Building a Slightly Cursed Mac Plus Plus Plus 

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

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.

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.

*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

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.

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 imagine any remaining System Savers could use a fan replacement.

Installing windows 95 on floppies was hell! 😆

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?!?

Nice find, and totally agree!

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.

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.

I was using external power for it, but I'm going to do that mod

It's from the @mac84 channel!

*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

…or 6.0.8!

yup some proots

Probably upgraded using the official upgrade kit (which I understand cost almost as much as a new machine). I have one just like it. 😊

Shhh... he's reaching for reasons this turd didn't suck.

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.

so i wasnt the only one to immediately go like "oh look, the seller is a protogen"

I have never heard of one of these working on a 128k or 512k. A 512ke might be a possibility since they use Plus ROMs (I believe), but even if it works the small amount of ram would limit your ability to run any programs that would really benefit from the accelerator.

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.

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.

The Amiga has some oddities that prevent that sort of thing. It's why a terrible fire won't work in an Atari or the like

No weird trick, the accelerator asserts bus request similarly to if you had a dma expansion that wanted the bus. The accelerator just never relinquishes the bus, so the 68k will just sit there waiting forever in tristated mode.

@@Jope9k So does that mean that nothing _else_ can use DMA on such a system? Maybe that's what causing issues with SCSI?

@@kFY514 true, but I doubt there is any dma in a mac plus, since to my knowledge early macs are very much cpu bound for everything. My guess on the errors is that he was running system 7. The working boot disk had system 6 on it, which sounds like that's the last one that works wirh this turbo. I'm not a mac guy tho, so who knows :-)

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.