There are several reasons that 68020/030 upgrades are so unstable on these machines, and it's not really fixable. Starting with the system ROM, it uses "32 bit dirty" code. The 68000 has a 24 bit address bus, and Apple in an attempt to save memory would use the upper 8 bits of a 32 bit address as flags. The 68000 was fine with this because it only ever saw 24 bits, but when you get into 68020/030 CPUs, it's a major problem because those are full 32 bit CPUs. Now that same code would be throwing 32 bits of nonsense at the CPU and causing unpredictable behavior. But the system ROM wasn't the only thing that used 32 bit dirty code, Mac OS and applications at the time all did it as well. This means that you'll never really be able to run in a pure 32 bit addressing mode without constant trouble from "dirty" code. If you want a really bad time, try to run the game "Dark Castle" or "Return to Dark Castle" on Mac OS 7.x on a compact mac. It will cause stack smashing, which will obliterate any and all partitions on the hard drive and cause some psychedelic screen nonsense to happen. The only real workaround for accelerators on compact macs is to run System Software 6.0.8, the last to run in pure 24 bit addressing modes. This of course hampers the potential performance of an accelerator card, but it will keep most of the problems with 32 bit dirty software in check. And as a practical matter, there's really nothing in System 7.x that applies to compact macs anyway. It just runs slower. I have a Mac SE with a Total Systems Gemini Ultra accelerator, and it's only stable with System 6.0.8. It will run 7.x, but it does all of the nasty things you've shown in this video and won't run right.
Sounds like you could just work around it by running system 7 with 32 bit addressing disabled (the default). Provided you stick to 24bit software, you should be ok.
@@kirishima638 That's not what 32 bit addressing is for. It's to allow System 7+ to address more memory, it has nothing to do with not allowing the system to run 32 bit code. System 7 itself has 32 bit code in it that isn't compatible with older 24 bit Macs, it didn't help that Apple didn't explicitly cut off the older machines, even though there were known compatibility issues. Compact Macs weren't the only ones with compatibility issues with either, many Mac II series machines also had 24 bit dirty ROMs and required MODE32 from Connectix, which Apple later licensed so users could download it for free. There's no way to prevent 32 bit code from trying to run on a 24 bit machine and vice versa, because hardly anyone took the time to make compatibility lists for all of the Apple machines. It's a miracle the original system software even worked at all, because it was more of an ad hoc system of APIs glued together from many different sources. By the time Mac OS 9 came around, more of the OS had been written by third parties than Apple itself. Apple by that time had desperately been trying to keep their "OS" relevant by spending lots of money buying 3rd party extensions to their OS and incorporating it in.
I still don't quite understand how the 68020+ upgrade would break things if you only hook up the 24 address lines you have, given that the 68000/010 can mangle addresses as 32-bit quantities all the same. Interfacing with a 16-bit data bus sounds like a harder problem.
@@D0Samp You can't just arbitrarily hook up how many address lines you want and leave the rest floating. The 68020/030 are 32 bit CPUs and expect full 32 bit buses. There are ways to engineer around them, which is why upgrade boards are generally packed with tons of custom logic chips. While the 68000 had 32 bit registers internally, most operations were 16 bits and only worked on half of the register at a time. If Mac OS sends a "24 bit" operand to a 68020/68030, it's really sending 32 bits of data (24 bits of normal code plus the 8 bits of flags). The 68020/030 doesn't know the difference and will take this as a full 32 bit operand and try to execute it, causing undefined erratic behavior. Engineering around a 16 bit data bus is a lot easier than a 24 bit address bus. If you have to perform a 32 bit operation, you just break it up into two 16 bit operations to load the data and two more to store each piece as it comes in. Many architectures do this, including the 68000 if it has to do a 32 bit operation on the bus.
I am actually not that interested in Mac (Apple in general), but love watching these types of vids where old machines get a lovely boost! Thanks for this.
Same for me, but I watched so many of these videos that I ended up getting a Quadra 700 from eBay and hot rodded it to the max, including a PowerPC 601 accelerator card and full retrobright treatment. It’s really easy to work on classic Macs and it gave me a new appreciation for the “Snow White” era. Besides, I couldn’t have afforded a fully-upgraded Quadra 700 when it was new, so it’s fun to be able to explore one now.
my heart dropped when i saw the garbled screen lol but glad its "kinda" working well. I think what you should do is copy the floppy disk install onto a floppy emu hd image and install the rest of the system stuff on there then go from there.
*uWu notices your stickers* Man, the crossover of furries and retro computing is always amusing to me, it's great to see we still have a bunch of awesome furry people who love old tech. And I guess Sean is fun too. I bet that whiteboard guy is a closet furry though. :D
Their taking machines that should have been in the scrapyard a long time ago and giving them seemingly impossible or difficult upgrades in the beloved year 2022
I just bought a mac classic off facebook market place. To my surprise when I opened it up I found one of these accelerator cards. Mine obviously was fitted with the classic connector. It makes my mac classic 3 times faster than stock. I have not tried to use it with a blue scsi. the original hard drive was working so I just kept it that way. Great video, the struggle to get these things working is the joy of collecting old computers. If it all just worked out of the box it wouldn't be as much fun.
Another excellent video as always Sean! The "killy-clip" seems like the weak link here. My OCD would tell me I need to clean those contacts with alcohol and verify "springiness" for positive contact with the CPU pins for thoroughness.
Only if you were tech-savvy. For most people, A Mac Plus was a simpler proposition; as there were no real choices to be made… perhaps add a hard drive and printer; but there was really only a couple possibilities there as well; and if you wanted to stay 100% Apple, it was an HD20SC and an ImageWriter.
Building a PC was challenging in the 386 era, in the age of jumpers, before plug and play existed, especially having to navigate the IRQ/DMA assignment hell. Non-technical users would always choose a pre-made system instead. Things got easier during the Pentium era when most motherboards were auto configurable and plug and play was working okay.
Cool! The Mac Plus was my first computer in 1986... My Dad actually told me that he only just threw it in the garbage a few years ago... He didn't realise it was worth money!!
It's not the CPU that really generates the heat on these, it's the CRT and analog board. If you're worried about temps, get a Kensington System Saver or cut a proper fan vent and mount on the back of the case. Larry Pina's books have some good instructions for doing so. Is this upgrade worth it? Maybe back in 1990 if the choice was between buying an accelerator for an existing Plus that has a hard drive and other accessories, or a brand-new SE/30. Nowadays people would probably want more for that upgrade card than a real SE/30. Either way, I'd say it's a "because it's there" sort of thing: there's some benefit but unless you're running programs entirely within the 256 bytes of L1 cache on the '030, it's not going to be anywhere close to the SE/30 in performance, mostly because of the Plus's slower and narrower (16 bits @ 8MHz) bus. Then there's still the RAM ceiling of the Plus (nowhere close to the 128MB of the SE/30), and the Plus doesn't support FDHD drives (except for third-party SCSI-based floppy drives). Finally, there's the fact that some software just won't cooperate because, even though there's an '030 and an '882 present, it still has Plus ROMs and so some fakery is required to get it to maybe possibly (but probably not) work.
We had Mac Plus workstations at the Music Technology department, and the easiest we worked with, was an extension called 'Ram Disk', that made it possible to boot from a system floppy, then load that same system OS in Ram, then eject that floppy, allowing you to insert the application floppy (MOTU's Performer) and go to work without having to keep floppy-swapping. Nifty little app!
a very good demo of what it was like IRL in those days, even though wtf, this thing has 4MB of RAM and only 2 800k floppies in play, how could it BE THIS BAD?!?
yea proot stickers i was like waiiiit what are they doing there its not that kind of channel but its fun to see the same stickers which i see on telegram
My Mac plus was awesome piece of technology. And oh boy when i got me an external disc drive, that was thrilling time to be a life, no more endless switching floppies. And i remember to this day how envy i was to my friend that had PC with 120 MB hard drive. Not GB a MB...
I had a lot of problems getting my bluescsi to work and even now it will occasional fail to boot. A 16 or 25mhz 68030 runs cool enough to not require a fan. These power many PowerBook models with considerably less space with no fan and they don’t even have passive cooling.
I started my vintage mac collection in the late 90's, the first was a Performa 5215 which was okay. Then I bought a 145b and 180c which blew me away for they were like coloring books coming to life. Within the next few years, I was given a few Plus's and an SE which sat for years before I'd figure out how to boot them... Although the Plus would boot from floppies but it also came with an external HD which I had to take the top off and kick start it to boot... After watching the needle move across the disc and then stuff would appear on screen which made it a favorite in it's own quirky way. I never really mind how slow it was though, I just thought of it as the little Mac that could. I simply hated the SE for being so ugly and when I finally got around to it, I was totally shocked and surprised at how crisp the screen was and also it's speed. What sat it off was a program called lip service that greeted and told you the time as it booted...
You make a comparison to a 386 at the start of the video, but consider that in 1986 a 386 was absolutely the top of the line money could buy. The Mac Plus is much more inline with something like a Turbo XT, which could cost less than $1000. Oh, and the Amiga 500 existed, which bested the Mac Plus in every possible way to the point it could run Mac software.
A barebone Turbo XT could be bought in the back of Computer shopper for $599. With a 20 Mb hard drive and Color Monitor, you are up to $1500. Giving you a machine with higher Resolution (Hercules graphics 720x348) Color and a Hard drive. None of which the Plus had out of the box.
Your youtube channel is amazing! I watch this every night to learn more about the macintosh, specially the macintosh plus. Absolutely amazing that you turned an original macintosh to a macintosh plus, plus plus. Btw those are some pretty nice protogen stickers! Just watch them overnight, or else they might eat your RAM sticks! 10:28
What a coincidence, I just ordered a blueSCSI the other day. The seller did specifically state that it came unflashed, but I've never used a Blue Pill before. I did order the STLink programmer, so hopefully it will be pretty straightforward. It's supposed to come with a Blue Pill, so at least I'll have a spare if I totally screw up the original one! That reminds me, I'll also need to order a micro SD card to use with the thing. Anyway, hopefully you can lift the curse and get your Mac Plus working stably with the upgrade.
The fact that the INIT works in 6.0.7 but does not work in 7.1.x makes me think there's a compatibility issue right there. There were many System 6 programs and INITs/extensions that did not work properly in 7 and 7.1. Is there a newer extension? Memory addressing was also an issue between 6 and 7 -- you'd have to turn off 32 bit memory addressing to get some older software to work. Not sure if that would impact the plus at all, as it would generally impact 030's like the SE/30 that had 'dirty ROMs'. But since the upgrade is an 030, maybe it does apply here.
Have you tried using Mini Vmac to put the drivers in the image and then boot from that? Maybe the big problem with the upgrade is that it overclocks the bus and you get crashes when there are collisions on the data lines?
great video aaa the m68k + i remember in my school in music class we had one of these with macOS 6.0 or something it has a cool piano program on it thats about all i remember about it... nobody seem to care much for mac ... we like our hp and compaq back then or our model m ibm
1:34 That said, you certainly wouldn't build a DOS computer around an 80386 yourself in 1986. Not only were they much more expensive, MS-DOS also still lacked (built-in + 3rd party) facilities to use that whole whopping megabyte of RAM and OS/2, the operating system of a different future, wouldn't ship until the next year and still only use 80286 features. It's much more likely someone had already somehow shoved a 68020 into their Macintosh Plus at the time.
He's cherry picking with the Compaq machine. They were literally the most expensive "clone" At the time (1986) you could buy a barebone Turbo XT machine with 640K of Ram and a single 360K floppy for $599.
I didn't even know you could get an 030 accelerator for a Plus! I have a Plus with 4 megs and SCSI2SD setup at my office for display. Since I now have a VARIETY of compact Macs, I finally just now bit the bullet and ordered a BlueSCSI so I can swap them among machines, especially among the SE, SE/30, Classic, Classic II, Color Classic, II, IIfx, etc. It seems this is the easiest way to go since it's the best of both worlds of being interchangeable and still having a clean appearance, well, unless you're looking at the back of the machine ;) I think I'll leave the accelerators to you, at least for now LOL.
At my last office job, some 20 something didn't believe me that Mac was short for Macintosh. PS. I'd pay good money for a modern Mac M3 in that classic form factor
"One keyboard and one monitor in one outlet." Not if you wanted to use a hard disc, without which the Mac Plus experience was pretty terrible. I had a Rodime 20 Plus, my first ever hard disc, and I thought it was amazing.
@@dennisp.2147 Yes. The successor to my Mac Plus, a cheap Goldstar PC used for university work, had exactly that and an internal HDD, so it did work from one socket.
Ah, yes. Extending your touch. One of the only proper usages for an M:TG rules reference card. The other being breaking into your apartment when you've locked your keys inside and you need to use the card trick to slip past your lock.
I sure don't miss swapping disks back and forth like that. I guess most of the time it wasn't needed, but when installing stuff like this it sure was a pain. I guess the dual floppy SE was a bit rare because by then it was more likely you'd have an HDD?
I wonder if the bluescsi issue is power related, maybe the accelerator board is drawing enough that there's not a lot share to run the drive. Can you externally power those?
I guess this might come from my back ground, when someone says "x is intimidating" I just remember now matter how complicated something is, in the Army, if you yell at it and the right people long enough, you'll learn how to make it work.
I wish i could also have a Mac, but i (mostly) live in Germany and they are rare, because no one really used Apple computer in the 80's and 90's. I know exactly one person which did have one in the late 90's, a macintosh Performa 5200 all-in-one and it was not really a great machine. The biggest reason against it was Software. There was not a lot of software with european language support. In the 80's most people used IBM compatibles from Siemens-Nixdorf and, the C64, but most importantly the AMIGA family of computers. The AMIGA had a big influence in our culture, because of the Demoscene and most important it's role in mainstream EDM. Sven Väth was a big fan of the AMIGA, he even dedicated a whole album to it "16BIT Inaxycvgtgtb" (yes that's the name). I do own a signed LP of this album, which was a limited version bundled with a coupon for discount on an AMIGA 1000. The C64 and the AMIGA were also the reason why we didn't have a "Video game crash", because most people were playing games on computers. In the 90's it was all just IBM clones and real IBM ThinkPads, because they were the best laptops. My dad worked at Siemens-Nixdorf and he used a ThinkPad. IBM didn't sell many desktop PC's here tho. Siemens had the monopoly until they sld themselves to the japanese, which gradually worsened the product quality. Fujitsu computers just gotten so bad. Kinda the same fate as IBM. Modern Lenovo ThinkPads are not even anywhere close to the quality standards IBM had.
With the Thinkpad quality: The best Thinkpads are the ones, after Lenovo took over the lineup. T60/61, T400, T410, T420 and the T430 are the best Thinkpads ever made, in my opinion and a lot of others. After this they went more for an apple style, because "premium". With Fujitsu: actually they are not bad. Good quality parts in them. My Pentium 4 Scaleo still works today and it is from time of capacitor plague (one cap failed, but one of 25 caps). And I seen it on other machines from fujitsu, too. But these where also machines, which where not cheap back than.
@@FoxMccloud42 The T430 was one of the worst for me, because the new keyboard feel like short travel calculator keys and as terrible as the ones from other laptops. The classic ThinkPad keyboard had a more tactile and clicky feel to it. . Lenovo also ditched the UltraBay and the X-series portable docking station. More and more of the unique IBM Thinkpad features got removed. The biggest nope was when they ditched the removable battery. Now they are just generic laptops, with the name ThinkPad written on them. Siemens used sturdy metal for their desktop PC cases, now under Fujitsus Name, they are wobbly thin sheets with lower quality plastics.
@@hyperturbotechnomike With the T430: You can swap it with the Keyboard from the T420 (My T430 has the original keyboard because I prefer the backlight which the T420 keyboard does not has). With the newer Thinkpads: A lot of press people said the design of older thinkpads are outdated and does feel plastic and not "premium" like the macbook (which breaks just from a drop of 10cm). There are even people saying Lenovo should ditch the trackpoint, because it is "outdated" and a bigger trackpad is much better. Thats why the quality of the Thinkpads went down and with it the modularity. Because everyone want all the notebooks to be in essence Macbook-clones (with all the problems of them). With Fujitsu and Siemens: Back in the old times everything was heavy because to suggest quality. The used thicker metal or just but some lead in to the chassis. I have an old cassete deck which is heavy, but when I looked in it, there was nothing what should be heavy. It was build heavy so people think it is a quality product. Also companies, who buy the fujitsu computer, don't need suchs steardy and heavy chassis. It cost extra in purchase and in shipping and when you can save 40€ (for example) per unit and you buy 100 because you are a business you can save 4000€. And once they are deployed, they wont be moved (no need for sturdy cases) until they get thrown away. Most companies throw them in to the trash instead of selling them and depending on the company who are recycling the pcs for them sometimes they charge them on the kilo and so ligther less sturdy cases are better. And when sturdy cases are needed, you normaly pick an industrial pc, because often the pcs are then in rough enviroments.
im about the biggest anti Mac guy you could ever imagine. Despite having owned several cult items over the years.......thanks wife........ Having said that, love the channel. Big fan of retro tech being a old man.
Now I see why your video didn't come out until Sunday - I'm sure you were trying everything possible until the last second to try to get things working... 😀
I think that comparison around 1:38 is a bit unfair - 286s were really more comparable, and the prices are much more reasonable when you're looking at 286s in 1987 instead of 386s. Also, that price at 3:39 was from the mid-90s, so obviously it cost a whole lot less than the SE/30 initially cost at retail many years prior.
I've had similar problems with the BlueSCSI also, in this case on a Macintosh IIsi with a Daystar Powercache 33mhz 68030 accelerator. I recall it being OK when I was first setting it up without the accelerator installed, but once I put it in and installed the extension it started getting more and more slow and unstable, although my memory may be faulty. Eventually I had to switch to using an external Apple 3gb hard drive, which works without a hitch. I wonder if there's a compatibility problem with accelerators and modern SD card readers.
@@elmosexwhistle I recall a quote attributed to Jean Louis Gasee who was Apple's head of engineering for Europe who said that when the Amiga came out they were in a panic - it was yoinks better than a Macintosh at way less the price...but they calmed down when they realized Commodore had no idea how to market it.
With all that floppy swapping - I was wondering - why not just image those disks to the floppy emu or similar and just "swap" them virtually - could save a ton of time and effort, methinks. Also, not sure what the first 'hack' was you mentioned (something about a resistor removal?) but perhaps that could contribute to the issues? I'm dug my Mac Plus out the other day and I'm going to tear it down later today with my floppy emu and whatever else I can find. It's been far too long since I ran it. What's the "best" OS for it? 7.1? 7.5? So far as I know, it's stock, but I might be able to get it up to 4MB RAM. Likely will just use it for some writing and MAYBE some old-school (not intensive) gaming. Thanks as always for the great content.
Was there ever a sequel to this video? I dont see one, but might be icerlooking it. BTW Floopy Emu has known compatibility issues with accelerators, at least on the SE, and i assume with the Plus as qell. On my SE with the same card the machine dreezes on boot and the Floppy EMU shiws the "wait state changed" message.
There was a trend about 20 years ago where these macs where turned into aquariums. Good to see that some of them made it and are getting an upgrade.
molar macs make a better aquarium anyway, breadbox only good for a bettafish.
Macquarium a few coworkers made them. 98-99 or so.
No, the trend was about 12 years ago.. your a tool and more then a decade off.
The iMac G3 makes beautiful fish tanks
Sad that’s a really small place to live in
There are several reasons that 68020/030 upgrades are so unstable on these machines, and it's not really fixable.
Starting with the system ROM, it uses "32 bit dirty" code. The 68000 has a 24 bit address bus, and Apple in an attempt to save memory would use the upper 8 bits of a 32 bit address as flags. The 68000 was fine with this because it only ever saw 24 bits, but when you get into 68020/030 CPUs, it's a major problem because those are full 32 bit CPUs. Now that same code would be throwing 32 bits of nonsense at the CPU and causing unpredictable behavior.
But the system ROM wasn't the only thing that used 32 bit dirty code, Mac OS and applications at the time all did it as well. This means that you'll never really be able to run in a pure 32 bit addressing mode without constant trouble from "dirty" code.
If you want a really bad time, try to run the game "Dark Castle" or "Return to Dark Castle" on Mac OS 7.x on a compact mac. It will cause stack smashing, which will obliterate any and all partitions on the hard drive and cause some psychedelic screen nonsense to happen.
The only real workaround for accelerators on compact macs is to run System Software 6.0.8, the last to run in pure 24 bit addressing modes. This of course hampers the potential performance of an accelerator card, but it will keep most of the problems with 32 bit dirty software in check. And as a practical matter, there's really nothing in System 7.x that applies to compact macs anyway. It just runs slower.
I have a Mac SE with a Total Systems Gemini Ultra accelerator, and it's only stable with System 6.0.8. It will run 7.x, but it does all of the nasty things you've shown in this video and won't run right.
Sounds like you could just work around it by running system 7 with 32 bit addressing disabled (the default).
Provided you stick to 24bit software, you should be ok.
@@kirishima638 That's not what 32 bit addressing is for. It's to allow System 7+ to address more memory, it has nothing to do with not allowing the system to run 32 bit code.
System 7 itself has 32 bit code in it that isn't compatible with older 24 bit Macs, it didn't help that Apple didn't explicitly cut off the older machines, even though there were known compatibility issues. Compact Macs weren't the only ones with compatibility issues with either, many Mac II series machines also had 24 bit dirty ROMs and required MODE32 from Connectix, which Apple later licensed so users could download it for free.
There's no way to prevent 32 bit code from trying to run on a 24 bit machine and vice versa, because hardly anyone took the time to make compatibility lists for all of the Apple machines.
It's a miracle the original system software even worked at all, because it was more of an ad hoc system of APIs glued together from many different sources. By the time Mac OS 9 came around, more of the OS had been written by third parties than Apple itself. Apple by that time had desperately been trying to keep their "OS" relevant by spending lots of money buying 3rd party extensions to their OS and incorporating it in.
@@GGigabiteM thanks I didn’t know that. I assumed the switch applied to all apps.
Totally agree about the state of the OS.
I still don't quite understand how the 68020+ upgrade would break things if you only hook up the 24 address lines you have, given that the 68000/010 can mangle addresses as 32-bit quantities all the same. Interfacing with a 16-bit data bus sounds like a harder problem.
@@D0Samp You can't just arbitrarily hook up how many address lines you want and leave the rest floating. The 68020/030 are 32 bit CPUs and expect full 32 bit buses. There are ways to engineer around them, which is why upgrade boards are generally packed with tons of custom logic chips.
While the 68000 had 32 bit registers internally, most operations were 16 bits and only worked on half of the register at a time.
If Mac OS sends a "24 bit" operand to a 68020/68030, it's really sending 32 bits of data (24 bits of normal code plus the 8 bits of flags). The 68020/030 doesn't know the difference and will take this as a full 32 bit operand and try to execute it, causing undefined erratic behavior.
Engineering around a 16 bit data bus is a lot easier than a 24 bit address bus. If you have to perform a 32 bit operation, you just break it up into two 16 bit operations to load the data and two more to store each piece as it comes in. Many architectures do this, including the 68000 if it has to do a 32 bit operation on the bus.
I am actually not that interested in Mac (Apple in general), but love watching these types of vids where old machines get a lovely boost! Thanks for this.
Same
Same for me, but I watched so many of these videos that I ended up getting a Quadra 700 from eBay and hot rodded it to the max, including a PowerPC 601 accelerator card and full retrobright treatment.
It’s really easy to work on classic Macs and it gave me a new appreciation for the “Snow White” era. Besides, I couldn’t have afforded a fully-upgraded Quadra 700 when it was new, so it’s fun to be able to explore one now.
my heart dropped when i saw the garbled screen lol but glad its "kinda" working well. I think what you should do is copy the floppy disk install onto a floppy emu hd image and install the rest of the system stuff on there then go from there.
*uWu notices your stickers* Man, the crossover of furries and retro computing is always amusing to me, it's great to see we still have a bunch of awesome furry people who love old tech. And I guess Sean is fun too. I bet that whiteboard guy is a closet furry though. :D
owo
*notices your cute protogen stickers* OwO
Running Catalina on a custom workstation, macos has never felt so sweet.
@@Xurikyo Good proto :3
This is my favorite thing to watch every weekend even though I have the shakiest grasp imaginable of what's even going on.
Their taking machines that should have been in the scrapyard a long time ago and giving them seemingly impossible or difficult upgrades in the beloved year 2022
I just bought a mac classic off facebook market place. To my surprise when I opened it up I found one of these accelerator cards. Mine obviously was fitted with the classic connector. It makes my mac classic 3 times faster than stock. I have not tried to use it with a blue scsi. the original hard drive was working so I just kept it that way. Great video, the struggle to get these things working is the joy of collecting old computers. If it all just worked out of the box it wouldn't be as much fun.
Nice find, and totally agree!
Another excellent video as always Sean! The "killy-clip" seems like the weak link here. My OCD would tell me I need to clean those contacts with alcohol and verify "springiness" for positive contact with the CPU pins for thoroughness.
1:32 “cobbling” together a 386 system was a breeze with so many fully compatible inexpensive options.
Only if you were tech-savvy. For most people, A Mac Plus was a simpler proposition; as there were no real choices to be made… perhaps add a hard drive and printer; but there was really only a couple possibilities there as well; and if you wanted to stay 100% Apple, it was an HD20SC and an ImageWriter.
Building a PC was challenging in the 386 era, in the age of jumpers, before plug and play existed, especially having to navigate the IRQ/DMA assignment hell. Non-technical users would always choose a pre-made system instead. Things got easier during the Pentium era when most motherboards were auto configurable and plug and play was working okay.
Cool! The Mac Plus was my first computer in 1986... My Dad actually told me that he only just threw it in the garbage a few years ago... He didn't realise it was worth money!!
That's a pretty wicked upgrade for that beige bread box Mac. Keep up the excellent work action retro.. 👍
That clip-over chip, adapter socket, is absolutely brilliant!
I totally forgot about floppy swapping. What a wild reminder!
It's not the CPU that really generates the heat on these, it's the CRT and analog board. If you're worried about temps, get a Kensington System Saver or cut a proper fan vent and mount on the back of the case. Larry Pina's books have some good instructions for doing so.
Is this upgrade worth it? Maybe back in 1990 if the choice was between buying an accelerator for an existing Plus that has a hard drive and other accessories, or a brand-new SE/30. Nowadays people would probably want more for that upgrade card than a real SE/30. Either way, I'd say it's a "because it's there" sort of thing: there's some benefit but unless you're running programs entirely within the 256 bytes of L1 cache on the '030, it's not going to be anywhere close to the SE/30 in performance, mostly because of the Plus's slower and narrower (16 bits @ 8MHz) bus. Then there's still the RAM ceiling of the Plus (nowhere close to the 128MB of the SE/30), and the Plus doesn't support FDHD drives (except for third-party SCSI-based floppy drives). Finally, there's the fact that some software just won't cooperate because, even though there's an '030 and an '882 present, it still has Plus ROMs and so some fakery is required to get it to maybe possibly (but probably not) work.
I imagine any remaining System Savers could use a fan replacement.
We had Mac Plus workstations at the Music Technology department, and the easiest we worked with, was an extension called 'Ram Disk', that made it possible to boot from a system floppy, then load that same system OS in Ram, then eject that floppy, allowing you to insert the application floppy (MOTU's Performer) and go to work without having to keep floppy-swapping. Nifty little app!
Oh swapping floppies, something I NEVER will miss!
Installing windows 95 on floppies was hell! 😆
I always watch your videos when I’m on a trip and love seeing a new one. I’m not a mac man but your channel has converted me. Thank you.
What kind of trip? 🤔
Lol
Awesome protogen stickers XD
The floppy changing sequence made me giggle. Well done Sean - keep it up. 👍
a very good demo of what it was like IRL in those days, even though wtf, this thing has 4MB of RAM and only 2 800k floppies in play, how could it BE THIS BAD?!?
Loads of fun!! Looking forward to your next video and see what you do with it next! Thanks for sharing
Mac shenanigans are the reason I’m here! I’m sure it’s been mentioned somewhere but how do I get my hands on that shirt!
It's from the @mac84 channel!
"Read state change?! What the hell does that mean?" -- shades of Office Space "PC Load Letter" there
Those protogen stickers will eat your ram.
It would certainly be interesting if someone ran A/UX on the Macintosh Plus
you got some protogen stickers, nice!
*notices you*
yea proot stickers i was like waiiiit what are they doing there its not that kind of channel but its fun to see the same stickers which i see on telegram
@@OtioseFanatic owo
An Action Retro video ending on a cursed cliffhanger? Love it.
My Mac plus was awesome piece of technology. And oh boy when i got me an external disc drive, that was thrilling time to be a life, no more endless switching floppies. And i remember to this day how envy i was to my friend that had PC with 120 MB hard drive. Not GB a MB...
APPLE: THONK DIFFERENT
Lol nice. Furry and Protogen stickers
yup some proots
I had a lot of problems getting my bluescsi to work and even now it will occasional fail to boot.
A 16 or 25mhz 68030 runs cool enough to not require a fan. These power many PowerBook models with considerably less space with no fan and they don’t even have passive cooling.
I started my vintage mac collection in the late 90's, the first was a Performa 5215 which was okay. Then I bought a 145b and 180c which blew me away for they were like coloring books coming to life. Within the next few years, I was given a few Plus's and an SE which sat for years before I'd figure out how to boot them... Although the Plus would boot from floppies but it also came with an external HD which I had to take the top off and kick start it to boot... After watching the needle move across the disc and then stuff would appear on screen which made it a favorite in it's own quirky way. I never really mind how slow it was though, I just thought of it as the little Mac that could. I simply hated the SE for being so ugly and when I finally got around to it, I was totally shocked and surprised at how crisp the screen was and also it's speed. What sat it off was a program called lip service that greeted and told you the time as it booted...
You make a comparison to a 386 at the start of the video, but consider that in 1986 a 386 was absolutely the top of the line money could buy.
The Mac Plus is much more inline with something like a Turbo XT, which could cost less than $1000.
Oh, and the Amiga 500 existed, which bested the Mac Plus in every possible way to the point it could run Mac software.
A barebone Turbo XT could be bought in the back of Computer shopper for $599. With a 20 Mb hard drive and Color Monitor, you are up to $1500. Giving you a machine with higher Resolution (Hercules graphics 720x348) Color and a Hard drive. None of which the Plus had out of the box.
Your youtube channel is amazing! I watch this every night to learn more about the macintosh, specially the macintosh plus. Absolutely amazing that you turned an original macintosh to a macintosh plus, plus plus.
Btw those are some pretty nice protogen stickers! Just watch them overnight, or else they might eat your RAM sticks! 10:28
Love seeing those old Macs!
What a coincidence, I just ordered a blueSCSI the other day. The seller did specifically state that it came unflashed, but I've never used a Blue Pill before. I did order the STLink programmer, so hopefully it will be pretty straightforward. It's supposed to come with a Blue Pill, so at least I'll have a spare if I totally screw up the original one!
That reminds me, I'll also need to order a micro SD card to use with the thing.
Anyway, hopefully you can lift the curse and get your Mac Plus working stably with the upgrade.
The fact that the INIT works in 6.0.7 but does not work in 7.1.x makes me think there's a compatibility issue right there. There were many System 6 programs and INITs/extensions that did not work properly in 7 and 7.1. Is there a newer extension?
Memory addressing was also an issue between 6 and 7 -- you'd have to turn off 32 bit memory addressing to get some older software to work. Not sure if that would impact the plus at all, as it would generally impact 030's like the SE/30 that had 'dirty ROMs'. But since the upgrade is an 030, maybe it does apply here.
I have zero experience with this era of Macs but as an IT person for 30 years that’s what my gut told me too.
Have you tried using Mini Vmac to put the drivers in the image and then boot from that?
Maybe the big problem with the upgrade is that it overclocks the bus and you get crashes when there are collisions on the data lines?
That is a 512K not a Plus. The Plus actually said “Macintosh Plus” on the front and had a recessed logo, not the square indent.
Probably upgraded using the official upgrade kit (which I understand cost almost as much as a new machine). I have one just like it. 😊
great video aaa the m68k + i remember in my school in music class we had one of these with macOS 6.0 or something it has a cool piano program on it thats about all i remember about it... nobody seem to care much for mac ... we like our hp and compaq back then or our model m ibm
I consider whether to subscribe to the channel with every video, and I always have more than a few reasons to continue! 😁
3:02 gettin' fancy lol
Protogen Mac! 😻😻😻
Those stickers are adorable
so i wasnt the only one to immediately go like "oh look, the seller is a protogen"
RPi Picos aren't hard to find. They've been particularly good at remaining available during chip shortages.
"No chime... and garbage... excellent." :D
Not system 7 compatible. A lot of older upgrades were not. You can try 7.0.1.
…or 6.0.8!
Best retro computer channel on UA-cam and I don't even like Macs 🤣
The seller of the accelerator card is a cute protogen :3
EDIT: Oh shit, and you play Magic too, Sean? The memes are colliding :D
That moment when your drive has more processing power than the computer it’s connected to.
Love to see these unobtaniums in action. Also, did you mod the plus board to power scsi, or does blue scsi not need external power on a plus?
I was using external power for it, but I'm going to do that mod
There was also an ‘040 accelerator for the SE30 itself.
1:34 That said, you certainly wouldn't build a DOS computer around an 80386 yourself in 1986. Not only were they much more expensive, MS-DOS also still lacked (built-in + 3rd party) facilities to use that whole whopping megabyte of RAM and OS/2, the operating system of a different future, wouldn't ship until the next year and still only use 80286 features. It's much more likely someone had already somehow shoved a 68020 into their Macintosh Plus at the time.
He's cherry picking with the Compaq machine. They were literally the most expensive "clone" At the time (1986) you could buy a barebone Turbo XT machine with 640K of Ram and a single 360K floppy for $599.
I can't recall seeing old ie. 286 that wouldn't have had power passthrough on it's PSU for monitor.
Shhh... he's reaching for reasons this turd didn't suck.
That was pretty funny. I really thought there was just a weird reflection on that screen… then you stuck your hand in.. hah!
I didn't even know you could get an 030 accelerator for a Plus! I have a Plus with 4 megs and SCSI2SD setup at my office for display. Since I now have a VARIETY of compact Macs, I finally just now bit the bullet and ordered a BlueSCSI so I can swap them among machines, especially among the SE, SE/30, Classic, Classic II, Color Classic, II, IIfx, etc. It seems this is the easiest way to go since it's the best of both worlds of being interchangeable and still having a clean appearance, well, unless you're looking at the back of the machine ;) I think I'll leave the accelerators to you, at least for now LOL.
At my last office job, some 20 something didn't believe me that Mac was short for Macintosh.
PS. I'd pay good money for a modern Mac M3 in that classic form factor
Would love to see you mess about with a few Acorn computers at some point. :D
Just ordered a metal print from PCB way, didn’t even know they did that until I looked.
"One keyboard and one monitor in one outlet." Not if you wanted to use a hard disc, without which the Mac Plus experience was pretty terrible. I had a Rodime 20 Plus, my first ever hard disc, and I thought it was amazing.
Also ignoring the fact that most XT and AT power supplies of the time have a passthough for the monitor to connect to.
@@dennisp.2147 Yes. The successor to my Mac Plus, a cheap Goldstar PC used for university work, had exactly that and an internal HDD, so it did work from one socket.
I've been wanting one of these for ages to put in my Mac Classic so I can futz with A/UX on a machine with no business running it
Ah, yes. Extending your touch. One of the only proper usages for an M:TG rules reference card. The other being breaking into your apartment when you've locked your keys inside and you need to use the card trick to slip past your lock.
I love your humor. These videos always make my day heheh
11:08 And people say spending money on Magic cards isn't practical!
Wonderful .. brought back so many memories 😂
Rumor has it, the world's most powerful super computer is just a Mac Plus to the infinity power
as a furry some of the stickers are pretty funny
yup the Proots protogen stickers
Nice little homage to Rayman! I request a doodley-doo next time.
I sure don't miss swapping disks back and forth like that. I guess most of the time it wasn't needed, but when installing stuff like this it sure was a pain. I guess the dual floppy SE was a bit rare because by then it was more likely you'd have an HDD?
The internet needs a skit where a Mac is pushed off the table
congrats on 64k subs
That plus must have the scsi diode mod if it powered that BlueSCSI
I wonder if the bluescsi issue is power related, maybe the accelerator board is drawing enough that there's not a lot share to run the drive. Can you externally power those?
I know my life is completely pathetic when I get ready for bed at night and I’m just waiting to see what he could do with an old Mac 😂
I’ve wanted an accelerator for my Mac plus for a long time. I guess they are hard to find?
I guess this might come from my back ground, when someone says "x is intimidating"
I just remember now matter how complicated something is, in the Army, if you yell at it and the right people long enough, you'll learn how to make it work.
Your channel wouldn't be as much fun if everything went right the first time 🙂
You needed a disk with the mac plus. Typically I had a scsi disk that I had plugged into mine.
What an upgrade!
I wish i could also have a Mac, but i (mostly) live in Germany and they are rare, because no one really used Apple computer in the 80's and 90's. I know exactly one person which did have one in the late 90's, a macintosh Performa 5200 all-in-one and it was not really a great machine. The biggest reason against it was Software. There was not a lot of software with european language support.
In the 80's most people used IBM compatibles from Siemens-Nixdorf and, the C64, but most importantly the AMIGA family of computers. The AMIGA had a big influence in our culture, because of the Demoscene and most important it's role in mainstream EDM. Sven Väth was a big fan of the AMIGA, he even dedicated a whole album to it "16BIT Inaxycvgtgtb" (yes that's the name). I do own a signed LP of this album, which was a limited version bundled with a coupon for discount on an AMIGA 1000. The C64 and the AMIGA were also the reason why we didn't have a "Video game crash", because most people were playing games on computers.
In the 90's it was all just IBM clones and real IBM ThinkPads, because they were the best laptops. My dad worked at Siemens-Nixdorf and he used a ThinkPad. IBM didn't sell many desktop PC's here tho. Siemens had the monopoly until they sld themselves to the japanese, which gradually worsened the product quality. Fujitsu computers just gotten so bad. Kinda the same fate as IBM. Modern Lenovo ThinkPads are not even anywhere close to the quality standards IBM had.
With the Thinkpad quality: The best Thinkpads are the ones, after Lenovo took over the lineup. T60/61, T400, T410, T420 and the T430 are the best Thinkpads ever made, in my opinion and a lot of others. After this they went more for an apple style, because "premium". With Fujitsu: actually they are not bad. Good quality parts in them. My Pentium 4 Scaleo still works today and it is from time of capacitor plague (one cap failed, but one of 25 caps). And I seen it on other machines from fujitsu, too. But these where also machines, which where not cheap back than.
@@FoxMccloud42 The T430 was one of the worst for me, because the new keyboard feel like short travel calculator keys and as terrible as the ones from other laptops. The classic ThinkPad keyboard had a more tactile and clicky feel to it. . Lenovo also ditched the UltraBay and the X-series portable docking station. More and more of the unique IBM Thinkpad features got removed. The biggest nope was when they ditched the removable battery. Now they are just generic laptops, with the name ThinkPad written on them.
Siemens used sturdy metal for their desktop PC cases, now under Fujitsus Name, they are wobbly thin sheets with lower quality plastics.
@@hyperturbotechnomike With the T430: You can swap it with the Keyboard from the T420 (My T430 has the original keyboard because I prefer the backlight which the T420 keyboard does not has). With the newer Thinkpads: A lot of press people said the design of older thinkpads are outdated and does feel plastic and not "premium" like the macbook (which breaks just from a drop of 10cm). There are even people saying Lenovo should ditch the trackpoint, because it is "outdated" and a bigger trackpad is much better. Thats why the quality of the Thinkpads went down and with it the modularity. Because everyone want all the notebooks to be in essence Macbook-clones (with all the problems of them).
With Fujitsu and Siemens: Back in the old times everything was heavy because to suggest quality. The used thicker metal or just but some lead in to the chassis. I have an old cassete deck which is heavy, but when I looked in it, there was nothing what should be heavy. It was build heavy so people think it is a quality product.
Also companies, who buy the fujitsu computer, don't need suchs steardy and heavy chassis. It cost extra in purchase and in shipping and when you can save 40€ (for example) per unit and you buy 100 because you are a business you can save 4000€. And once they are deployed, they wont be moved (no need for sturdy cases) until they get thrown away. Most companies throw them in to the trash instead of selling them and depending on the company who are recycling the pcs for them sometimes they charge them on the kilo and so ligther less sturdy cases are better.
And when sturdy cases are needed, you normaly pick an industrial pc, because often the pcs are then in rough enviroments.
im about the biggest anti Mac guy you could ever imagine. Despite having owned several cult items over the years.......thanks wife........ Having said that, love the channel. Big fan of retro tech being a old man.
it's not the weekend if i don't see you slap an old mac on its head
Where the heck to you keep finding all these random obscure upgrade cards 😂
Now I see why your video didn't come out until Sunday - I'm sure you were trying everything possible until the last second to try to get things working... 😀
I think that comparison around 1:38 is a bit unfair - 286s were really more comparable, and the prices are much more reasonable when you're looking at 286s in 1987 instead of 386s.
Also, that price at 3:39 was from the mid-90s, so obviously it cost a whole lot less than the SE/30 initially cost at retail many years prior.
Not at all surprised that that retro computing person is a furry, and even less surprised their Sona is a protogen.
I've had similar problems with the BlueSCSI also, in this case on a Macintosh IIsi with a Daystar Powercache 33mhz 68030 accelerator. I recall it being OK when I was first setting it up without the accelerator installed, but once I put it in and installed the extension it started getting more and more slow and unstable, although my memory may be faulty. Eventually I had to switch to using an external Apple 3gb hard drive, which works without a hitch. I wonder if there's a compatibility problem with accelerators and modern SD card readers.
"It was the best computer the could buy!"
_Laughs in Commodore Amiga_
Yeah, soon after the A2000 was released, a total beast for the money.
@@elmosexwhistle I recall a quote attributed to Jean Louis Gasee who was Apple's head of engineering for Europe who said that when the Amiga came out they were in a panic - it was yoinks better than a Macintosh at way less the price...but they calmed down when they realized Commodore had no idea how to market it.
it worked! thank you so much!!
Awesome video! thanks!
You make me think you're italian by how much you move your hands while talking
Haha "Funny stickers"
It's so cursed that it's made you sick...or at least sound like you're sick. 🤣
With all that floppy swapping - I was wondering - why not just image those disks to the floppy emu or similar and just "swap" them virtually - could save a ton of time and effort, methinks. Also, not sure what the first 'hack' was you mentioned (something about a resistor removal?) but perhaps that could contribute to the issues?
I'm dug my Mac Plus out the other day and I'm going to tear it down later today with my floppy emu and whatever else I can find. It's been far too long since I ran it.
What's the "best" OS for it? 7.1? 7.5? So far as I know, it's stock, but I might be able to get it up to 4MB RAM. Likely will just use it for some writing and MAYBE some old-school (not intensive) gaming.
Thanks as always for the great content.
For price comparison, why would you compare a Compaq with the newly release 386 CPU to a Macintosh with a old 68000 CPU?
Because otherwise it makes the Mac look like the terrible bargain it really was. Here's a better comparison. 1/2 of a New 1986 Honda Civic.
I have a PerformerPro! But mine is the Classic version.
Would love if you could get your hands on and upgrade a Performa 6200… that was my childhood Mac. What a piece of junk. I loved that thing though
Was there ever a sequel to this video? I dont see one, but might be icerlooking it.
BTW Floopy Emu has known compatibility issues with accelerators, at least on the SE, and i assume with the Plus as qell. On my SE with the same card the machine dreezes on boot and the Floppy EMU shiws the "wait state changed" message.
Always awesome.
You forgot the standoooffss
Love the vids keep it up!
I love your content
How about a Macintosh Plus Plus Plus Plus Plus? Or even a Macintosh Minus.