Apple's Obscure 90's Macintosh TV
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- Опубліковано 14 жов 2024
- Thanks PCBWay.com - I recently found TWO of the super obscure 1993 Macintosh TV, Apple's early attempt to combine a computer and a TV. Unfortunately, neither one works.
Thanks @Mac84 for the superb cameo!
VIDEO LINKS:
🍎 Macintosh TV Software: macintoshgarde...
🍎 BlueSCSI: scsi.blue/
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#Camera #LoFi #cheapcamera
There are digital tuner boxes available for cheap, which will convert the current OTA broadcasts to both RF and A/V
I've still GOT one, 🤣😂! In addition, I have two working Laserdisc players and a bunch o' Laserdisc titles to truly resonate with the vibes of 1993!
Yep I have a few ATSC 1.0 converter boxes in storage for use with my CRT TV's if ever needed, and they should work till around 2030 when the ATSC 3.0 conversion is suppose to be complete, but the FCC keeps changing the exact date because the networks keep screwing with it, as some stations are now encrypting their ATSC 3.0 signals meaning early ATSC 3.0 converter boxes, and really expensive TV's with it no longer fully work, and have not gotten their firmware updates yet, and no one knows went will happen as the networks/stations hold the encryption keys, so in my eyes ATSC 3.0 at this point is nothing but Anti consumer, with the networks trying to get people back on pay TV.
@@CommodoreFan64 the encrypted OTA ATSC 3.0 hasn't been confirmed yet, and there is a petition to tell the FCC to not allow it to be encrypted. However, there will very likely be decryption key updates available for download from various places around the internet so the receivers can use the broadcasts again.
@@vwbug1975 I'm well aware of the petition which I'm not 100% confident in, and confirmed or not stations have already begun to encrypt their broadcast, plus I'm talking about stuff done through legal channels, and ATSC 3.0 boxes being easily updated by the companies who made them, not where they have to be hacked to make the keys work, which the vast majority of consumers won't do, or can't do because they are not technically competent enough, as they barely know how to check emails on their phones.
@@CommodoreFan64 A pox on ATSC 3.0! Greedy networks are at work to foul up free TV...says this old boomer😆😅🤣😂
“Apple Support-Have you tried resetting the PRAM” 😂😂😂
Had this said to me this week at work. My work machine is a 2017 MB Air that is clearly showing signs of age, especially with more CPU intensive stuff like dozens of Chrome tabs and video calls. So I opened a ticket to get it replaced.
The answer was: "we don't have new machines, reset the SMC and NVRAM".
"Eenie, meanie, miney Mac,
Michael Shindler plastics crack." Brilliant!!!
You can watch over the air TV with this if you connect a digital converter box (and an antenna of course). Would be great to see a followup video with that - would also be fun to see you hook up a streaming device watch Apple TV originals on Apple’s original TV. If you can’t get an actual Apple TV running through an HDMI adapter, you could get the last Roku with composite output (Roku Express 3910X), which should still support the Apple TV app.
I used to have one of those, it's a total dog due to the 16-bit front-side bus unfortunately. It does make a great little TV though due to the Trinitron tube!
Just about any Sony 90s remote will work on it too.
I used to have a performa with tv tuner and i had a sony trinitron next to my monitor and I was so confused when my computer turned on or off constantly then I realized it was happening when I pressed the power button on the remote lol. Then I brought my Apple and sony remotes to school and my friends and I caused havoc by turning on and off computers all around the school. It was good times.
you should hook up the //c to it one day, just for fun.
Fun fact: there were low power analogue TV stations still broadcasting locally until just a few years ago.
And a lot of people too have low power TV stations in their house.
Hint: VCRs
Some of those stations actually operated as radio stations, as the channel 6 FM audio carrier, at 87.75mhz, was at the extreme end of most FM radio tuners. They were mono-only, and the vision carrier tended to be neglected.
@@RealEpikCartfrenYT Old school video senders were also a thing. They got banned here because they were so easy to whack up the power and fiddle with the broadcast frequency thus messing up tv reception in adjacent houses.
Somehow getting an Apple TV wedged in there and working on the screen would be hilarious
omg yeah!!
Funnily enough the Apple TV on its own is at least a thousand times more powerful than the Macintosh TV
Brings back memories of the Performa 6220CD I had as a kid. It added the ability to watch video in a window, so you could watch your show in the background while still working or playing, which seemed pretty cool at the time. It was my first Power Mac, and in that respect it really made me question what all the hype was about. Turns out it was just engineered so crappily that it wasn't much faster than the Quadra 650 I was using before!
Also, was anyone else expecting the "two of them" kittens from Cathode Ray Dude's videos to make an appearance?
1:40 that's dead on; back in late 90s and 2000s I worked for an AASP and yes, the official service manuals included as first step making the user reset PRAM and as 2nd step...unplug the power cord.Of course service manuals were just a guide to replace (at best) some modules like psu, logicboard, etc.If you think Apple Certified technicians were required to perform discrete component troubleshooting you are wrong (I can't even recall the manuals instructing to measure voltages or currents).
Woz & Jobs were former Atari employees. You made a little reunion by using the Jaguar on the Apple! ☺
Only Jobs was an Atari employee. Woz was called in by Jobs to help with designing a new game, which ended up being "Breakout". They worked on it for about 4 days and nights, both got mononucleosis from that and Jobs got the majority share of cash.
Woz was unofficial. Everyone there knew what Jobs was doing, including Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell. They were getting a 2fer out of the deal and not having to pay taxes. Plus, Woz was known at the time to be unwilling to leave HP for Atari or anyone else.
Plenty of Atari Inc employees ended up at Apple and vice versa over the years. Al Alcorn, Steve Woita, Keithen Hayenga, Landon Dyer….
You need one of the free HDTV tuners the gov't was sending out years ago during the switch from analog to HDTV. That would let you watch actual TV on this but it would not utilize the analog tuner channel switching in the Mac. That beige optical disk plastic in the slot looked very bad.
At 1:52, love the "I Hate PCs" button falling down. 😂😂
Dude I watched one of your videos and subbed instantly. Second video and I immediately went into notification settings and enabled ALL notifications for your channel (FYI I never do this). Two reasons: one, I'm a huge Apple fan and retro Apple tech is just as cool to me as new stuff. And two, your channel is awesome and criminally underrated! Keep it up!
Technically this machine could still be used as a TV you just need to figure out how to get a digital antenna to get digital over air broadcast.
A digital set top box would work a treat
@@paulwilliams7816 that's what I was thinking. 👍
Surely, a better thing would involve a digital tuner, D->A conversion, +rebroadcasting a pirate analogue signal that's just strong enough for the analogue tuner in the Mac to pick it up.
@@halfsourlizard9319so... A digital set-top box then?
@@CoCoNutBob Afaik, that doesn't actually rebroadcast. It'd do the D2A conversation and then output something that'd connect straight to coax or RCA. It's the low-power pirate broadcast -- no wires! -- that's the needless level of shenanigans.
I never used one of these, but at some point my dad brought home a couple 5xxx-series all-in-one PowerMacs that had TV tuners and AV in. They could do video capture but only at 320x240 and used a codec that would easily eat disk space.
If I recall correctly, the resulting capture didn't have great framerate and maybe it would vary depending on the disk speed.
It also had to scale the inputs for full screen unlike the Macintosh TV which could directly send the signal to the tube so the scale wasn't so blocky.
Took me back seeing that remote control! Had a Performa with a remote and tuner card. Was a great party trick switching the pc off in front of all my friends, at a time when seemingly the rest of the world was obsessed with Pentium Win 95 machines. Their amazed little faces.
It's so silly that this thing can't display video in a window when the one year later 68040 TV Tuner card could not only do that, but supported composite input and recording! I have a Performa with a TV tuner and MPEG-1 decoder that still works here, although unfortunately the plastic face has been long since ruined due to plastic brittleness (and the fact it had a 10 year old me inflicted upon it). I wonder how difficult it is to get beige PLA filament and a printer...
Through the magic of buying two of them!
I am quite young for this Mac, but my mom was a life-long Mac user, and a school teacher at a school district that used Macs, so I have vague memories of two computers with TV tuners.
One was our home computer in the late 90s. This one broke at some point, and I hardly remember the TV tuning functionality actually functioning (I think an OS update killed it when I was very young; I remember it quite vaguely), but I clearly remember the ports on it (the broken machine stayed around our house well into my tinkering years). A cursory look at EveryMac indicates it may have been an LC 630.
The other was one that I believe to have had the same form factor as this one, but not black, that was in my mom's school classroom when I was in elementary school in the early 2000s. I remember bringing our family SNES/N64 to use with that computer when she was getting her classroom ready for the next school year one summer.
This one does seem to work a bit differently though. Both of the above computers had a program that could interface with the TV tuner, so you could use the computer and the TV feed simultaneously. There was no "TV Mode".
Sean, you find the most amazing things all the time! Either you are incredibly lucky (like with that Dove board) or a brilliant sleuth! What I think is that you are like the great golfer, Gary Player - "the harder I practice, the luckier I get." And with your results, you must be "the hardest workin' man" on UA-cam! Keep it up! I love it!!
I can relate to small apartments during college. I actually used my Apple IIGS equipped with the Apple II Video Overlay card, a VCR, desktop speakers to operate as my TV for a couple of years
Not that I would have been in the market for a Mac TV, I wasn't made of money back then. Come to think of it, I'm still not made of money today
They had a couple of these in my school. I remember seeing the Coax port on one of them. The other, the teacher actually used and would pull up the football game during homeroom,
Combining this with an Atari Jaguar has to be the single most 1993 thing ever. Both in terms of failed products and the absolute slick design on show. Keep it setup like that!
Your page is great man, I have my own collection that I enjoy too but the way you do it is enjoyable for us all thank you.
I love your videos on all these obscure machines. I'd never want to use/own them myself, but watching you have fun with them is fantastic content.
I had one of those tuner cards in an old Power Macintosh 5500 I found at a thrift store for $25. It was actually my web server running AppleShare IP 6 and a G3 upgrade Card until it finally gave up the ghost. A cute little system despite the heavy CRT which I'm convinced was at least partly lead brick.
Probably need to tune the Apple TV to channel 3 or 4 to view the output of the VCR or any other coaxial input. It will be designated by the output device.
Then it needed to be on channel 3.
Good to know. I couldn’t see something that small when watching on my phone.
A level called "Maximum Death" sounds so out of character for a Wolfenstein game. They should've called it like today, "Mein Leben". And our old Performa 5300 also had a TV tuner, it was a PAL tuner because we lived in Germany. You should still be able to use the tuner for OTA television if you can hook up a set top box for digital TV via composite.
Take it up with id. They themselves coded the Jag versions of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
I found this channel randomly.... glad it popped up in my feed.... its fun
I added a tv card to my power mac, it still works as a TV and is used as such regularly.
The TAM came with the same TV remote control. I think the TV playback worked a bit differently, though: I think it was an app that ran within Mac OS, instead of a separate “mode”. I just set up a partition on my TAM with a Mac OS 7.6.1 installation from the original install media; I’ll see if it installed the TV app, and if so maybe I can find an NES to hook up to it and try TV mode out.
UPDATE: yup, the TV playback on the TAM is through a windows Apple TV app instead of a separate full-screen mode. I might need to hook up my Japanese Sega Saturn to the S-Video port and play some Castlevania: Symphony of the Night!
Amazing, two Machintosh TV! I never had one but i have a Machintosh Performa. 5400 Power PC with the extra tv board and with the same remote and works the same way :)
Any thought on getting one of the digital to analog converters for OTA broadcasts and hooking it up to this?
It’s legal to broadcast analog at home. If I recall, Adrian’s Digital Basement did it in a vid to test out analog NTSC tv signal reception.
@@TheJeremyHolloway are you sure? From FCC website-
" A very common question asked of the FCC is whether broadcasting at very low power requires a license. Please be aware that unlicensed operation of radio broadcast stations is prohibited, even at low powers such as 1 watt or less. The only unlicensed operation that is permitted on the AM and FM broadcast bands is covered under Part 15 of the FCC's rules, and is limited to a coverage radius of approximately 200 feet. (See the Commission's July 24, 1991 Public Notice, which is still in effect.) Unlicensed operation is not permitted in the television bands (including 87.9 MHz, which falls within the 82.0 to 88.0 Channel 6 television band)."
Key words "Unlicensed operation is not permitted in the television bands".
And as far as I can tell DTV ATSC broadcasts use the same VHF and UHF bands.
@@startedtech the playa’ h8ing Feds always ruin everything. Now, where’d I place that old Max Headroom mask, fly swat, and rotating piece of aluminum siding in the garage?
Was looking for something to watch. Perfect timing!
Macintosh TV owners UNITE! I have one as well, and did the recap of both the mainboard and the analog boards.
I love how the lighting at 4:45 looks like how you'd expect an old Polaroid of someone using a 90s Mac would, compared to the clean modern lighting on the other side of the room. It's an interesting contrast.
This would have been my dream computer in my freshman year of college, which should both tell you how old I am and the fact that I did +not+ have the money to afford one. The only computers I was using were in the student lab and they were so old I put up a poster that said "Jurassic Mac" parodying Jurassic Park.
I got one of these in the early aughts. Sound board needed a thousand little capacitors replaced. There are black/dark-gray CD caddies out there. I know 'cause I found one on ebay way back then. Couldn't ever find a keyboard though. I eventually traded it for a recap/accelerate/max-ram service on a Q605. Totally worth it since OTA analog TV stopped being a thing about then.
Was that an original Atari Jaguar ProController or one of the recent community repros sold by AtariAge and others? The ProController is still my favorite game pad due to comfort followed by the obviously far more common 6-button Genesis pads. And do you have SainT’s/RetroHQ’s awesome Jaguar GameDrive SD Cart adapter for it?
I'm excited for the episode where you put in a color-matched optical drive and patch the ROM.
locking it down to 8mb max is the most classic apple thing about it
Back in the day I had a similar Mac hooked up with a DVD player in my daughter's room. This was before wifi, so I also had an RF modulator send the tv signal over the air to any tv receiver in the house.
I wonder if that composite in does a true 240p. If it can’t that might be the reason why the Jaguar doesn’t look super sharp on it
That black Mac is way better looking then the bage Macs which were good looking machines to begin with.
So gorgeous! Still looks contemporary today!
I think the exterior beige parts should be sprayed to match the rest of the case.
@@TheJeremyHolloway that would be pretty sweet
Later Macs that had IR sensors on them, were compatible with the Apple Remote (and most Sony TV remotes), even if just to change volume and power the machines on. If you had a tuner card though, you could change channels, when using the Apple TV application. FWIR, they maintained the compatibility with the remotes through the G3 iMac, and may even be the basis for the IR communications on the G5 (and later) iMacs, iPod Docks/HiFi, and Apple TVs.
I just loved that you plugged a Jaguar into this! Great stuff ❤
I thought we had black Macs like this at school, but they weren't Macintosh TVs, however upon further investigation they may have been the later Performa 5400 series since that was also available in black. It would also make a lot more sense timeline-wise, since the Macintosh TV came out in 1994, but I remember one computer lab with the beige Performa 5000 series, and the other lab still had thicker non-pizza box style LC/Quadra/Performa type Macs before they replaced them the black Macs, so it wouldn't have made sense to go back to the older 68K Macintosh TV era machine.
They literally look like my Performa 630CD Macintosh.
I bought one of these new back in ‘93. The TV was basically unwatchable and I only used the computer for word processing and a goofy game where a cartoon Bill Clinton ate French fries like PacMan. I gave it away in ‘96. I wish I would’ve kept it - what a cool quirky antique!
I really love the fact that most TVs nowadays can be used as both computer monitors and native television sets that do what they were actually supposed to do.
@nicksterj like Apple's 1990s TV sets are one of the earliest (if not the first to ever exist) smart TVs. They're basically smart TVs but without ads, Prime Video, Disney TV, Amazon TV, Apple TV and all the annoying and paid stuff that you see on today's smart TVs.
@nicksterj Exactly! A smart TV is nothing but just a computer hooked to an LCD/(O)LED panel out of the box with the remote control being the only input device to make it feel more like a TV.
@nicksterj no wonder why do I still prefer CRT TVs to smart TVs.
CRT display is interesting. It can work with interlaced analog TV standard and also progressive RGB video from Mac. It has the potential to be the most versatile 90's CRT display. Monitors that can do both 15 kHz and 31+ kHz signals (TV and VGA) are rare, yet this can do both and it is a Trinitron after all.
We had one of these for years, well, it was an LC520, which was pretty fancy at the time! I actually have a Performa 5260/120 in the shed with a TV tuner card in it. Should get her up and running again!
@0:49 My wife has that shirt! I love this so much. Then you have Rollins asleep at the Mac and I plotzed. Awesome!
Better have the Mad Scientist crack that ROM to allow more than 8 megs of ram.
Always enjoy your videos 😀Watching makes me nostalgic for my Performa 5215CD w/a TV card. Albeit not as cool as those black Mac TV's, it still blew my 17 y/o mind.
why not use a digital converter box, and good ol' rabbit ears? these never occur to most people for some reason. surely I'm not the only person who uses them?
Because you can’t use the Mac remote. You’d just be using it as a monitor.
@@fuelvolts sure, but you're not using the remote if the VCR, and Star Trek tape had worked either, and it'd be a monitor either way in that test.
I remember seeing one of those as a kid in a Fry’s or CompUSA or something. I thought the future had arrived. 😂
The modern Apple would NEVER let you have access to a media environment they weren't 100% in control of and charging you monthly for ! 😩
The TV would also be glued together and use non standard screws and parts.
If you wanted to repair the TV you couldn't because the screen has a security chip encoded to that individual PCB.
Isn't progress great ? 😩
Great explenation of todays apple 😂😂
These are one of my favorite systems to resurrect. I've fixed so many that wouldn't turn on. Hope to fix even more!
If I could do a Siskel and Ebert, I would! Two thumbs up!
As soon as Sean said he had two of them, I pictured him bashing them into one another like I do with He-Man figures. Like I DID!
We had a Performa 5300 with a TV tuner - which (in Europe at least) had a Teletext decoder too. If you get hold of one of those, you could get a Raspberry Pi and set it up with a Teletext server and connect the two together for a neat example of how you can send data over a video signal.
Hey, wait a minute, my Macintosh TV doesn't work! It's broken!
What are we gonna do tonight, this isn't fair!
Lol perfect
You should do a video on your skateboard setup for us fellow “old man” skaters!!!
Yes please !!! In this case a Apple-based graphic on the board itself with matching Apple-Stickers an both trucks would be appropriate. Maybe a Ollie over a Apple II or a nose-bonk over this Macintosh TV ??? ☺
“Through the magic of buying two of them…” -Alec Watson
There was a rumor going around back around the last years of Steve Jobs (2010/2011) that Apple would release an actually Apple Television and I explained to those asking about the rumors that Apple had already released a TV (of sorts) once before back in 1993 in the form of the Macintosh TV and it failed thus I doubted the rumors. Had Apple decided to release an flat screen TV back then, hopefully it would have been better then this. But I think it's pretty clear now that the Macintosh TV is the one and only time Apple will try releasing a TV of any sort. Better these days for Apple to stick with a set-top box only or maybe offering built-in Apple TV support in third-party TV manufactures set's.
loved my black bell & howell growing up
Oh wow. I had never heard of this before. The computer I bought on my own was a Performa LC 575.
Why is this so much more exciting than todays stuff?
Around this time I was begging my parents for a "real" computer to replace my Commodore 128 and I wanted a Mac. We saw the Macintosh TV, believe it or not, on QVC-it *might* have been HSN-and I convinced them to buy it for me. I had no cable hookup in my room and it came with, literally, no software other than Grolier's Encyclopedia. A couple weeks later my mom saw a Packard Bell multimedia PC for sale at Circuit City for cheaper than we paid for this and they returned it and got me the PC. It was another 10-11 years before I got a Mac again; a 17 inch PowerBook in 2004. Been full time Mac since. I still remember the couple weeks I had the Macintosh TV, though, and wish we'd kept it.
The Blue SCSI has "Double Secret Probation" firmware :)
Just get a digi box im told just like the UK you can buy converter boxes that will allow you to get over the air digital TV and then turn that signal in to an RF or RCA/SCART
with those tv's you gotta find the frequency of the VHS player if it's connected to coax. it's not necessarily on a channel. you set the channels manually to a frequency, or with a scan. had to do the same with my NES when using the coax cable
It's limited to 8 MB of RAM because while it's physically in an LC520 style shell the internals are derived from the Color Classic. (Just got it to boot in MAME so I know what the ROM's looking for).
Upgrade the motherboard. Then put the tv tuner in it. then get the RCA composite input board got goes in the slot in the case above the motherboard.
Get a DTV converter box there's an episode of This Old House from 2009 here on UA-cam explaining it all.
I think Apple made other Macintosh models with a built in TV tuner card, my family knew someone who had one in around 1996 or so. I don't know what model it was, but it was white in colour, and from memory it was not an all in one design, the monitor was a separate unit and the infrared receiver was on the front of the system unit. I'm not sure if the TV tuner software allowed for full screen TV viewing though. You could also use the remote to turn the computer on and off and it could adjust the system volume I think. Wow, that Macintosh TV sure struggled with Wolfenstein 3D, that's really not good since that was quite a new game at the time. Wasn't the Mac version released in 1994 or so? I remember our family friend's Macintosh running Duke Nukem 3D respectably well. I'd hate to see how that game would run on this system.
You keep thwacking computers and your wrist will never heal.
Try to connect to TV provider coaxial cable, if you have one.
It will be a digital signal and the mac tv only accepts an analog input
I have an LC520 that I pieced together from a couple of donor Macs. It still works, but the analog board desperately need to be reccapped. But the plastics are so damn brittle, I'm afraid to tear it apart to do the work.
My to favorite retro MAC creators
My parents bought a new Performa (LC) 550 as our family computer. Our neighbor had the TV and I thought it was so much cooler at the time.
The real question is: can you downconvert an AppleTV 4K to display on the Macintosh TV for maximum Apple Macintosh TV shenanigans?
Easy.
just get an HDMI to composite/s-video and an RF modulator.
hdmi to AV, and then AV to RF modulator
@@RealEpikCartfrenYT what? Why? It has av in. Why would you go through RF?
@@goclunker because analog RF is dead so that's the only use it'll ever get. plus he could stuff the apple tv into the macintosh tv and then have a free AV input for other things.
OTA Broadcast is still a thing, you just need a digital to analog tv converter box. The government literally gave them away free to just about everyone in the country when the switch from analog to digital happened, so I'm sure that they can probably be found super cheap these days.
Is resetting the PRAM the sfc /scannow of the Apple universe?
Resetting the P-RAM just wipes out all your system settings. When you make a change to items in the Control Panel (System Preferences, under OS X and later), you are both updating a preference file on the hard drive and a controller chip on the Mac's logic board. The P-RAM battery holds those changes within the volatile RAM that caches the settings for the controller chip. If the battery goes dead or is running out of juice, it corrupts the P-RAM settings in the hardware. Resetting the P-RAM (Cmd+Option+P+R) clears out the hardware settings, but not the preferences file; you still have to go and delete the .prefs file(s), too. Sorry for the long answer. TL:DR.
We had LC575s in my gradeschool. Good memories
🎸🎤 We Love Shenanigans! 🎵
I wondered what the Macintosh TV form factor was inside? LC 520? LC 575? Performa 520? Other? It ironically looks similar to the LC 520 in terms of case size and design, and processor but in black color. LC 520 was a model that was primarily sold to schools back in the day if I remember right.
One honest suggestion: could you fix / stabilise that table a bit more? Other than that your videos are great :)
I think the same kind of remote control was bundled with Performa / LC models and their TV and/or AV Card.
That looks fun! I remember trying to play on my playstation on a hand-me-down Centris 660AV. The lag was pretty substantial and practically unplayable. At least this one works for gaming.
Opened youtube and saw a new vid. It’s gonna be a good day.
That Apple support guy looks a lot like Steve from Mac84. Perhaps a long lost twin?
Definitely interesting. Very strange that its memory was locked to only 8mb, such a weird thing to do.
I NEED this in my life
That's cool! I've seen an episode of Computer Chronicals (Macworld SF 1994) that showed off a Macintosh TV running Super R-Type on a connected SNES. Though to be honest I liked Wolfenstein on the Jag better... 😊
I had a beige one in the UK... it was hell. Crt failure, video board failure and the lack luster proforma it was built on..... I don't miss it.... ;)
You were skating and Mac-ing at the same time again. Weren't you? 🤣
There were a number of Macs around that time that could be turned on with most remotes. I don't know why they had IR functionality but I could turn mine on and off and change volume with my TV remote
Shouldn't have been that difficult. Just add a tv tuner to a monitor, or add a connection to the video bus to a tv. Maybe a capture card inside if you want to watch Seinfeld as you work on your memories.