Extreme Overclocking a Vintage Mac with Spicy O'Clock! 

I’m so glad whiteboard Sean is a recurring character now lol

Your stable 48MHz 68040 Colour Classic is faster than a stock Quadra 840AV, the fastest 68k Mac. Congrats!

The Wolf-3d performance vs. the DN3D performance tells you just how sloppy of a port Wolf 3D was on the Mac.

Your multimeter jankiness is impressive, Sean. I saw the bare-wire connectors and thought, "Surely he has a set of meter leads with alligator clips... oh. Close enough."

Fruit and red peppers go incredibly well together! I learned that with a friend who introduced me to Indian cuisine! I always have some kind of fruit spicy shutney on my fridge.

this retro YT channel is clearly doing very well given it can afford a dedicated whiteboard guy on staff

In the headlines today a Retro apple RU-vidr's house disappeared into a strange spicy vortex...

Congratulations on the overlock! Because the LC575 board is very sensitive when it comes to overclocking, I'm curious if you tried stably overclocking beyond 45MHz (a) with the PPC card completely removed, or (b) with a different 040 CPU? I of course didn't have a PPC card in my testing, but once recapped with OS-CON caps and with a 40MHz rated 040 processor, I was able to achieve a stable 49MHz with Mr. Fahrenheit's 60ns VRAM (PCB by Stephen Arsenault) and 50MHz with the 2-chip SMC VRAM. So it could be either the CPU and/or the presence of the PPC upgrade card that is the limiting factor for overclocking the 040. Not that it matters in your case though because once the PPC card is installed, it seems to be the limiting factor at about 85MHz. Even so, great work! I enjoyed this video very much! Hopefully it will inspire others to give Spicy O'Clock a try on their own 040 Macs!

Spicy is good

Can't you ask Mr Colin aka Dosdude1 to put a faster cpu on that acceleratorcard? I think he would be glad to try it and help you out

I'll have the Macspice with extra RAM please.. and could i have some software to go?

You earned a sub. Not for the showcasing of the Spicy O'Clock, but for eating hot sauce on an apple and actually liking it. Lol.

Amazing results! Makes me so happy to see folks enjoying our products and pushing their machines to the limit! - Satanic Mac Club xoxo

PCB WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY LOL sometimes I'll get that in my head and I'll just say it all day to myself...

i'm losing my f-ing mind laughing sooooooo hard over that spicy apple bit!

Making a Power PC into a spicy meat ball 🤌

Gotta say, I LOVE the addition of Whiteboard Guy. Dunno where you got him from, but his timing is

Back in the mid 90s I got a CPU accelerator from Other World Computing and over clocked my 60 MHz 6100 (PPC 601) to 66 MHz! If I tried to go beyond that the Mac would crash. It was a noticeable improvement.

"Squeeze out every last megahurt..." 😂😂😂

Hmm. I've been thinking about getting a second TRS80 Model 100 for shenanigans, and that system can be overclocked with crystal swaps. Even if this particular device wouldn't work, this is definitely an idea to explore. A variable oscillator of some sort should be doable.

Back in the day. OWC used to have this thing called the "rocket" which you literally placed over the oscillator on the board. Sure enough your CPU speed would register higher but the performance difference was almost non-existent. Still felt cool to put in though.

Just found your channel and subbed immediately. This is the exact content I was looking for.

I thought you accidentally set an April fools video for August and not April

That was so fast that even the camera lost its focus at the end 😅

My friend did something similar to a 286 back in the 90s.

I have a Centris 650 w/ 25MHz 68040 (not LC) and when I looked into overclocking info, I found references saying boosting the clock much above 27MHz w/o other mods can make I/O unstable, so recommended commercial overclocking boards (I think there's a 75-100MHz Daystar accelerator for it, but I've never been able to locate one). I actually still need to make sure the Centris 650 works first (Mac84 said they rarely have issues w/ caps or anything unless there's damage/corrosion), before I concern myself more with accelerating it.

bro i feel like stupid , i just discovered this channel pretty late..

I've never owned a Mac. The last apple product I owned was an iPhone 4s. That's how long that's been. Yet I still watch all this man's videos for some reason 🧐🤔 I feel like that is an odd thing and maybe I'm a weirdo. Oh well.

I have a 601/66 for my IIci, but it's actually slower than a fast 040 lol. I was thinking about trying a PiStorm in it and ditching the 601....

Awesome, loved how far you’ve pushed this. Silly question but would the non fpu 040 potentially clock faster?

Do you have any links where we could find vram options?

Within my collection of classic PCs the most I have is a 25mhz i486 🙃

Action retro is the goku of mac upgrading

640x480 resolution is overkill. For 3D games with this config, 320 is the way.

Ok now i want a spicy apple

Kind of Funny watching this video about Vintage mac's on a Modern M2 macbook

I see playing videogames on macs hasn't changed in 20 years. It still sucks today.

i called it when i looked at it . its going to be happy at 45 and in 68040

So we just gonna ignore the oil smears on the board? We need to turn action retro into a restoration station

As a challenge for you, I wonder if you one day could try and hack the Mac OS X Public Beta (Kodiak) to run on one of your G3/G4 Upgraded Mac Clones. Wouldn't be too easy as the Beta will only work if you have a Mac from 1998-2000 and ATI graphics (1998-2000), but i challenge you to try that and achieve the impossible!

But can it run TempleOS?

Viper 2 fpga wont work in this thing? 68060 ppc setup

funny thing is i wanted to overclock my ppc 575 like yours but never found a 2nd stick of 70ns vram stick for my budget. I might later on through

God I love this channel

Someone needs to write a *GOOD* Macintosh emulator so that poor people like me can enjoy the wonders of old macs.

That fan was not placed in an effective location. The 68040 was known for running hot and the fan was placed away from it. My Amiga was running an 040 at 55MHz but I clocked it down to 50 as I could feel the heat through the keyboard despite having a blower directed over the copper heatsink. There are different revisions of the 68040 from the full CPU, FPU and MMU, however the EC while dropping both the FPU and MMU (neither used often on the Mac from my understanding) does not get as hot and is apparently easier to overclock. Also if you can get the real L88M mask (last produced revision) they are debugged and lowest heat. Anyone tried putting an 68060 as a replacement?

why every single video that sponsored by PCBWay don't have announcement on intro?

To run those games at playable framerates at 640x480 on a DOS machine, you would need something like a Pentium 166-200mhz. I think a Pentium 200 classic does software Quake at 20 fps in 640x480. So I guess you're looking for a similar Mac performance envelope.

Sean, please don't go soft on me. ?"Too extreme" is exactly what I come here for.

what a funny man i love these videos

ボットロッド　Botrod. Clever, Koba-san.

You should have had some music or MIDI playing on the computer while you changed the clock frequency.

Is this your audition tape for Hot Ones?

I'm going to need a glass of milk after watching this video!

Damn it now I want hot sauce ! LOL 🌶

Chocolate Plague from puckerbutt farms is the best hot sauce ever, btw.

Imagine this macintosh with a g5 processor in it somehow

We have very different definitions of playable but nice upgrade nonetheless

it is more to do with the cpu chips, every manafacture has a variability - even newer cpu's ---- same model but vary in performance

I can't help but think about how i've been calling swollen batteries "spicy pillows"

Think if you add some faster VRAM you could push past 50MHz. Some ~spicy~ VRAM, if you will.

anyone ever tell you that you look kinda like whiteboard guy? are you related?

all my want

Next step: improvise cooling for higher OC? 🤔

Bake the apple with cinnamon

You retro maniacs, overclocking old computers to play games that have many better ways to play.... I'm jealous of you. Keep it up I guess

i hate and love this 2d jokes at the beginning...

Nice how you have the multimeter connected wrongly at 7:47... Does whiteboard you know how a multimeter works?

Go on, put an Apple IIe card in it so you can run three different Apple generations

who knew 80hz could do so much. i overclock my cpu 100mz and don't even notice a difference

Janky is good.

I overclocked my T41 to 3GHz

I don't meant to insult you, but your soldering makes my skin itch ....

Those games you chose to benchmark are horribly optimised for the Mac! You should have played Marathon.

Ewww, I remember the mouse in school. First time I saw one I was like wtf is this thing and the teacher said to me grab the mouse, I was confused when she said that until she said this ball here is called a mouse then 2 yrs later we got the mouse with the balls inside and they all disappeared.

I don’t have happy experiences with Apple gear that’s more than one generation old. What witchcraft is this?

james karla youtube channel old typewritter

Frankly disappointed at the results

No. The spicy things was cringe and annoying. Just give me the overclock. No carmeggedon was not playable, even after the OC. Wolfenstein was better though. Duke is also not playable, stop lol. I know oldschool PCs are something else, but don't lie to yourself.

If the 601 is the limiting factor, you could get a 100/110MHz 601 chip and install it on the upgrade card.

Wow! The overclock sure helped games too improve! Too bad it couldn’t run 50 Mhz 68040 stability. I think it’s probably the VRAM and the RAM preventing it from running stable.

Great video. Back in my tech days I had a customer leave behind a Color Classic with a bad logic board. It took more extensive modifications than the 040 mod, but I got it working with a 5500 logic board and later put a Sonnet G3 upgrade in it. I used it as my shop computer for quite a while. Everyone who saw it would ask why the heck I was using an old Color Classic, then they'd notice it was running OS 9...and then that it was screamin' fast.

Finally I was able to watch this video. Was the spicy apple delicious? lol I think the lack of voltage is one of the reasons why the clock didn't go up that much even with the 040. I feel that 5V is not enough. But you're the first to watch a video of overclocking a PPC card! I am happy with the results. Thanks so much!

Put some heat shrink on the alligator clips and just use them for pins so you're not having to make specific adapters for everything

1:30 It's not really a chip, it's a four-pin oscillating crystal. The tall two-pin ones are used in ham radio gear, but you see crystals in various forms everywhere in electronics that needs a sync signal (AV stuff).

*Sean adds hot sauce to a fruit* Me, a mexican: He's starting to believe Pro tip, try adding some hot sauce/chilli powder to some fruits, like apples, mangoes, oranges, cucumbers. Do not try with peaches or bananas....unless you want to lmao.

If you plan on using the PowerPC chip anyway, why not downgrade the 040 back to the LC variant? It doesn't run nearly as spicy, and might be a better candidate for overclocking. If you slap that heatsink onto an LC040, you might get up to or past 50 MHz. Besides, games that use the 040 don't really use the FPU anyway. Better yet, you could get a faster 40 MHz 040 or LC040, which would be forced to run underclocked by 7 MHz at the board's speed before overclocking. Then, if 50 MHz is still a goal, you'd only be pushing the 040/LC040 10 MHz past its factory rated stock speed (as opposed a 17 MHz increase past factory speed) when you overclock the PowerPC. I can imagine that being a lot more stable.

One of things i noticed is missing from the PPC Accelerator card - the L2 cache option. That would also explain the slow performance in games.

5:17 Has science gone too far!? Certainly "interesting" to see Carmageddon's performance after the overclock. Perhaps some things just weren't meant to be 😆

Back in the day there were clip-on oscillator mods you could drop into the old 6100s and such that'd overclock the 66MHz 602 to 83MHz. it seems that most of the 601s could handle 83MHz no problem and that's where I'd recommend leaving it.

Hell yeah, hot sauce.

SEAN'S GONE CRAZY AGAIN

Tbh i'm kind of interested in the idea of a motherboard replacement entirely. A new design that takes these cpus and the custom chips and such but is capable of handling increased clock speeds and without the cost cutting compromises.

a lot of your unplayability problems may be related to running the games on top of a memory-intensive gui. on PCs of the era, with the same games, if there was not quite enough RAM, you needed to make a boot disk with a very pared-down autoexec.bat and config.sys; running them in a gui was never recommended. i am curious about the display on this machine. either your ability to focus your camera sucks, or the monitor has a serious fuzz problem and needs some adjustment. the numbers displayed for your benchmarks are impossible to read.

Wait… Sean! You didn’t mess with the PLL resistors? Now I feel old. Back in 1999 (when I hung out on AppleFritter) PLL modding was all the rage ;)

That is one gross looking motherboard. Make sure that's not cap juice!

I wouldn't exactly call any of those "playable." I'm not a Mac guy so I'm unfamiliar but I have a question. Can you not run Duke or Wolfenstein in PowerPC mode? Also why is Wolf3D on the Mac so slow? On PC you can run it on a 33mhz 386 at full speed. I would have thought you had plenty of speed there to run Wolf3D. Also If you do read this I know this is an over 1 year old video but it would be fun to see you run Linux on this machine. There are older versions of Debian that supported the 68040 and of course the PowerPC.

I don't really get the Mystic upgrade. I mean, the LC575 is basically a CC, but with a bigger, higher-res screen, stereo sound and an on-board CD-ROM. Hell, thanks to so many people hacking them apart, there are probably fewer working LC575s than Mystic-upgraded CCs.

While I thank you for purchasing my VRAM to feature in a video, I believe you represented my VRAM very poorly. Your video didn't even show my VRAM in use, mention that you even tried it, nor any testing results. The Satanic Mac Club's 60ns VRAM, and my Mr Fahrenheit's 60ns VRAM are very close in performance, and sometimes individual VRAM SIMMs cross the performance results of each, depending on specific chips and the use case. I have users who have exceeded 51Mhz using my VRAM, where they couldn't get other 60ns VRAM to work. There are many technical aspects regarding the two designs, and they should theoretically perform similarly or identically. Especially in the setup which you were testing. To me, this wasn't a fair review of any particular product, but instead a promotional video for the Satanic Mac Club's products, who are friends of Action Retro. As a result of the marketing of this video, seen by 29k+ viewers, I have decided to discontinue making and offering the VRAM that I made. To update viewers, my VRAM is no longer offered for sale, despite the fact that each and every person I sold modules to was extremely satisfied with the quality and performance of the product which I made, by hand. I am obligated by contractual agreement to mention the PCB design was licensed from Stephen Arsenault, but all other aspects of this item were my own.

You know what is not theoretical? Nothing said in the video. You have no theory there nor its parts such as formulas, laws, or the force as in the THEORY of gravitation.