So many hours playing Marathon and its community maps. Deus Irae was my favorite. Gotta practice those grenade jumps and then the super punches where you hit space bar and the back key at the same time...
Awesome video! The extra effort to schedule an appearance from Maccy and Twoee was appreciated. :) This looks like a lovely machine to use and maintain. I certainly wasn't expecting to be in (near?) NOS condition.
Super cool (and super clean)! The PowerPC 604 was a real powerhouse when it came out -- really put the hurt to the P5 Pentiums back in the day. Also: shoutout to Chex Quest! Such a cursed creation!
I had a Power Computing machine when I was working for a startup in SF back in the 90's. I have fond memories of the computer, the startup, not so much.
I used one of those at a Ma and Pa ISP I worked for that ran entirely on Mac. Eudora Internet Mail Server, Mac Radius, FileMaker CRM and billing, some Mac based DNS and FTP server, Imagina News Server. We managed it all using Timbuktu to log into each system. We also had an AIX Big Mac for a file server. We had to give out discs with the TCP/IP stack and dialer since it didn’t come with the OS. We eventually ripped it all out and rebuilt it on Solaris and Red Hat.
Wow, what a great You Tube channel you have. Back during this time frame (1996/1997) is when, I picked-up my first Apple system an All-in-One 5400 with a 603(e) processor. At the time of purchase, I also picked-up the Apple video Card system and the Apple TV/FM radio Card system with its matching black remote control. While, this system died decades ago, about 10-years ago, I was able to replace it in my collection with an All-in-One 5500 which, has the same look and form factor (smile...smile).
I really want to get a clone to add to my retro collection. These things fascinate me more all the time. I remember a friend of mine had one in the mid 90s, but I was a PC guy back then. Congratulations on getting such a nice one for your collection!
I remember those. At the time I was into PCs and Windows (and DOS) but I remember them. It is neat to have one in your own library. Thank you for sharing.
This brings back memories. My first desktop Mac was a Power Computing Power Tower 180e. It was a great machine. It, sadly, died by way of a lightning strike four years after owning it. Great video!
Back in the late 90’s I worked for Mitsui Computers in Australia. We were the Australian distributor for Power Computing. I was one of the techs who serviced them. I also worked on large printers, plotters and Sun workstations and servers. Good times.
We had some Mac clones in the computer labs at my university in the early 2000's, and while they were getting a little long in the tooth by then, they still got the job done. I think ours were made by a company called "Starmax" or something like that. They looked just like late 90's beige towers, but with the telltale lack of eject buttons on the floppy and CD-ROM drives. Since I never owned one myself, I have no idea if the clones were as reliable as "real" Macs, but I thought they were a cool idea at the time. Since I was "just a kid" until after the clone program ended, though, they moved from "something I want to buy" to "something I can't buy (new)" too quickly for me!
I was vaguely aware of PowerComputing and Mac clones in general in the 90s, but I was also only vaguely aware of Macintoshes in the 90s. We had a couple in our dorm computer lab circa 1995 and I _think_ they were 60MHz. All I used them for was going on the then very new world wide web. Pretty impressive to see a Mac-like in the 132MHz range from the same time period.
I purchased a UMAX SuperMac in late 1997. It had a 233 MHz PowerPC 604e CPU and a video graphics accelerator card (I think this was the first computer I had that had a dedicated GPU). The specs on this machine were roughly equal to Apple's top of the line Tower Power Mac computer but at half the price! Also, this was the mid-range model UMAX SuperMac. For more money, they had an even more powerful Tower model!
A 3rd party was making better Apple computers for less money than what Apple was charging for worse ones. A great testament to the state of mid 90's Apple.
Part of the issue was that Power Computing didn’t have the volume requirements that Apple did. Motorola/IBM were happy to sell them (I’m making up the numbers) 1k 500Mhz PPC 604 CPUs, but Apple would’ve needed 50k of them to launch their high-end computer so they couldn’t get CPUs faster than 450MHz.
"Better" is questionable. You heard the fan noise in that video, for instance. There were some unequivocally better clones, like the Radius 81/110 etc, but they also cost nearly $10,000
It's not a problem unique to Apple, look at the early PC clones that did the same to IBM. The price wars then killed off many PC and peripheral manufacturers. It's not an uncommon occurrence in business, especially when like Apple, a company promotes their products as boutique, high end products with a price to match.
I worked at apple in Elk Grove CA and they did keep a Starmax clone around just to remind everyone how much Steve Jobs considered licensing MacOS was a horrible mistake. This was around 1998 - about 2001. Before you ask yes I did meet both Mr Jobs and Woz (met Mr. Wozniak outside of apple at gaming convention in Sacramento). I miss my days there but I no longer live in California and i DONT miss California lol
I am brand new to this channel but I love the demonstration of the older systems. I was a Commodore 64 user and I have purchased some of the original Commodores as well as the remake.
It almost feels like cheating to look at that beige box and think…what if? I do like the vga port. I tried using an adapter on my 9600 but didn’t get the same results you did. Excellent video with superb production value and mac-simum geekery!
Gran canal de los clones de Macintosh Power,no sabia que habia saludos desde Peru -Latinoamerica,creo que podian correr también el sistema operativo BeOS
Ah yes I remember the day these came out. I still have the CD. These were rough based on Apple’s CHRP architecture just like the PowerMac 4400 was. Nearly the same case.
I got this exact machine new in 1996 when I was in college. it was the shit! Thousand dollars cheaper than the comparable mac. I got on hotline and had all the software!
I remember when I was heavily into CBM Amigas, and when CBM died, a lot of Amiga retailers started promoting Apple clones in the magazines. I drooled at machines like this, with their super fast PPC chips etc. Unfortunately, they were always beyond my means back then. Being quite rare, they still are! Ms Fox definitely needs a bigger 'studio', it looks very cramped in there. 🙂
Ciao, congratulations for your super sympathic video ❤️ my first Mac Computer was a PowerMac 7200 with MacOS 8.6, later a PowerMac G3 and G4, great times.. as for now i'm using a PC with Debian Linux 12.. many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃 ps. i will share your video at WhatsApp and at mewe..
omg I have one of those in my basement :O I used to play on this computer as a kid, the hard drive died and I have to figure out how I (or someone else) can perform data recovery off of it.
I am technolusting after these clones. I like their look and their configurations. If / when I ever get the time (retirement??), I want to get a few classic Macs and create something in some 90s 3D programs, like Infini-D, Strata Studio, Form-Z and EIAS. I want to see how far I could push these old apps. (I currently own a non-functioning IIcx and a malfunctioning 2010 5,1 MacPro tower. Not that anyone asked 🙂)
Nice video. I wasn't so lucky - I have one that's also in its original box, but the Tadiran battery leaked all over the system board and case. The faceplate is immaculate, but the motherboard and inside of the case? It looks like someone had used it outside in Galveston for a few years! Also, I think the mismatched RAM is normal, as mine had the same mismatched DIMMs.
Power Computing had great clones while they lasted. They did not last long because they lost their license from Apple for speeding! In fact, the first commercially available home computer to beat the 200MHZ barrier was a Mac Clone made by Power Computing. Apple's top speed was 150MHZ at the time! Power Computing on some of their models also boosted the bus clock speed to 60MHZ when most Apples topped out at 50MHZ!
I have a power computing invoice and a letter from when steve jobs terminated the company sometimes the hard drives get stuck a little bit and you can tap them and they start running then.
Had these at my school in the lab with some older 386s and 286s. So weird using the very PC-like mouse and computer form factor (and the keyboards could be more Mac-like and or more PC-like or halfway in between depending on the model, I think?) with MacOS on the PowerPC s.
Odd that it doesn't have a CPU fan. I got a Power Center Pro 180 tower a few months ago and it has a small fan mounted to a weird plastic bracket that snaps onto the crossbar.
Sounds like the hard drive has stiction, preventing it from booting. If you tap a screwdriver against the side or top of the HDD, it may start spinning again and boot up. If not, it's likely the System Folder for MacOS isn't "blessed" or got corrupted. Does 'IDKFA' work in the Chex WAD of Doom?
Kinda interesting in that it looks almost like something partway between a Mac and a PC (with a 90s PC style case and PCI slots, but still using SCSI and similar rather than IDE, etc). I remember Doom as this was a game that had been around since my childhood (along with Quake and similar); but had never seen or messed around with Chex Quest. Never saw any of those computers in my childhood (had seen a few Mac's though, such as the Mac II variants or similar, but mostly had encountered PCs). For my own project (involving a custom CPU core running a custom ISA on an FPGA), I am using Doom and Quake/GLQuake as some of my main test cases. Quake performance was pretty bad at 50MHz though, but recently I had been hacking around a bunch with the Verilog and have "sort of" got it up to 75MHz (while keeping most of the ISA and L1 caches intact), which should (hopefully) allow for slightly better GLQuake performance (along with another recent project of implementing a hardware rasterizer; though for "technical reasons" kind of ends up looking like "What if someone ran GLQuake on the original PlayStation?"). Does manage to run Doom typically in 16-30 fps territory (or 20-34 fps at 75MHz). Though, it is like I had gone full circle, building a custom processor and then using it to run code that had so much confused me back when I was still young and first learning C. Though, ironically, my CPU project is slower than the PCs I had in elementary school (this being partly in the era of the Pentium and Win95 and similar). By the time I was getting into 3D graphics programming (in high-school), PCs had already moved over to GPUs and the battle of OpenGL vs Direct3D, etc... Though, technically, the FPGA boards have more RAM than these PCs, but it doesn't seem like much by modern standards. How the PC's ran so well with so little RAM, or managed to pull off GUI's with usable performance, are still mysteries that elude me it seems (I can get full motion video playback to work sort of OK on it, along with semi-usable OpenGL, etc, but can't seem to manage to get a 640x400 "GUI" to redraw much faster than around 8 or 10 fps, ...). Where, say, each window has a backing buffer, and drawing a bitmap into a window triggers the GUI to redraw the window stack and copy/re-encode the internal framebuffer out to the graphics/VRAM framebuffer (internally, the screen update using an RGB555 buffer, but then re-encoding it into color-cell or similar, with the display VRAM using a character-cell / color-cell oriented format, rather than a conventional linear framebuffer). There not being sufficient RAM bandwidth to manage 640x480 hi-color at 60Hz; so one needs to settle with 640x400 4bpp color-cell (4x4 pixel cells with 2x RGB555 colors, and 2 interpolated colors) or 800x600 2bpp color-cell (8x8 pixel cells with 2x RGB555 colors, no interpolation). In a way, old computers still have mysteries, and ironically, I owe some debt to retro-computing videos in part for giving me ideas that allowed me to make as much progress as I have (like, "borrowing" ideas from technology of the past). Even if a lot of it is technology I had never really used myself. It seems like there are some parts of the past I still don't really understand though. As for "modern" games, I don't really do much beyond poking around in Minecraft. I didn't really get much into the "modern era" much past Half-Life 2 and Portal and similar (HL2 came out when I was in high-school, and Portal while I was taking college classes). Seemed like most of the games mostly got caught up in obsessing about graphical effects, and not really doing much that got me all that interested in playing them. Though, Undertale and Deltarune were kinda interesting, but possibly don't really count (and Undertale is almost a decade ago already...).
6:31 - oh wow... I think those might be the same (or at least very similar) RAM chips swinging into view as I got used to upgrading in Indigo and Indy (and other) computers at Silicon Graphics (SGI), back in the day... and yet, two sizes here? Dunno if the smaller slots are also RAM or something else, or what. Let's see if you get into it... *watches some more*... Ahh, 7:06 - VRAM... OK, that could make sense. Huh, 7:48 - 1GB, huh? Big spender, back in those days! :) [I don't remember what a 1GB drive cost in 1996, but I do remember drives being about $1000/GB circa 1992/1993 or so -- and then seeing an 8GB drive for like $1200, which was jaw-dropping (if still way out of reach of what my young self could afford at the time).] 9:11 - ooh, do I sense a whole HCI series? I just learned about your channel yesterday, am watching for the first time today (with thanks to Veronica Explains giving you a shout-out in the "OpenSSH is about to change (for the better)" video), and... Yeah, I'm excited to see what else you'll come up with! And/or already have recorded for me to peruse. Subscribed! :) 9:35 - I kinda miss the D&K nubs, to be honest. My index fingers often float above the keyboard, whereas my middle fingers more or less rest on it... Maybe I can make some nubs with epoxy or something. I'll have to experiment. :) 10:15 - oh my goodness, best self-correct (err, I mean... from within your studio, anyway ;) ) I think I've ever seen. Love it. Scripted or no, I love it. :)
I had a Mac clone back in the day, a Radius 81/110. Basically a PowerMac 8100 in bigger all steel case. It was built like a tank. I later upgraded it a G3 card from Sonnet and it flew. So many of these machines were thrown away because they looked like PCs. The licensed clones were always intended to just grow the market, with Apple doing most of the engineering to license motherboards. All the cloners had to do was design the cases, and build Apple’s boards, which they were able to do much more cheaply. It was never going to work out well. This is contrast to the IBM/AT clones that were reversed engineered by Compaq and others. That is straight up stolen.
Ermahgerd! A retro Mac channel with a female host! And a Macintosh and a IIe with googly eyes and a cowboy hat! I'm going into cute overload! Where have you been my entire life!
Huh, that case looks just like the Dells of slightly later. Like, suspiciously so. Like they used the same designer. Which would make sense given how they shut down and Dell was in the same city i think.
![[Labs] Upgrading Your 1996 Mac Clone: Bryce 3D, Tomb Raider, Quake!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/C4dAwoLGMTg/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Labs] Upgrading Your 1996 Mac Clone: Bryce 3D, Tomb Raider, Quake!](/img/tr.png)
![[Labs] Upgrading my NeXT Computers!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nuppqSRPW5Q/mqdefault.jpg)
The Power Computing machines are incredible machines. I have fond memories of working with this system running OS 7 and 8. Thank you for sharing this.
Probably the coziest channel on youtube
A company giving a snacks-themed Doom to kids as a promotion is very 90's
I wish they had more cereal / doom themed WADs
So many hours playing Marathon and its community maps. Deus Irae was my favorite. Gotta practice those grenade jumps and then the super punches where you hit space bar and the back key at the same time...
I came for your beauty ❤ and I stayed because it is a great channel 👏
Still awesome to see an old computer in that condition AND complete with the box and accessories.
These clones were awesome.
Came from Veronica Explains!
Loved this, and the bits with Maccy were very funny.
Excited to see more!
Trifecta.. very well done video, great hardware and an attractive librarian. ❤
WOW! All that CGI ! Must be the future now.
Exactly!
Awesome video! The extra effort to schedule an appearance from Maccy and Twoee was appreciated. :)
This looks like a lovely machine to use and maintain. I certainly wasn't expecting to be in (near?) NOS condition.
Thank you for these videos. I was never a Mac guy in the 90s, it's neat to see what I missed out on.
Super cool (and super clean)! The PowerPC 604 was a real powerhouse when it came out -- really put the hurt to the P5 Pentiums back in the day. Also: shoutout to Chex Quest! Such a cursed creation!
Your videos are always a great mixture of humor, fun, and learning. Love them.
Next level opening skit
Thank you 😊 Action Retro Sean !
ACTION RETRO!!!!1!11111111111!11111!!1!!!1!!
I wonder where my copy of Chex Quest is these days. It is cool seeing these machines. Great video as usual. Thank you.
I had a Power Computing machine when I was working for a startup in SF back in the 90's. I have fond memories of the computer, the startup, not so much.
I used one of those at a Ma and Pa ISP I worked for that ran entirely on Mac. Eudora Internet Mail Server, Mac Radius, FileMaker CRM and billing, some Mac based DNS and FTP server, Imagina News Server. We managed it all using Timbuktu to log into each system. We also had an AIX Big Mac for a file server. We had to give out discs with the TCP/IP stack and dialer since it didn’t come with the OS.
We eventually ripped it all out and rebuilt it on Solaris and Red Hat.
Awesome episode Ms. Fox! Didn't even know Mac clones were a thing. We second the early Tablet/Wacom episode!
Your videos are always a nice break from the rush outside. Here we talk about details, about old stuff, because we can and want to.
This is pretty cool and quirky. I came here based on a recommendation from Veronica Explains and I'll be checking out lots more of your content. 🖖
Awesome possum! Thank you Ms. Fox!
🤣 Maccy: "Not a Mac!" 🤣
Wow, what a great You Tube channel you have. Back during this time frame (1996/1997) is when, I picked-up my first Apple system an All-in-One 5400 with a 603(e) processor. At the time of purchase, I also picked-up the Apple video Card system and the Apple TV/FM radio Card system with its matching black remote control. While, this system died decades ago, about 10-years ago, I was able to replace it in my collection with an All-in-One 5500 which, has the same look and form factor (smile...smile).
Brand new? Im so jealous! And a 604 too! Love your channel
I really want to get a clone to add to my retro collection. These things fascinate me more all the time. I remember a friend of mine had one in the mid 90s, but I was a PC guy back then. Congratulations on getting such a nice one for your collection!
Your videos always teach me something and brighten my day!
Came from Veronica Explains! Loved the video :D
Ma'am we (at least I) do not get enough content from you and Maccy!! But I do appreciate what we get. Thank you
I remember those. At the time I was into PCs and Windows (and DOS) but I remember them. It is neat to have one in your own library.
Thank you for sharing.
I don't think I've ever seen a clone in real life, so this is as close as I'll get for now! Thanks for sharing.
I'm not a mac-nut but a mere left outer join from veronica explain's.
Huh???
Amazing find and, boy is it chonky! =) Thanks for showing it off!
Oh my gosh, Marathon running live on an authentic hardware 🥰
This brings back memories. My first desktop Mac was a Power Computing Power Tower 180e. It was a great machine. It, sadly, died by way of a lightning strike four years after owning it. Great video!
Good to see you back Maccy! 🎉❤
Back in the late 90’s I worked for Mitsui Computers in Australia. We were the Australian distributor for Power Computing. I was one of the techs who serviced them. I also worked on large printers, plotters and Sun workstations and servers. Good times.
That cowboy Apple IIe should be the star of a children's cartoon.
I had one of those (after they were kinda obsolete, I got it cheap) - it's pretty cool! And a NIB (or barely used one with the box) is amazing!
Played many hours of Marathon at my uncle's work on their lan. Fun times 😊
Funny opening credits! 😂
We had some Mac clones in the computer labs at my university in the early 2000's, and while they were getting a little long in the tooth by then, they still got the job done. I think ours were made by a company called "Starmax" or something like that. They looked just like late 90's beige towers, but with the telltale lack of eject buttons on the floppy and CD-ROM drives.
Since I never owned one myself, I have no idea if the clones were as reliable as "real" Macs, but I thought they were a cool idea at the time. Since I was "just a kid" until after the clone program ended, though, they moved from "something I want to buy" to "something I can't buy (new)" too quickly for me!
Yayyy more vids about Clones🔥
Reutn of the Mac(k) as the closing song was everything!
always wondered what 1996 smelled like 🤣 great video!
What does 1996 smell like? Pogs and Jawbreakers?
With a side of Surge.
Zima and Crystal Pepsi.
I was vaguely aware of PowerComputing and Mac clones in general in the 90s, but I was also only vaguely aware of Macintoshes in the 90s. We had a couple in our dorm computer lab circa 1995 and I _think_ they were 60MHz. All I used them for was going on the then very new world wide web. Pretty impressive to see a Mac-like in the 132MHz range from the same time period.
Chex quest was the best Doom TC of it's era.
I purchased a UMAX SuperMac in late 1997. It had a 233 MHz PowerPC 604e CPU and a video graphics accelerator card (I think this was the first computer I had that had a dedicated GPU). The specs on this machine were roughly equal to Apple's top of the line Tower Power Mac computer but at half the price! Also, this was the mid-range model UMAX SuperMac. For more money, they had an even more powerful Tower model!
A 3rd party was making better Apple computers for less money than what Apple was charging for worse ones. A great testament to the state of mid 90's Apple.
It was the same thing with the Laser 128 and the Apple II. Apple's prices have always been... questionable...
Part of the issue was that Power Computing didn’t have the volume requirements that Apple did. Motorola/IBM were happy to sell them (I’m making up the numbers) 1k 500Mhz PPC 604 CPUs, but Apple would’ve needed 50k of them to launch their high-end computer so they couldn’t get CPUs faster than 450MHz.
"Better" is questionable. You heard the fan noise in that video, for instance. There were some unequivocally better clones, like the Radius 81/110 etc, but they also cost nearly $10,000
It's not a problem unique to Apple, look at the early PC clones that did the same to IBM. The price wars then killed off many PC and peripheral manufacturers. It's not an uncommon occurrence in business, especially when like Apple, a company promotes their products as boutique, high end products with a price to match.
I worked at apple in Elk Grove CA and they did keep a Starmax clone around just to remind everyone how much Steve Jobs considered licensing MacOS was a horrible mistake. This was around 1998 - about 2001. Before you ask yes I did meet both Mr Jobs and Woz (met Mr. Wozniak outside of apple at gaming convention in Sacramento). I miss my days there but I no longer live in California and i DONT miss California lol
I thought you might find a leaky battery inside, that would have been a shame. Cool machine. Hi Maccy!
Fun fact Robin Williams wrote a book about the Apple Mac
great content ☺️ subscribed after a few mins of watching this
Awesome! Thank you!
You said "Oh my Glob" nice adventure time reference heh...
love the ending musics
I am brand new to this channel but I love the demonstration of the older systems. I was a Commodore 64 user and I have purchased some of the original Commodores as well as the remake.
I kinda liked how the set looked all half-lit like that! A bit more light on you would obviously help though.
It almost feels like cheating to look at that beige box and think…what if? I do like the vga port. I tried using an adapter on my 9600 but didn’t get the same results you did. Excellent video with superb production value and mac-simum geekery!
Gran canal de los clones de Macintosh Power,no sabia que habia saludos desde Peru -Latinoamerica,creo que podian correr también el sistema operativo BeOS
Ah yes I remember the day these came out. I still have the CD. These were rough based on Apple’s CHRP architecture just like the PowerMac 4400 was. Nearly the same case.
I'm working on a PowerCenter Pro 180. I thought the Open Firmware was bug-y on the Power Mac 7500, but wow! The 180 has a FAR more bug-y OF.
I got this exact machine new in 1996 when I was in college. it was the shit! Thousand dollars cheaper than the comparable mac. I got on hotline and had all the software!
I remember when I was heavily into CBM Amigas, and when CBM died, a lot of Amiga retailers started promoting Apple clones in the magazines. I drooled at machines like this, with their super fast PPC chips etc. Unfortunately, they were always beyond my means back then. Being quite rare, they still are! Ms Fox definitely needs a bigger 'studio', it looks very cramped in there. 🙂
POWER
I just noticed the music at the end 😂😂
That's pretty awesome! Hopefully you can get the HDD working, and that CPU upgrade would be pretty awesome if you can get that working too.
I love how Ms. Fox’s phone case matches her skirt 💜
Also the clones I have are 2 outbound notebooks and 1 outbound 125 LapTop and a StarMax with a 400MHz G3 sonnet in it and OS 9.1
Nice! Although it's not an Amiga, I still love it :)
I legit love the production quality of your videos! Just Maccy has to be a bit of effort. Also, new old stock? What a find!
Ciao, congratulations for your super sympathic video ❤️ my first Mac Computer was a PowerMac 7200 with MacOS 8.6, later a PowerMac G3 and G4, great times.. as for now i'm using a PC with Debian Linux 12.. many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃 ps. i will share your video at WhatsApp and at mewe..
I like your little mac friends
omg I have one of those in my basement :O
I used to play on this computer as a kid, the hard drive died and I have to figure out how I (or someone else) can perform data recovery off of it.
"Frog blast the vent core!!!"
I am technolusting after these clones. I like their look and their configurations.
If / when I ever get the time (retirement??), I want to get a few classic Macs and create something in some 90s 3D programs, like Infini-D, Strata Studio, Form-Z and EIAS. I want to see how far I could push these old apps.
(I currently own a non-functioning IIcx and a malfunctioning 2010 5,1 MacPro tower. Not that anyone asked 🙂)
Oh that's nifty.
Nice video. I wasn't so lucky - I have one that's also in its original box, but the Tadiran battery leaked all over the system board and case. The faceplate is immaculate, but the motherboard and inside of the case? It looks like someone had used it outside in Galveston for a few years! Also, I think the mismatched RAM is normal, as mine had the same mismatched DIMMs.
Power Computing had great clones while they lasted. They did not last long because they lost their license from Apple for speeding! In fact, the first commercially available home computer to beat the 200MHZ barrier was a Mac Clone made by Power Computing. Apple's top speed was 150MHZ at the time! Power Computing on some of their models also boosted the bus clock speed to 60MHZ when most Apples topped out at 50MHZ!
I have a power computing invoice and a letter from when steve jobs terminated the company sometimes the hard drives get stuck a little bit and you can tap them and they start running then.
I doubt the hard drive would have had an OS installed. Maybe worth trying to install Macos on it? Always nice to see old hard drives up and running.
I had one of these about 20 years ago in high school, I really regret giving it away to my cousin.
Profile picture is appropriate!
Maccy is sooo cute 🥺🥰
Great video, Ms. Fox. Should be fun to see if the 500MHz card works. Regardless, it might be worth doing a Noctua fan swap to sooth your ears a bit.
Had these at my school in the lab with some older 386s and 286s. So weird using the very PC-like mouse and computer form factor (and the keyboards could be more Mac-like and or more PC-like or halfway in between depending on the model, I think?) with MacOS on the PowerPC s.
Although i could do without the mascots, i find your video content very interesting.
Odd that it doesn't have a CPU fan. I got a Power Center Pro 180 tower a few months ago and it has a small fan mounted to a weird plastic bracket that snaps onto the crossbar.
Sounds like the hard drive has stiction, preventing it from booting. If you tap a screwdriver against the side or top of the HDD, it may start spinning again and boot up. If not, it's likely the System Folder for MacOS isn't "blessed" or got corrupted.
Does 'IDKFA' work in the Chex WAD of Doom?
Kinda interesting in that it looks almost like something partway between a Mac and a PC (with a 90s PC style case and PCI slots, but still using SCSI and similar rather than IDE, etc).
I remember Doom as this was a game that had been around since my childhood (along with Quake and similar); but had never seen or messed around with Chex Quest.
Never saw any of those computers in my childhood (had seen a few Mac's though, such as the Mac II variants or similar, but mostly had encountered PCs).
For my own project (involving a custom CPU core running a custom ISA on an FPGA), I am using Doom and Quake/GLQuake as some of my main test cases.
Quake performance was pretty bad at 50MHz though, but recently I had been hacking around a bunch with the Verilog and have "sort of" got it up to 75MHz (while keeping most of the ISA and L1 caches intact), which should (hopefully) allow for slightly better GLQuake performance (along with another recent project of implementing a hardware rasterizer; though for "technical reasons" kind of ends up looking like "What if someone ran GLQuake on the original PlayStation?"). Does manage to run Doom typically in 16-30 fps territory (or 20-34 fps at 75MHz).
Though, it is like I had gone full circle, building a custom processor and then using it to run code that had so much confused me back when I was still young and first learning C.
Though, ironically, my CPU project is slower than the PCs I had in elementary school (this being partly in the era of the Pentium and Win95 and similar). By the time I was getting into 3D graphics programming (in high-school), PCs had already moved over to GPUs and the battle of OpenGL vs Direct3D, etc...
Though, technically, the FPGA boards have more RAM than these PCs, but it doesn't seem like much by modern standards. How the PC's ran so well with so little RAM, or managed to pull off GUI's with usable performance, are still mysteries that elude me it seems (I can get full motion video playback to work sort of OK on it, along with semi-usable OpenGL, etc, but can't seem to manage to get a 640x400 "GUI" to redraw much faster than around 8 or 10 fps, ...). Where, say, each window has a backing buffer, and drawing a bitmap into a window triggers the GUI to redraw the window stack and copy/re-encode the internal framebuffer out to the graphics/VRAM framebuffer (internally, the screen update using an RGB555 buffer, but then re-encoding it into color-cell or similar, with the display VRAM using a character-cell / color-cell oriented format, rather than a conventional linear framebuffer). There not being sufficient RAM bandwidth to manage 640x480 hi-color at 60Hz; so one needs to settle with 640x400 4bpp color-cell (4x4 pixel cells with 2x RGB555 colors, and 2 interpolated colors) or 800x600 2bpp color-cell (8x8 pixel cells with 2x RGB555 colors, no interpolation).
In a way, old computers still have mysteries, and ironically, I owe some debt to retro-computing videos in part for giving me ideas that allowed me to make as much progress as I have (like, "borrowing" ideas from technology of the past). Even if a lot of it is technology I had never really used myself. It seems like there are some parts of the past I still don't really understand though.
As for "modern" games, I don't really do much beyond poking around in Minecraft. I didn't really get much into the "modern era" much past Half-Life 2 and Portal and similar (HL2 came out when I was in high-school, and Portal while I was taking college classes). Seemed like most of the games mostly got caught up in obsessing about graphical effects, and not really doing much that got me all that interested in playing them. Though, Undertale and Deltarune were kinda interesting, but possibly don't really count (and Undertale is almost a decade ago already...).
6:31 - oh wow... I think those might be the same (or at least very similar) RAM chips swinging into view as I got used to upgrading in Indigo and Indy (and other) computers at Silicon Graphics (SGI), back in the day... and yet, two sizes here? Dunno if the smaller slots are also RAM or something else, or what. Let's see if you get into it... *watches some more*... Ahh, 7:06 - VRAM... OK, that could make sense. Huh, 7:48 - 1GB, huh? Big spender, back in those days! :) [I don't remember what a 1GB drive cost in 1996, but I do remember drives being about $1000/GB circa 1992/1993 or so -- and then seeing an 8GB drive for like $1200, which was jaw-dropping (if still way out of reach of what my young self could afford at the time).]
9:11 - ooh, do I sense a whole HCI series? I just learned about your channel yesterday, am watching for the first time today (with thanks to Veronica Explains giving you a shout-out in the "OpenSSH is about to change (for the better)" video), and... Yeah, I'm excited to see what else you'll come up with! And/or already have recorded for me to peruse. Subscribed! :)
9:35 - I kinda miss the D&K nubs, to be honest. My index fingers often float above the keyboard, whereas my middle fingers more or less rest on it... Maybe I can make some nubs with epoxy or something. I'll have to experiment. :)
10:15 - oh my goodness, best self-correct (err, I mean... from within your studio, anyway ;) ) I think I've ever seen. Love it. Scripted or no, I love it. :)
I had a Mac clone back in the day, a Radius 81/110. Basically a PowerMac 8100 in bigger all steel case. It was built like a tank.
I later upgraded it a G3 card from Sonnet and it flew.
So many of these machines were thrown away because they looked like PCs.
The licensed clones were always intended to just grow the market, with Apple doing most of the engineering to license motherboards. All the cloners had to do was design the cases, and build Apple’s boards, which they were able to do much more cheaply. It was never going to work out well.
This is contrast to the IBM/AT clones that were reversed engineered by Compaq and others. That is straight up stolen.
Ermahgerd! A retro Mac channel with a female host! And a Macintosh and a IIe with googly eyes and a cowboy hat! I'm going into cute overload! Where have you been my entire life!
Huh, that case looks just like the Dells of slightly later. Like, suspiciously so. Like they used the same designer. Which would make sense given how they shut down and Dell was in the same city i think.
I'd like to see how well it runs Quake. I have a slightly faster Power Mac, a 7300/200 with a 604e, that runs it really well.
Thos is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I can see why Jobs killed the clone program.
Ironically, Apple used technology developed by Power Computing for their own multiprocessor systems.
@@pseudotasukiProbably one of the reasons why they acquired PowerComputing rather than trying to ending their contract with them.
❤
Sadly, I got rid of my power computing machine years ago. Same model as shown here.
"return of the mac"....lol
😂13:25 Maccy mansplaining DOOM monsters
Any interest in Amiga stuff? I have 2 x A1200 and 2 x A500 with upgrades and PiStorms w/ CaffieneOS if you’re interested