only served to exasperate system performance when emulating 68K code. Even if it required a slight bump to the initial MSRP, it would have probably improved initial impressions. Though to be fair, the amount of 68k code in the Mac OS was also a huge detriment to the PowerPC systems. No doubt Apple was trying to rush these systems out the door, native code be darned as long as the OS could boot...
The thing was, running the 68k code didn't really slow anything down, it ran at near full speed, BUT the context switch between the two modes was VERY costly and kneecapped it.
@@slightlyevolved I remember testing PM 7100 vs Quadra 650, both with 16 MB Ram and Photoshop 3.0 - Quadra worked better after the debut of PM 7100, then, as the system had more and more PPC code, PM 7100 improved its result.
The issue was the price bump. Those cache RAM chips were very expensive until about a year after the thing shipped. But a big, fast cache would really have helped.
My dad took me to Sears to get one when they came out. "Traded in" a year old Performa 550 for it. Sears had a "if you're ever unhappy forever" return policy back then. Flipped the 6110CD for a 6360 once more before they changed their policy for electronics and then everything else.
When Apple Computer, Inc. introduced their 6100 line of desktop systems, this was almost my first Apple computer. Felt that macintosh at this point, was no longer a toy and a real home computer system but, at this time my bank account was just a little too low. My first system a few years later turned out to be an All-in-One 5400 with a 603 processor which, years later was upgraded with a G3 card. My system also had Apple's internal video capture card system, Apple's internal TV/Radio card system with its matching "black" remote control. Currently, this is still all working in my All-in-One 5500/275. (smile ... smile).
I picked up a 6100 at a goodwill several years ago for 5 bucks, I did the sd scsi upgrade, crystal overclock to 80mhz and then did a G3 cpu upgrade card...its my go to gaming rig for playing vintage Bungie games like Marathon or Pathways
My parents bought a 7100/66 to replace our Mac Plus in 1994. We used that all the way up until 2000/01 when we finally replaced it with a PM G4 sawtooth. We did have a couple PowerBooks in between that time.
Upgrading from an LC II, my 6100/60 8/160 noCD was $1,600 at CompUSA within weeks after launch. I was happy with it. Later I added the 256K cache and the crystal upgrade snapped over the original with 80 and 84 MHz supplied. I ran 80 MHz most of the time so I thought I was right inline with the 8100. I added a fan and removed the back card cover to give it an exhaust outlet. But I think I finally killed it running it at 84 MHz too long and upgraded to the PowerBase 200 for $1K in 1997. 6100's later ended-up being terrific hosts for G3 upgrade cards.
You made an excellent film with very cool modifications of this standard 6100 and DOS card. My story in 1994 is the period of writing my first master's thesis in economics. I had a Quadra 650 computer available (Mac OS 7.1) and as a second option PM 7100 (Mac OS 7.1.2) After doing tests in Ms Word 5.1 (68k) and Photoshop 3.0 (68k PPC versions) I decided to use Quadra 650 to add the work and make drawings and illustrations, because it was better to work on this Quadra then. But in 1995 I got a Power Mac 6200/75 computer from my parents as a gift and this machine was not a good choice (very poor motherboard architecture) and after a year of use I sold it and bought a used PM 6100/66 with DOS card for less money and until 1998 it was my main computer. which I only replaced with the G3 Beige 266 Tower. Today I have the 6100/66 again, but with the G3 250 Mhz card from Sonnet and an additional HPV VIDEO Z PM7100 card. On such a 6100 it works very well, but I prefer to play Marathon :) The PM 6100 is always in my heart as the first very good Power Mac and generally a very solid machine,
when I played DOOM II on my 386SX/25, I had no choice but to play at the smallest reduced play screen possible. I would use my imagination to do what video card graphic DLSS does today, in my head.
The PPC was my favorite CPU arch. I think that if Moto/IBM had not had their infighting with "Altivec" and figured out their high MHz production issues, our current computers would be something quite different. They were more power efficient, faster than x86 clock for clock, were easier to implement SMP (and by extension, would most likely have been successful making into multicore CPUs.) The G5 was an argurable misstep. Also, the 15pin monitor dongle did come with the computers. At least, at the start. I don't know if they kept them until EOL.
Back in the day, my Faculty Head purchased a brand new 6100/60 with DOS card and 32MB of memory. And all the associated dongles. Years later, when they were moving to Windows PCs, I tried to save as many Macs of different types, including some 512k compacts. Sadly I was ill and they were dumped by the new Faculty head who hated me because I happened to know more about his subject than he did.
On the flip side, the 630 could also upgrade to PPC via a card that used the 040 processor to run 68k code. I believe this card had 66 and 100 MHz variants. Think you could give that a try?
I bought a Performa 476 instead for $1000 with keyboard, mouse, and monitor. All from proceeds from writing Macintosh Software on a Macintosh SE. It was brutally tough back then as a poor kid with a pocket full of dreams to sell any software you wrote... impossible even. Pretty much the same today. I sold a couple of licenses to PBS. However, the 476 was one of the best buys I ever made, because I catapulted that 476 into writing a website with Netobjects Fusion to start a computer recycling business that brought thousands of computers home by the pickup truck load. One computer purchase turned into a thousand. I was swimming in computers, including a ton of Macintoshes way way way higher spec than that 476 lol... which... I never even fired up. Because I built my first ethernet network and jumped over to PC, Windows, Linux, etc.
This was my first Mac! I do remember being a bit frustrated that so much of the software I used, including large chunks of the OS, was 68k code running under emulation so I wasn't really using the full power of the chip. And some of it was glitchy as a consequence. I got one of the beige desktop G3s a few years later, and eventually started running the first version of Mac OS X on it. I was trying to buy in a future-proof way--and I was betting on the PowerPC transition happening more quickly than it actually did. If I'd bought the Quadra, I'd have worried about it becoming obsolete quickly. Actually, the situation with the 6100 pretty much persisted through the whole time I was using it as my primary computer, and the 68k machines didn't really become difficult to use until I'd already traded up again. And then Apple completely changed processor architectures again... twice. With similar backward compatibility strategies.
the doom/quake numbers seem about right for a 486 using an ISA video card. Need to overclock the bus speed/cpu or add cache [if that is possible here] to get much more performance.
@GutBombTech You know that back in early days of the Commodore Amiga a developer named Jim Drew made a Mac Emulation card for the A2000 that with an 030 or 040 CPU Amiga would show up as an Macintosh running whatever accelerated even though the CPU was running as the same speed as the eqiuvulate Macintosh. The other thing too about the PowerPC, the PowerPC that Motorola made was slower than the PowerPC that IBM made (both the same version same Mhz).
The 6100 was my first Mac. The only real problem was the poor video resolution 832x624 without Grapic Card (AV Card). A OS with GUI and Low Resulution ... And the 6100AV was not available in Europe. A custom upgrade was very expensive, about 50% of the 6100, compared to a PC video card (1024x768 or so) for 100 or 200 bugs.
Those resolutions seem pretty low by today's standards but I have a 17" CRT on my desk that I use all my retro machines with and 800x600ish is really the sweet spot. Bigger monitors back then were SOOOO expensive compared to now.
I'm curious if the bottleneck for the game benchmarks is the graphics chip on the PC compatibility card or some weird limitation of the PC compatibility setup rather than the CPU.
I used a 6100/60 for years in the 90s. That and a 28.8k modem and a SCSI CD player which required a caddy and drivers. The 6100 reminded of the Chev Cavalier. Nice at first, but then slowly it began to fall apart. First the drive was acting weird, on/off for no reason. There was a spare power plug in the 6100, I plugged that one in, the drive then began to behave. I too updated the CPU using the crystal, it was...ok? Mac claimed it now ran at 80Mhz, but there was no real way to see the difference. The real benefit of course was upgrading the ram. Virtual ram was a time vampire. The nightmare of course was the HDI-45 cable. The sheer weight of this dongle and the cables...gravity eventually pulled the cables down enough to loosen the connectors. So the screen/Mac wouldn't operate. A LOT of duct tape later to HOIST up this mess of cables: it finally sorta did...but if I so much as 'looked' at the 6100 weird, the cable would be an issue. Then the thing which made me realize I need to get rid of this Mac...the Sonnet G3 233mhz accelerator card. Being the idiot I was...I thought "Get this card...I won't need a Powermac!". The card noticeably did run things faster...but it kept CRASHING NONSTOP. It wasn't all the Powermac 6100's fault. The MacOS in the 90s was a disaster of extension conflicts/bugs. At least with Windows you had the 'blue screen of death', for the Mac in the 90s...the damn thing just froze and I had to manually unplug the system. It took a long time of disabling/stripping down anything that might cause any issue to make it sorta work. When Mac OS8 came out, I immediately bought it and was impressed by the overhaul...however it still had a lot of legacy issues. When OSX came out, it too was a buggy mess which only until OSX 10.2/3 did it finally become usable. Still, I can't tell you the AWE I experienced when using Hotline (a blast from the past!) I downloaded (after a long time) my first MP3 and listened to it. It was Rob Zombie's Dragula. Playing this MP3 took up the entire Powermac CPU/power to play it. If I tried doing anything else, the MP3 would stutter. It was such of a wild experience listening to such pristine audio coming off of a frankenstein/wreck computer which my 6100 was becoming. But: It was magical to listen to near CD quality music off of the net. I knew back then MP3 would render CD's obsolete and it really made me realize that physical media's days were numbered...everything eventually would be online. I was fortunate enough to sell off this buggy system it helped pay for a nice B&W G3 Powermac. The only 'good' thing out of this system...I used it to sign up for an online dating site...and met my future wife off of this computer. So the Powermac 6100/60/80/G3 couldn't have been that bad. It did help me find love after all.🥰
The Macintosh LC475 with a 25mhz 040 was HALF the price of the Amiga 4000 with the same 25mhz 040 back in 1993. The problem is, this sort of amazing value for money only ever occured at this time with this spec for Mac and so the market continued to ignore them. Yes Windows 3.1 was horrible, yes Windows 95 was a kludge of a 16/32bit buggy as hell OS BUT people do not pay an extre $1000 for a different OS than Windows for identical performance hardware. But the LC475 was an excellent machine, and a 486SX25 PC in 1993 was only slightly cheaper so who knows where that sort of pricing strategy would have resulted for Apple market share. PowerPC was hugely expensive MIPS/$ ratio vs Pentium and not great for laptop motherboards in any of its revisions. In fact the only decent product at bargain price ever to be equipped with PowerPC technology was the Xbox 360 (which cost less than the graphics card you would need to buy for your PC so you could play Need for Speed:Most Wanted in the same quality).
Motorola failed Apple. The 68000 was far superior when it came out, with an orthogonal instruction set and a large register file it was the perfect CPU for proper OSes such as Unix. It’s just sad they fell behind the x86 and its 1970 vintage architecture sensibilities.
I have the exact same setup as you. I overclocked my 6100 to 80Mhz as well. The 486 is bottle-necked by the garbage VGA chip from the late 80s that Apple used. Using different CPUs won't make much of a difference sadly.
Here's a question I've never seen a video on. Could you upgrade the DOS Cards? Swap out the CPU for something faster? EDIT: When will I learn to not comment before watching the whole video? Oh right because I forget what I was thinking of... Thank you for going that extra mile!
The computer itself was... okay. Perfectly fine, really. The problem was that Apple was trying to convince people that PPC was mindblowing, and all of the software available for the first gen Power Macs was 68k code running under emulation. Basically the only people it was really good for was devs who needed a workstation to write PPC native software on. Anybody else could either get a 68k machine for cheap, or wait a product cycle for when native software was available..
Oh man, macs crashed all the time. Mac OS was a huge unstable mess held together with paper clips and gum. All computers were at the time. It was just the slickest UI and had the whole Mac attitude to go with it that made it tolerable and preferable to a lot of people.
@ I dunno not in my experience. In the windows 95 era if you were working on a photoshop project for instance I could do the whole thing and not have to save it until I had finished. On windows you had to tap ctrl+s after every manoeuvre for fear it would either hang or just fully break. I never had such problems with macs. In fact I’d go as far to say I didn’t really experience fully crashing macs until they moved to intel chips. And actually for me in system 8+9 the only apps I ever found that crashed were freeware internet stuff like IRC and even then it never took the whole system down but just the app itself. And so you just had to reload the app. Windows was always BSOD. but again I’m talking late 90s.
The 6100/60 AV was not bad for a 1st rev. I remember having one new at work and writing several products on it. The Centris 610 which was the consumer version wasn’t bad either.
I'm surprised at how poor doom runs on that dos card. on an equivalent pc 486 doom should be humming along at near 30 fps. i wonder what is bottlenecking the dos card?
Oh yeah it’s definitely bottlenecked. The thing is really designed for running lotus 123 as opposed to games, so it’s just got really bad video performance connecting through its (unexposed) ISA bus. That’s my guess anyway
Have you tried a 60 MHz oscillator? I've seen online that people have had success getting the 6100 up to 120 MHz. If you try it please go into more detail on the soldering section. I plan to do this to my 6100/66 DOS Compatible or my 6100/60
At the time even with later OS'es, x100 series Power Mac's didn't feel much faster in use than 68040's until they released the next generation x500 machines with 604 chips and PCI. NuBus was slow as hell for even the best accelerated video cards too. I remember how even trying to use a maxed out Workgroup Server 9150 I got for cheap as a general desktop computer felt so slow just 5 years after it came out.
I was given one at school to use in my room when they first came out 1994. It was an outstanding computer for about a year before it started to feel like it was slowing down. Luckely at my job we could always choose to get a new computer if we wanted one. in 1996 they gave me a 6400. It was SOOOOO much faster. Then it slowed down, and they gave me a G3 it was great until the g4 came out and it sucked when the G5 came out etc....
I went to graphic design school back in the 90s. The computer room was full of these. Their performance compared to my pentium PC at home was horrible. Their performance on Photoshop 3.0? Crash and burn constantly. I miss them though because I learned the basics of MacOS back then.
I wonder if the 486/5x86 CPU's had proper level 2 cache. That performance didn't look like the performance a 486 should have. Plus perhaps slow regular memory.
How slow was the RAM on the DOS card? In the 80's and 90's using faster than specified RAM could give a decent speed boost. For example the computer would send data to RAM and it would have a window of time where it would wait for the RAM to be ready to accept the data. The faster the RAM was ready, the faster the computer could move to the next thing. Same thing with reading from RAM. The computer would request data from RAM, with a window of time it could wait for the RAM to be ready to read. This speed difference could easily be experienced on the PC XT and clones and most 286 through early Pentiums with the RAM counter during POST, with fast RAM test off. It was so nice to install RAM with a much faster nanosecond rating and hear the RAM test go from slow, individual ticks to brrrrrrrrrt.
I think the DOS card is was more geared towards text-mode DOS applications than games. The video chip on it is quite bad., basically an old ISA graphics card soldered to the board.
would you like to sell one of the units shown in your basement? - I need one with the Case in as good a physical & optical condition as possible. many thanks in advance for your response. cheers.
Weeeellll… the Macs consumers bought in that era were the Performa line, not the Quadra. The Performa 630 (same as the Quadra, but without FPU and with more bundled software), Performa 500 series all-in-ones, and the Performa 400 series (same as LC series, but with more bundled software) were all intended for consumer retail, and were a bit more aggressively priced. (The Performa 475, with the 25MHz 68LC040, was the performance-per-dollar king at the time).
The Performas were all bundles though, with a monitor and keyboard. If you already had those you could save by getting the Quadra, and that bundled software was all junk anyway. Nothing was actually stopping people from buying Quadras.
@ I suppose. They were not always bundled with displays, though AFAIK keyboards were always included. This probably depended on what market (country). The software was a mixed bag. ClarisWorks was a great program. I never said consumers couldn’t buy Quadras (or later, Power Macs). Just that what Apple marketed to consumers was the Performa line.
Excellent video! I’ve been collecting Apple stuff since the 90s. Personally I’d make the argument that the 630 would have been a better choice because you could get the PowerPC Upgrade card for it, which retained the 68040 and could be switched back and forth. This allowed for the benefit of PowerPC software and 68K software to be run at full speed. Some would disagree with me though due to the IDE HD, but IMO in the long run IDE was more of a benefit than a drawback.
That is a great point, and the SCSI for the CD ROM could easily be extended out to use a SCSI HDD by just replacing the cable. 630 with a PPC card would be a great thing to test for a follow up. Now I have to find one…
They weren't that bad. Was it a best buy? Eh, not at MSRP (but what Mac is, amirite?). On clearance? Maybe, if it was one of the DOS or AV models and came with more RAM and accessories (monitor, PPC software bundles, etc.). All three of the x100 Macs were basically the same at their core (even the WGS 9150 is mostly the same except for DB15 video and an extra NuBus slot). If I was an adult in 1994, in all likelihood I wouldn't have been able to afford one new, so when the PCI models arrived a year or so later I would've breathed a sigh of relief at not having wasted money on a technological dead end, and then just skipped the x100s and waited for a deal on a 7500 or (more probably) an equivalent clone. A 6100/60 was my first Power Mac, though. It was $100 from a vendor out of the back of MacWorld in 2000 or so, the cheapest PPC option they had. I may still have that thing sitting around somewhere but I've been though so many of them I may not be able to tell them apart anymore.
Lol got one sitting here beside me. Needs a switch for the monitor with that shitshow connection, so kinda stuck. I had a centris 650 in this era originally but I bought this recently from an estate sale.
Plus PhotoShop was PPC native pretty fast and that was the power app of the time. I find it odd that everyone compares early PPC performance with 68k. Things moved pretty quickly and native software was available for most major software soon afterwards. There was the cost to upgrade, but that cost had value because your workflow was faster! Like, 5x faster or something wasn't it :)
well it was about home users. games and home apps, not photoshop and pro stuff. If you were a pro you were getting the 8100 any blowing everything away.
@@GutBombTech heh, but by that logic, a home user with an 040 Mac wasn't upgrading in the 6100 era anyway :) over time even the home software became PPC and the benefits tricked through. I wouldn't have worried about the day 1 compatibility performance. I would have made sure my 6100 had an L2 cache though. That's a good few percent speed boost and not all of them had one.
Crummy. In 1994, an Amiga 4000 was still sweet a.f. and if you had more money and had a clue, you'd probably be sinking it into an SGI Indy or something similar. Macintoshes were overpriced and System 7 was slower than System 6.0.8. PPC was such a huge disappointment in practice.
UPDATE: someone told me how to get FPS to display on Doom II for Mac and on the 6100-80 it averages around 30fps. To get FPS to display on Doom II just change screen size and then change it back. + or - on the keyboard.
UPDATE 2: turns out that I was wrong that the outer pins on the Pentium overdrive are all power and ground. There are some pins related to cache out there too.
Holy cow, this is such a great video! I'm not saying this in hyperbole or just to be nice... I honestly think you're making some of the best vintage computer videos right now. Historical context rooted in first-hand experience from the era, just the right amount of "what if" wonderings, benchmarks, upgrades, cameos, fun editing and a killer closing animation... this has it all!
Your videos are incredible too ;-)
@@LeSpameurYT @iiidiy I agree with this guy, your stuff is AWESOME. Thank you!!!
I have the rare 6100 workgroup server love it and the matching apple server software to
My Quadra 840AV is pumping it's guns and waiting for a rematch with the 6100!
Steve! Fun challenge: PPC Native Photoshop Vs DSP Accelerated Photoshop!!
I suggest testing Quadra 840 AV with 8.1. and Photoshop 3.0 or 4.01 and DSP in action against PM 6100/66 or 80 with 8.6 or even 9.1 (already very much with PPC code). From what I've read, things like Appearance, Apple Guide, AppleScript, AppleShare/File Sharing Extensions, Contextual Menu Extension, QuickTime 3.0, Sound Manager, Video Startup (use in AV macs), Apple Menu Options and Control Strip and Date & Time were never rewritten to PPC code and until the end in Mac OS Cassic were as 68k code
Also... your scenario theorizing about what family computer to buy? That was EXACTLY the situation my dad was in, in 1994. He had to replace our aging Amiga500 and a family friend steered him to the Mac. I didn't know anything about Mac then, and was way too young to contribute anyways, but the friend helped him land on an LC630. It was wildly exciting for me at the time, but buying into a dying chip platform meant that I had a narrower and narrower library of apps and games to run... I looked at my friend's 7100 (purchased around the same time) in envy. Even if it was slow, it still RAN the new games when my old 630 simply couldn't... and there seemed to be better upgrade options for the first PowerPC Macs to extend their life. I LOVE my 630 now, but late-90s me resented the choice.
I had a very similar experience with a Q610 that my parents purchased instead of shelling out the extra money for a 6100. There were a few games that came out that my Q610 couldn't run and it made teenage me feel like we had made a bad choice, but I didn't consider the extensive back catalog of software our Q610 could run like a champ and could be purchased really inexpensively used. I still have fond memories of that Q610.
Working in the UNH computer lab, I found that people were pushing the power button on the 6100 thinking it was a floppy eject button... sadly had my students lose everything they were working on a few times. Rough.
My first GutBomb video ! great work my Retro friend !
This is a phenomenal video! It has.. serious production quality in a way that a Netflix documentary would have. Historical context, explanations, "what-ifs", etc; just like others have said I'll echo it too: Bravo. - Mark
Apple was quick to release updates for their OS that sped up the emulation layer (way before Mac OS 8), they also gradually made more parts of the OS PPC native, that helped as well.
Love the video BTW!
Fascinating watch, and some catchy music. Honestly if they were posted somewhere I'd probably listen to some of it on it's own.
Really great video man! Tons of work and it shows! Super clean!
Had a 840AV and a 6100 overclocked to 100MHz. Your video brought back some memories :)
When I was in High School, I had a friend who's brother worked for Apple. I remember being over at his place the day his brother bought home a prototype 6100.. it was pretty awesomely fast :D
Very good video covering a total blind spot in my mac knowledge that everyone seems to be familiar with already and will not go out of their way to showcase like you just brilliantly did!
Great video. Excellent pacing and story arc. Really enjoyed this.
Excellent video and work!! Thanks for sharing!
Great video. All I know is that I picked up a 475 at discount in fall of 94, for under $600 brand new at retail. I used it until the spring of 1996, and upgraded to a 7200/75 for the heavily discounted price of under $1000, opting to sell my 475 for nearly $500 still. A $500 upgrade. The performance of that 7200/75 was quite a bit better than the 6100/66, and probably also a bit better than the 7100/80 or 8100/80. For thousands less, just two years after the original PPC machines shipped. It was worth the wait, and the frequent upgrade cadence I went through. Going from a IIsi to the 475 in 94 was a good option at the time, as most software that I used was not even PPC native.
Edit: forgot to mention, it's possible now to overclock a 475 to 50Mhz and beyond using just a software control panel and extension. While 50Mhz is a bit more of a challenge, 40Mhz is quite easy. So most people with both a 475 and 6100 in their collection could do their own testing between them.
Looking forward to more videos! Great production and audio. Intelligent, thoughtful takes are always welcome too.
I love the music you wrote for this video. Vaporwave with slow-mo Doom benchmarks is a vibe
This is what life is like on planet gutbomb
Great video man! Love that ending animation too!
Thanks! I was watching an old NASA film from the 70s the other day and it had this at the end and I thought it was the perfect thing to learn Final Cut Pro motion graphics for.
@GutBombTech I need to see how to do that in davinci. Definitely has that scanimate look from when we were kids.
Basically I made 1 text element that said gutbomb and rotated it and had it follow a swirly path. Then I copied it 7 times and gave each one a lower opacity. And delayed each one by a few more frames than the last one.
You Have Been Bestowed the Highest Honnor of any youtube video around, being watched wale eating
It was never really called TaligentOS, except as a marketing term. Taligent was the name of the project, after it was decided that "Pink" was too informal a name. (later spun off as a company.)
It was agreed that both IBM and Apple would create operating system products based on the shared code in Taligent.
For Apple, it would be a new version of the Macintosh Operating system.
For IBM, it would become their Workplace Operating System.
In the end, Workplace OS would only see the light of day as an OS/2 for PowerPC beta, with a Mach microkernel, Taligent middleware, and an OS/2 personality (I have a copy).
And Apple's Taligent offering would be severely reduced, as Project Copeland.
The Taligent object orientation framework would ultimately be spun off as CommonPoint, to be used in some obscure enterprise middleware deployments in the late 1990s.
Apple did a disservice to the PowerPC processor by making the L2 cache optional in the initial low end PowerPC models, as many PCs at the time included L2 cache as a standard feature. This only served to exasperate system performance when emulating 68K code. Even if it required a slight bump to the initial MSRP, it would have probably improved initial impressions.
Though to be fair, the amount of 68k code in the Mac OS was also a huge detriment to the PowerPC systems. No doubt Apple was trying to rush these systems out the door, native code be darned as long as the OS could boot...
The thing was, running the 68k code didn't really slow anything down, it ran at near full speed, BUT the context switch between the two modes was VERY costly and kneecapped it.
@@slightlyevolved I remember testing PM 7100 vs Quadra 650, both with 16 MB Ram and Photoshop 3.0 - Quadra worked better after the debut of PM 7100, then, as the system had more and more PPC code, PM 7100 improved its result.
The issue was the price bump. Those cache RAM chips were very expensive until about a year after the thing shipped. But a big, fast cache would really have helped.
My dad took me to Sears to get one when they came out. "Traded in" a year old Performa 550 for it. Sears had a "if you're ever unhappy forever" return policy back then. Flipped the 6110CD for a 6360 once more before they changed their policy for electronics and then everything else.
I hope this page explodes in popularity. I follow pages like Techmoan and Cathode Ray Dude and look forward to your future content.
I love the GUI. Reminds me of all those memories with my Atari computers. I wish Apple would make a skin like this for modern iMacs.
I remember my first grade teacher had one of these. She could mirror the screen to the tv.
Amazing video. Hope to see more crummy computers!
When Apple Computer, Inc. introduced their 6100 line of desktop systems, this was almost my first Apple computer. Felt that macintosh at this point, was no longer a toy and a real home computer system but, at this time my bank account was just a little too low. My first system a few years later turned out to be an All-in-One 5400 with a 603 processor which, years later was upgraded with a G3 card. My system also had Apple's internal video capture card system, Apple's internal TV/Radio card system with its matching "black" remote control. Currently, this is still all working in my All-in-One 5500/275. (smile ... smile).
I just became your 171st (full time) subscriber. I can't wait to see more videos like this in the future.
The fastest 68k Mac is an Amiga.
Wow this is brilliant! Where you did you come from! Amazing work here and a fresh take for sure
I picked up a 6100 at a goodwill several years ago for 5 bucks, I did the sd scsi upgrade, crystal overclock to 80mhz and then did a G3 cpu upgrade card...its my go to gaming rig for playing vintage Bungie games like Marathon or Pathways
I need to go to your thrift stores! I've only ever seen one Mac in a thrift store here and it was an MDD for $150.
hah marathon - wasted too many hours on that (esp that hard to find door thingy)
My parents bought a 7100/66 to replace our Mac Plus in 1994. We used that all the way up until 2000/01 when we finally replaced it with a PM G4 sawtooth. We did have a couple PowerBooks in between that time.
Great video. An upgrade you should have tried is the L2 Cache Ram. Stock was 256k but there was a 1mb stick and it really helped with performance!
Upgrading from an LC II, my 6100/60 8/160 noCD was $1,600 at CompUSA within weeks after launch. I was happy with it. Later I added the 256K cache and the crystal upgrade snapped over the original with 80 and 84 MHz supplied. I ran 80 MHz most of the time so I thought I was right inline with the 8100. I added a fan and removed the back card cover to give it an exhaust outlet. But I think I finally killed it running it at 84 MHz too long and upgraded to the PowerBase 200 for $1K in 1997. 6100's later ended-up being terrific hosts for G3 upgrade cards.
I knew it, Quadra 630 is and always has been the best! 😁
also lol 6:38 😫
I managed a lab of 6100s in college. Compared to the LCs and SEs they replaced, they were absolute monsters.
I had a 6100/66AV with a clip on crystal that ran at 88mhz, I seem to remember adding an fpu as well...
You made an excellent film with very cool modifications of this standard 6100 and DOS card. My story in 1994 is the period of writing my first master's thesis in economics. I had a Quadra 650 computer available (Mac OS 7.1) and as a second option PM 7100 (Mac OS 7.1.2)
After doing tests in Ms Word 5.1 (68k) and Photoshop 3.0 (68k PPC versions) I decided to use Quadra 650 to add the work and make drawings and illustrations, because it was better to work on this Quadra then. But in 1995 I got a Power Mac 6200/75 computer from my parents as a gift and this machine was not a good choice (very poor motherboard architecture) and after a year of use I sold it and bought a used PM 6100/66 with DOS card for less money and until 1998 it was my main computer. which I only replaced with the G3 Beige 266 Tower. Today I have the 6100/66 again, but with the G3 250 Mhz card from Sonnet and an additional HPV VIDEO Z PM7100 card. On such a 6100 it works very well, but I prefer to play Marathon :) The PM 6100 is always in my heart as the first very good Power Mac and generally a very solid machine,
I loooove the Quadra 650. It's my most used classic Mac actually. Rock solid machine.
Great video on a decent machine... But I would have preferred a Quadra 800 over either one, until the 7500/132 came out.
when I played DOOM II on my 386SX/25, I had no choice but to play at the smallest reduced play screen possible. I would use my imagination to do what video card graphic DLSS does today, in my head.
I tried playing doom on the smallest screen size with a magnifier in front of my screen (like the old gameboy ones).
The PPC was my favorite CPU arch. I think that if Moto/IBM had not had their infighting with "Altivec" and figured out their high MHz production issues, our current computers would be something quite different.
They were more power efficient, faster than x86 clock for clock, were easier to implement SMP (and by extension, would most likely have been successful making into multicore CPUs.)
The G5 was an argurable misstep.
Also, the 15pin monitor dongle did come with the computers. At least, at the start. I don't know if they kept them until EOL.
Thank you sir!
I used to support a small bunch of these pizza boxes. They weren’t the best but they were ok.
Back in the day, my Faculty Head purchased a brand new 6100/60 with DOS card and 32MB of memory.
And all the associated dongles.
Years later, when they were moving to Windows PCs, I tried to save as many Macs of different types, including some 512k compacts.
Sadly I was ill and they were dumped by the new Faculty head who hated me because I happened to know more about his subject than he did.
My 2nd Mac was a 6115 bundle. I had to reboot it. A lot. It crashed. A lot. I think I would have preferred a Quadra at the time, if I'd only known.
I bet the Quadra would have crashed a lot too, haha. These things were all constantly unstable back then.
Sonnet Crescendo G3 PDS slot upgrade FTW!
Back in the day I had a 6100/66 with a DOS card and Windows 95. It was a cool trick to show off to people, but I never used it for anything.
Yea, the DOS card was meant more for Windows 3.1 than 95.
Yeah it's not very useful, but it's just so neat!
On the flip side, the 630 could also upgrade to PPC via a card that used the 040 processor to run 68k code. I believe this card had 66 and 100 MHz variants. Think you could give that a try?
i've had many a mac and this machine was my fav. it replaced my quadra 840av before being replaced by a 9500
I bought a Performa 476 instead for $1000 with keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
All from proceeds from writing Macintosh Software on a Macintosh SE.
It was brutally tough back then as a poor kid with a pocket full of dreams to sell any software you wrote... impossible even. Pretty much the same today. I sold a couple of licenses to PBS. However, the 476 was one of the best buys I ever made, because I catapulted that 476 into writing a website with Netobjects Fusion to start a computer recycling business that brought thousands of computers home by the pickup truck load.
One computer purchase turned into a thousand. I was swimming in computers, including a ton of Macintoshes way way way higher spec than that 476 lol... which... I never even fired up. Because I built my first ethernet network and jumped over to PC, Windows, Linux, etc.
This was my first Mac! I do remember being a bit frustrated that so much of the software I used, including large chunks of the OS, was 68k code running under emulation so I wasn't really using the full power of the chip. And some of it was glitchy as a consequence. I got one of the beige desktop G3s a few years later, and eventually started running the first version of Mac OS X on it.
I was trying to buy in a future-proof way--and I was betting on the PowerPC transition happening more quickly than it actually did. If I'd bought the Quadra, I'd have worried about it becoming obsolete quickly. Actually, the situation with the 6100 pretty much persisted through the whole time I was using it as my primary computer, and the 68k machines didn't really become difficult to use until I'd already traded up again.
And then Apple completely changed processor architectures again... twice. With similar backward compatibility strategies.
the doom/quake numbers seem about right for a 486 using an ISA video card. Need to overclock the bus speed/cpu or add cache [if that is possible here] to get much more performance.
@GutBombTech You know that back in early days of the Commodore Amiga a developer named Jim Drew made a Mac Emulation card for the A2000 that with an 030 or 040 CPU Amiga would show up as an Macintosh running whatever accelerated even though the CPU was running as the same speed as the eqiuvulate Macintosh. The other thing too about the PowerPC, the PowerPC that Motorola made was slower than the PowerPC that IBM made (both the same version same Mhz).
The 6100 was my first Mac. The only real problem was the poor video resolution 832x624 without Grapic Card (AV Card). A OS with GUI and Low Resulution ...
And the 6100AV was not available in Europe. A custom upgrade was very expensive, about 50% of the 6100, compared to a PC video card (1024x768 or so) for 100 or 200 bugs.
Those resolutions seem pretty low by today's standards but I have a 17" CRT on my desk that I use all my retro machines with and 800x600ish is really the sweet spot. Bigger monitors back then were SOOOO expensive compared to now.
I'm curious if the bottleneck for the game benchmarks is the graphics chip on the PC compatibility card or some weird limitation of the PC compatibility setup rather than the CPU.
My first power Mac!
I used a 6100/60 for years in the 90s. That and a 28.8k modem and a SCSI CD player which required a caddy and drivers.
The 6100 reminded of the Chev Cavalier. Nice at first, but then slowly it began to fall apart.
First the drive was acting weird, on/off for no reason. There was a spare power plug in the 6100, I plugged that one in, the drive then began to behave.
I too updated the CPU using the crystal, it was...ok? Mac claimed it now ran at 80Mhz, but there was no real way to see the difference. The real benefit of course was upgrading the ram. Virtual ram was a time vampire.
The nightmare of course was the HDI-45 cable. The sheer weight of this dongle and the cables...gravity eventually pulled the cables down enough to loosen the connectors. So the screen/Mac wouldn't operate.
A LOT of duct tape later to HOIST up this mess of cables: it finally sorta did...but if I so much as 'looked' at the 6100 weird, the cable would be an issue.
Then the thing which made me realize I need to get rid of this Mac...the Sonnet G3 233mhz accelerator card. Being the idiot I was...I thought "Get this card...I won't need a Powermac!". The card noticeably did run things faster...but it kept CRASHING NONSTOP.
It wasn't all the Powermac 6100's fault. The MacOS in the 90s was a disaster of extension conflicts/bugs. At least with Windows you had the 'blue screen of death', for the Mac in the 90s...the damn thing just froze and I had to manually unplug the system. It took a long time of disabling/stripping down anything that might cause any issue to make it sorta work. When Mac OS8 came out, I immediately bought it and was impressed by the overhaul...however it still had a lot of legacy issues. When OSX came out, it too was a buggy mess which only until OSX 10.2/3 did it finally become usable.
Still, I can't tell you the AWE I experienced when using Hotline (a blast from the past!) I downloaded (after a long time) my first MP3 and listened to it. It was Rob Zombie's Dragula. Playing this MP3 took up the entire Powermac CPU/power to play it. If I tried doing anything else, the MP3 would stutter.
It was such of a wild experience listening to such pristine audio coming off of a frankenstein/wreck computer which my 6100 was becoming.
But: It was magical to listen to near CD quality music off of the net. I knew back then MP3 would render CD's obsolete and it really made me realize that physical media's days were numbered...everything eventually would be online.
I was fortunate enough to sell off this buggy system it helped pay for a nice B&W G3 Powermac.
The only 'good' thing out of this system...I used it to sign up for an online dating site...and met my future wife off of this computer.
So the Powermac 6100/60/80/G3 couldn't have been that bad.
It did help me find love after all.🥰
The Macintosh LC475 with a 25mhz 040 was HALF the price of the Amiga 4000 with the same 25mhz 040 back in 1993. The problem is, this sort of amazing value for money only ever occured at this time with this spec for Mac and so the market continued to ignore them. Yes Windows 3.1 was horrible, yes Windows 95 was a kludge of a 16/32bit buggy as hell OS BUT people do not pay an extre $1000 for a different OS than Windows for identical performance hardware. But the LC475 was an excellent machine, and a 486SX25 PC in 1993 was only slightly cheaper so who knows where that sort of pricing strategy would have resulted for Apple market share. PowerPC was hugely expensive MIPS/$ ratio vs Pentium and not great for laptop motherboards in any of its revisions. In fact the only decent product at bargain price ever to be equipped with PowerPC technology was the Xbox 360 (which cost less than the graphics card you would need to buy for your PC so you could play Need for Speed:Most Wanted in the same quality).
Motorola failed Apple. The 68000 was far superior when it came out, with an orthogonal instruction set and a large register file it was the perfect CPU for proper OSes such as Unix.
It’s just sad they fell behind the x86 and its 1970 vintage architecture sensibilities.
I have the exact same setup as you. I overclocked my 6100 to 80Mhz as well. The 486 is bottle-necked by the garbage VGA chip from the late 80s that Apple used. Using different CPUs won't make much of a difference sadly.
username checks out
Here's a question I've never seen a video on. Could you upgrade the DOS Cards? Swap out the CPU for something faster? EDIT: When will I learn to not comment before watching the whole video? Oh right because I forget what I was thinking of... Thank you for going that extra mile!
The computer itself was... okay. Perfectly fine, really. The problem was that Apple was trying to convince people that PPC was mindblowing, and all of the software available for the first gen Power Macs was 68k code running under emulation. Basically the only people it was really good for was devs who needed a workstation to write PPC native software on. Anybody else could either get a 68k machine for cheap, or wait a product cycle for when native software was available..
The only good thing about Mac’s of the 90s was they never ever ever crashed. Windows on the other hand. Every few minutes.
Oh man, macs crashed all the time. Mac OS was a huge unstable mess held together with paper clips and gum. All computers were at the time. It was just the slickest UI and had the whole Mac attitude to go with it that made it tolerable and preferable to a lot of people.
@ I dunno not in my experience. In the windows 95 era if you were working on a photoshop project for instance I could do the whole thing and not have to save it until I had finished. On windows you had to tap ctrl+s after every manoeuvre for fear it would either hang or just fully break. I never had such problems with macs. In fact I’d go as far to say I didn’t really experience fully crashing macs until they moved to intel chips. And actually for me in system 8+9 the only apps I ever found that crashed were freeware internet stuff like IRC and even then it never took the whole system down but just the app itself. And so you just had to reload the app. Windows was always BSOD. but again I’m talking late 90s.
underrated!
I always hated how the 601 machines didn’t output video when the clock battery was dead
at least you can quickly power cycle it when you turn it on to bypass that. still a pain though!
Would love to see AROS run in those power mac and also the old 68k ones
The 6100/60 AV was not bad for a 1st rev. I remember having one new at work and writing several products on it. The Centris 610 which was the consumer version wasn’t bad either.
"Living that dongle life" 😆
I bought a 6100 in January of 1995. I sold a Duo 230 with dock in order to pay for it.
I'm surprised at how poor doom runs on that dos card. on an equivalent pc 486 doom should be humming along at near 30 fps. i wonder what is bottlenecking the dos card?
Also indicated by the minimal improvements when upgrading the CPU. Definitely being throttled by something along the way!
Oh yeah it’s definitely bottlenecked. The thing is really designed for running lotus 123 as opposed to games, so it’s just got really bad video performance connecting through its (unexposed) ISA bus. That’s my guess anyway
I think it might be the RAM. Not on the Mac but on the card itself.
Have you tried a 60 MHz oscillator? I've seen online that people have had success getting the 6100 up to 120 MHz. If you try it please go into more detail on the soldering section. I plan to do this to my 6100/66 DOS Compatible or my 6100/60
A love letter to the 6100 ❤
At the time even with later OS'es, x100 series Power Mac's didn't feel much faster in use than 68040's until they released the next generation x500 machines with 604 chips and PCI. NuBus was slow as hell for even the best accelerated video cards too. I remember how even trying to use a maxed out Workgroup Server 9150 I got for cheap as a general desktop computer felt so slow just 5 years after it came out.
Great video, your voice almost sounds like microsoft sam where I thought AI was narrating haha.
I was given one at school to use in my room when they first came out 1994. It was an outstanding computer for about a year before it started to feel like it was slowing down. Luckely at my job we could always choose to get a new computer if we wanted one. in 1996 they gave me a 6400. It was SOOOOO much faster. Then it slowed down, and they gave me a G3 it was great until the g4 came out and it sucked when the G5 came out etc....
I went to graphic design school back in the 90s. The computer room was full of these.
Their performance compared to my pentium PC at home was horrible. Their performance on Photoshop 3.0? Crash and burn constantly. I miss them though because I learned the basics of MacOS back then.
I had two of these when I was in high school
The 6360 was a good alternative around this time
The best upgrade for the 6100 was to get one of the G3 upgrade boards.
I wonder if the 486/5x86 CPU's had proper level 2 cache. That performance didn't look like the performance a 486 should have. Plus perhaps slow regular memory.
I got my LCIII in 1994 for $999 refurbished. My bother ended up getting the Quadra 630 with AV card inside. His mac destroyed mine
How slow was the RAM on the DOS card? In the 80's and 90's using faster than specified RAM could give a decent speed boost. For example the computer would send data to RAM and it would have a window of time where it would wait for the RAM to be ready to accept the data. The faster the RAM was ready, the faster the computer could move to the next thing. Same thing with reading from RAM. The computer would request data from RAM, with a window of time it could wait for the RAM to be ready to read.
This speed difference could easily be experienced on the PC XT and clones and most 286 through early Pentiums with the RAM counter during POST, with fast RAM test off. It was so nice to install RAM with a much faster nanosecond rating and hear the RAM test go from slow, individual ticks to brrrrrrrrrt.
Why was DOOM so non-performant in your play tests and overall? It barely ever lagged on the "freestanding" 486 DX/2 66 I grew up with.
I think the DOS card is was more geared towards text-mode DOS applications than games. The video chip on it is quite bad., basically an old ISA graphics card soldered to the board.
‼️I like it when narrators throw a bunch of numbers at us with no visual assistance 🙂
The numbers themselves aren't important, it's the journey and the story that the numbers tell.
@@GutBombTechcope
would you like to sell one of the units shown in your basement? - I need one with the Case in as good a physical & optical condition as possible. many thanks in advance for your response. cheers.
Weeeellll… the Macs consumers bought in that era were the Performa line, not the Quadra. The Performa 630 (same as the Quadra, but without FPU and with more bundled software), Performa 500 series all-in-ones, and the Performa 400 series (same as LC series, but with more bundled software) were all intended for consumer retail, and were a bit more aggressively priced. (The Performa 475, with the 25MHz 68LC040, was the performance-per-dollar king at the time).
The Performas were all bundles though, with a monitor and keyboard. If you already had those you could save by getting the Quadra, and that bundled software was all junk anyway. Nothing was actually stopping people from buying Quadras.
@ I suppose.
They were not always bundled with displays, though AFAIK keyboards were always included. This probably depended on what market (country).
The software was a mixed bag. ClarisWorks was a great program.
I never said consumers couldn’t buy Quadras (or later, Power Macs). Just that what Apple marketed to consumers was the Performa line.
Did apple nerf the Dos card? doom normally runs silky smooth on a DX2 66
Excellent video! I’ve been collecting Apple stuff since the 90s. Personally I’d make the argument that the 630 would have been a better choice because you could get the PowerPC Upgrade card for it, which retained the 68040 and could be switched back and forth. This allowed for the benefit of PowerPC software and 68K software to be run at full speed. Some would disagree with me though due to the IDE HD, but IMO in the long run IDE was more of a benefit than a drawback.
That is a great point, and the SCSI for the CD ROM could easily be extended out to use a SCSI HDD by just replacing the cable. 630 with a PPC card would be a great thing to test for a follow up. Now I have to find one…
6100/60 66 has Houdini II, Houdini I was for the 68k line.
how much for the mac xl/lisa II 👉👈
Ten billion
They weren't that bad. Was it a best buy? Eh, not at MSRP (but what Mac is, amirite?). On clearance? Maybe, if it was one of the DOS or AV models and came with more RAM and accessories (monitor, PPC software bundles, etc.). All three of the x100 Macs were basically the same at their core (even the WGS 9150 is mostly the same except for DB15 video and an extra NuBus slot). If I was an adult in 1994, in all likelihood I wouldn't have been able to afford one new, so when the PCI models arrived a year or so later I would've breathed a sigh of relief at not having wasted money on a technological dead end, and then just skipped the x100s and waited for a deal on a 7500 or (more probably) an equivalent clone.
A 6100/60 was my first Power Mac, though. It was $100 from a vendor out of the back of MacWorld in 2000 or so, the cheapest PPC option they had. I may still have that thing sitting around somewhere but I've been though so many of them I may not be able to tell them apart anymore.
I had it with a 486 card to run windows 3.1 .
Lol got one sitting here beside me. Needs a switch for the monitor with that shitshow connection, so kinda stuck. I had a centris 650 in this era originally but I bought this recently from an estate sale.
If the benchmarked Performa 630 had an FPU, it wasn't stock - they cheated! Only the Quadra 630 came with an FPU.
Plus PhotoShop was PPC native pretty fast and that was the power app of the time. I find it odd that everyone compares early PPC performance with 68k. Things moved pretty quickly and native software was available for most major software soon afterwards. There was the cost to upgrade, but that cost had value because your workflow was faster! Like, 5x faster or something wasn't it :)
well it was about home users. games and home apps, not photoshop and pro stuff. If you were a pro you were getting the 8100 any blowing everything away.
@@GutBombTech heh, but by that logic, a home user with an 040 Mac wasn't upgrading in the 6100 era anyway :) over time even the home software became PPC and the benefits tricked through. I wouldn't have worried about the day 1 compatibility performance. I would have made sure my 6100 had an L2 cache though. That's a good few percent speed boost and not all of them had one.
Crummy. In 1994, an Amiga 4000 was still sweet a.f. and if you had more money and had a clue, you'd probably be sinking it into an SGI Indy or something similar. Macintoshes were overpriced and System 7 was slower than System 6.0.8. PPC was such a huge disappointment in practice.
quake is never going to run well on a 486 based CPU due to the non-pipelined FPU
A DX2 66 should run Doom much better than that. There must be a bottleneck at the graphics or something? That seems crazy slow.
6100/60 didnt ship with l2 cache
I Break for 8