These Performas weren't just for home users, these were common in classrooms, typically teachers had 'em. Used to see them everywhere at school circa 2000.
By 2000 my school district had bought the iMac G3. My memory is fuzzy since this is all the way back in elementary school, but we either had this or the LCiiis.
@@ryanstoddard1803 We had iMacs and various LCs, but I don't remember anything else. There was a few one-off Classics and Beige G3s, and even a few Apple IIs, but for the most part it was those.
The PowerPC 603e chip is 32 bits, not 64 bits. AIM didn't manufacture a 64-bit processor until The PowerPC G5. What you're mistaken about is that the PowerPC chip was 32-bit, and the data path was 16-bit.
I'm a bit of an amateur so I might be misunderstanding, but I was going off of this LEM article which describes the 603 as intended for a 64 bit data bus but running on 32 bits with a penalty. lowendmac.com/2014/cpus-powerpc-603-and-603e/
@@ActionRetro I'm going to have to research this a bit more. Some specs say it was a 64-bit processor, but yet the PowerPC G5 was advertised as the first 64-bit consumer processor. Not sure what market hyperbole is being used here.
@@ActionRetro Okay, I got confused a bit here. There is an address bus and a data bus. The address bus is 32-bit, the data bus is either 32-bit or 64-bit. Some of the internal functions of the 603 chip are 64-bit. However, when paired with a 32-bit data bus, the access to RAM is cut in half. That was one 'feature' that hindered the 603 and made it so terrible. www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MPC603.pdf
32 bit instructions, 64 bit data paths. The 603 (non e) in this 6200 has indeed got a 64 bits wide data bus however it is interfaced into a custom bridge chip which gives it the ability to talk to a 68k chipset. which runs at a data path width of 32 bits and even at a different clock speed IIRC. The 68K chipset was responsible for controlling the memory, peripherals and graphics. The one saving grace is the L2 Cache and rom were hung off the bridge chip directly and was 64 bits wide at processor bus clock, but that was not enough to save it from its abysmal performance. One of the common problems with the 603 (non e) was its internal L1 cache was only 16 kb. This was a bit of an issue for the code recompiler that Apple implemented in the system software to allow seamless emulation of 68k applications on PPC computers. The recompiler was written originally for the 601 and intended to work snugly inside of its 32k unified L1. And the 603 used independent instruction and data caches of 8k each. To top it off the 603 also had 1 fewers execution units internally compared to the 601 (2xALU vs 3xALU) as it was intended to be a scaled down more power efficient cpu. My 7100/66AV with l2 cache manages to just out perform an LCIII+ in 68k application performance, however a 6200 isn't even able to obtain LCII level performance in the same applications. And that is at least a 2.5x to 3x performance difference. many applications and extensions (including about half of the system software) was still written in thin binaries for 68K only. Yes, it really was that bad.. Once the system software and most applications became native PPC binaries the performance difference was narrower, but the cpu still had fewer resources and was still too slow. The 603E at least corrected this partly by increasing the cache sizes to 16K each. And this was able to partly handle the 68K emulation much better. And having a chipset with a proper 64 bits wide data path to memory was really the biggest reason for its increased performance in later macs. Though it really took the 604 at about 120mhz before it could out perform an 840AV in 68K.
@@negi9076 Citation needed that the Mac Mini is doing anything but existing as a machine for enthusiasts. Almost anyone buying a desktop Mac (not many people by Apple standards) is buying an iMac.
@@nfugitt89 When minis got the m2 upgrade first? Aaand you're saying not much people buy apple desktops anyway, why? It's marked got eaten up by MacBooks, good job at debasing and re-basing my argument.
I was lucky and came to the macintosh right after this period. My first system was the All-in-One 5400 with a 180MHz 603e Power PC processor and built-in Sony 15 CRT which, uses the same motherboard as the Performa Tower 6400 and the 20th Anniversary Mac. All three of these systems also accept the Apple Video card, and Apple TV/FM card with black remote control which, I see is already installed on your 6200CD. In addition, please note that each of these systems can also accept the Crescendo/L2 G3 processor upgrade card.
In the mid 90s I started college for 3d animation and design. The equipment guide recommended purchasing a PowerPC Mac to run Electric Image but did not specify the specs. I got a 6200CD... that did not... ummm... work out too well even after spending a fortune maxing out it's ram. Yet, I have incredible nostalgia for that machine (I miss eWorld/Hotline so much.) Edit: Forgot to add, Electric Image back then cost $8000 and required a hardware dongle so no pirating it (and my college forced you to buy it). Imagine the ridiculousness of running an $8000 piece of software on a 75mhz 603 with 16megs of ram (eventually 64meg).
I do believe it is worth noting that while standard 6300's share similar design flaws with the 6200, the later 160MHz variant (sometimes branded as the 6360) corrected most of these issues and could be thought of as a 6400 in the 6200/6300 style case.
I downgraded mine to a LC 580's logic board, I just wanted a 68k mac since I mainly have PPC ones, a Power Mac 6100 and a iMac G3. I wonder if a magic eraser would work for removing the PowerPC logo from the front panel of the mac.
Correct. I had the 6320, which was the last model with the compromised motherboard. If I had only waited another month or two, I would have had the 6360.
I had a 5200...it's like the 6200 but with a built in display, so even worse. I loved it dearly back than playing F/A-18 Hornet and Escape Velocity. Also i made my first Photoshop steps with it... loved that slow thing. :D
From a collector's standpoint I think this and similar machines are woefully underappreciated. The use of 72-pin SIMMs and IDE drives makes them so much cheaper and easier to upgrade and maintain than the 168-pin DIMMs and SCSI drives of "better" Power Macs.
This was my first Mac. My first computer was an Apple IIe. The monitor died early on, but the computer lasted for over 8 years- a long time for a computer of the mid-90s.
My first computer was a Macintosh Performa 630CD that looked almost exactly like this machine (33mhz, 8mb RAM, 250MB hdd, 2x CDROM, 2400bps fax/modem). I won't lie I kinda wish I had it to indulge in my "retro moments" lol. Anyway, cool video I subscribed.
The PM 5300 (same as 6200/6300 but with a 603e) was my first PowerPC. I snapped one up from Walmart for $285.00 because of the Gil Amelio inventory fiasco. I thought the performance was amazing, of course my previous Mac was a 660AV, but still I was blown away by the speed.
Oh yeah:) This was two months after they were discontinued, there were something like ten more on the shelves, I think the week before the price was $1300.00? I sold it two weeks later on a little start up site called eBay for $1100 and my 660av for $500. I used that to buy a used (almost new) 7300 with a bad hard drive, with $300.00 left over.
I had a 6360 that got me halfway through college. I loved almost every part of that computer from the 64mb of ram to the 2gb hard drive. The thing I didn't love about it, the thing that completely bamboozled me, that I didn't find out about until after recording half an album on it, was that the audio bus was only 22.05khz, not 44.1 like every other peer mac. I thought, foolishly, that the RCA jacks on the back would yield a superior signal chain and thus higher audio quality. Boy was I wrong. Programs like ReBirth sounded odd on it, missing some clarity, but I dismissed it. However all my recordings were muddy and impossible to EQ.
This was the first computer I grew up with, I personally liked it. The Macintosh had a lot of underrated computer games. It also lasted an extra decade because of its TV feature. I use to play the N64, Playstation 2 and Game Cube on this computer and I even recorded a few episodes of "Fear Factor" to watch later on, it was terrible quality but it was still impressive that a 90s computer could work like a DVR, it was ahead of it's time.
I have one of these! Got it at a garage sale for next to nothing. I tried running Mac OS 9 on it and it ran super-slow. Mac OS 8 ran really slow, too. Mac OS 7 is what you want for this machine :-)
Hey what are some cool things you can do with it after you run Mac OS 7 on it? Im new to the vintage computer stuff and im really curious on what I can do with it.
Good vid! I'm surprised the magic eraser didn't take off the top layer of plastic too and leave it a bit shiny. Grew up with a 5200, so one of these with a CRT attached. It was a slow machine even for it's day but the biggest issue was its stability. It would crash frequently. The architecture was weird too, there were all sorts of problems experienced with getting it on the net, maybe due to the lack of hardware handshaking as you highlighted, I was too young to understand at the time. Still, it ran a lot of games perfectly fine, it wasn't a useless device and i'm still quite fond of it, hence my display image. The worst Mac in my view is a toss-up between the PowerBook 5300, and Macintosh IIvi
Oh yeah, growing up we had a 486 and then a Pentium 200, but I was always super jealous of my friends who had Macs like these. Despite all the compromises there's just something about them.
My elementary school had a number of Power Macintosh 5200 and 5300s in use from the mid 90s into the early 2000s. They did the job, but they were a bit sluggish compared to the Dell PCs that most of the school had. They replaced a lab full of Apple IIgs' for typing classes with these Power Macintoshes...
One of my first experiences was also a 5200 all in one. Many days gaming on it. Doom, Simon city 2000, Dark Forces and Jazz jackrabbit 2! Very fond memories!
The Performa 5320 was our second Mac that my Dad bought back in 1996, it was a weird bundle with 8Mb (rather than 16Mb) and a Colour Stylewriter 2400 printer. We quickly upgraded it to 24Mb RAM to run Virtual PC but it was a dog of a Mac. There was interference lines visible on the display, the performance was dreadful and System 7.5 was pretty buggy at the time. The worst part of these Macs was the limited VRAM. It was stated to have 1Mb but couldn't display 16bit colour above 640x480, my cheap Cirrus Logic GD-5430 with 1Mb could display 16bit at 800x600 easily.
As someone who uses a 6300CD as a “bridge Mac” for old systems. These are by far the worst PPC systems ever produced. I loathe doing anything on it other than making floppies. I can only imagine how much worse the 6200CD performed. Speed Doubler 8 does really help with the bad 68k emulation and file transfer/copy speeds.
I had a 6290 CD that I fully upgraded as a teen. It worked as a internet connected computer and let me play a lot of popular games at the time. I'm still fond of that model.
Yeah that LEM article was crap. The author didn't understand how the computer is architected so made up a bunch of stuff that sounded plausible to non-tech people (and those without access to Apple's Dev Notes) but was pretty much trash in truth. It suckered me in too at the time, so don't feel bad. At heart these machines (and their larger AIO 52/53xx counterparts) are a Quadra/Performa 63/64x with a built-in PPC upgrade. It was a quick-to-market solution offering a low-cost upgrade path that was fully compatible with anything that was previously installed (or left over in inventory at a school or other org) in the old 63/64x machines: software, RAM, expansion cards, etc. Unfortunately the convenience came with some downsides: the original 75MHz 603 processor was hobbled by an insufficient L1 cache that severely hit 68k emulation performance (later improved with the 603e-based 100 or 120MHz variants), a half-width data bus (all 60x-bus PPC chips have external 64-bit data buses and the 603 can be configured instead for 32-bit operation such as used here and in the first PPC PowerBooks), and a 60x-to-'040 bridge chip (Capella) that added at least one bus clock cycle for any processor data transaction outside of ROM/L2 cache access, so they didn't exactly wow anybody with their raw performance especially considering the much faster CPU frequency compared to the previous models. Do they deserve their poor reputation? Eh, it depends: if you're running one of the early 75MHz variants on Sys 7.5.3 with 8MB of RAM and exclusively 68k programs, yeah you were really better off just keeping the old 63/64x machine because there was little or no improvement to be had here, certainly not ~$1200 (in 1995) worth. However with increased RAM (16MB minimum, more is better), OS 8.1 or 8.5, and mostly PPC programs? They weren't all that bad. If you had the later 100 or 120MHz versions they were actually pretty decent for what they were. Quick note if you're pondering a PCI MLB upgrade here: you'll need to modify the wiring harness to get it to work, likely including installing a 3.3v VRM in place of one of the ground wires at the power connector. It's doable but it's not a straight swap and you'll have to undo the mod if you want to reinstall the old MLB. Some say you can just cut the ground wire in question at the power connector and install a 55/6500 Gazelle MLB without adding an external 3.3v VRM (because this board has one built-in), and it may work for you, but when I tried it always had stability problems without the external VRM. So YMMV.
Also, my Performa 6320 is my all time favorite Apple computer. It was the first computer I ever owned that wasnt a PC, and the first system I got to play both Sim City 2000 and Starcraft on.
We had a Peeforma 5200 when I was a kid and even at the time I thought it was pretty bad. A year or two later we got a surplus Quadra 800 with 66MHz PowerPC upgrade card and that thing felt much faster (I think due to 601 vs 603, 68k emulator cache size issue) The poor serial port was also a big blocker, in the days of modems it meant you couldn’t practically go faster than 14.4k even if you got a 56k modem. We put the 56k modem on my 660AV and shared it over LocalTalk. But I think the biggest letdown of that era was system 7.5 which was just a buggy mess. They had to release a patch just for to get the volume buttons on the 5200 to not crash when you pressed them
Do you have a picture of the power supply out of this? I'm trying to restore one myself and when I took the power supply out to check it I may have swapped the power in connections and want to make sure I didn't before I plug it back in.
I have both a 636 with the 040 and a 6200 and honestly I love both machines. I haven’t benchmarked the two side by side, but the 6200 doesn’t feel all that slow.
I'm sorry, but that "list" where you are reading off all the "adventures" that the computer has done was so mind numbingly boring, I almost couldn't believe it. #constructivecriticism
I remember these machines fondly. I really want a PowerMac 8500 (the 120 MHz model but really any will do as I've decided) so I can film a retrospective video series on it and on how far I can upgrade it etc. I've been wanting to do this project, but there's one problem... I don't have the computer in question. I wanna showcase how it works with its built-in RCA/Composite In/Out capabilities, as well as other tests and experiments. Regarding the Performa in this video, I think my middle school had one or maybe it was a 5x00 series? Not sure... but I do remember my classrooms having them and it was so cool having a Mac in the classroom. When I hit high school all we had was WinNT4-equipped Dell systems, and eventually they became terminals and not even a local computer in the room you were in. ...ANYWAY, great video! I got carried away with memory lane there lol
@@ActionRetro haha I graduated HS in 2002... And I do remember at least one of the old computers in the room where I had my piano class my senior year I think it was running Win 3.11 for WorkGroups lol.
Hey there - what is the adapter for the NEC monitor? I have one of these Macs but would love to connect it to a better monitor (original is so blurry it’s unusable). I looked around but could not find any solid info. Thanks very much in advance!
@@MaxOakland an old old 3D render program by Metatools. It used prims instead of polygons. . it’s main purpose was to create landscape scenes but making it do more complex things was all part of the fun.
Sometimes I think about how my family paid the equivilent of 2 grand for this computer and think I wonder what it would be like if they spent 2 grand in Apple stock instead.. lol
I was given one of these for free and I know that it powers on and I can hear it working but I need a way to connect a display to it. I've got the factory (bnc?) display cable that came with it but I need to output to VGA somehow since I don't have the extra composite inputs your Performa was graced with. I noticed you had an adapter on the back of yours to adapt it to VGA. Do you know the name of that adapter or what I would look up to find one? Thanks ahead of time!
I had its sibling, the 6214CD. Same specs. Jobs knows why Apple bothered with a separate model number for it. Anyway, I don't know if it was the gimped bus or the 8 megs of ram, but I remember it could barely run DOOM with the screen size turned down and sat there for many minutes trying to load up Hexen. Absolutely pathetic machine even for its time and easily beaten in performance by the older Power Macintosh 6100 series (which I was using at school at the time) with its 601 CPU clocked at 60 or 66 MHz, vs the Performa's 75 MHz 603. I also tried running SoftWindows 3.0 on it. The Windows 95 upgrade experience was quite a bit like watching paint dry and it was unusably slow afterwards too, but maybe that was due to virtual memory use. The original hard drive was a slow, noisy 1 gig Quantum IDE model. Apple sure loved to skimp on hardware to save money, and of course they were not passing those savings on to the sucker buying these things.
I had a 6320CD (603e@120MHz) in the second half of the 90s. It wasn't bad, upgraded to 64Mb of ram, MacOS 9.1, installed network card and Apple Video System, just like the 6200 in the video. Maybe it wasn't worth the money paid...but was my first Mac and I was so happy!
I had the 6360CD as my first new Mac, bought it from Sears! First one was dead out of the box. But the second unit worked, many years of good memories. Looking back I always wanted a PowerMac 8500 at the time, but being in 7th grade at the time was a major barrier! lol.
Do you have the original software disk for it? I don't have my 6200 anymore but still have the disk for it (6200CD and 6218CD) I also still have the two disks for the 6360/6400 and the imac original tray load ver disks . I also have the Macintosh 5xxx/6xxx System 7.5 v2.0 Update Service CD Disk I bought from Apple and the OS 8 retail disk.
The 6300 was my first Mac. Changed the CD Drive against a Teac CD Burner and burned a lot of "Backups" *ehemmm* of PlayStation 1 Games patching the ISOs with PPF-o-Matic if anyone know this Software. And the 6300 was a 56K BBS.😁 Yeah good old times.
Hi Vintage Mac Lovers, I do own a Macintosh Performa 630, since the CRT-Monitor died some Time past I've tried to hook it up to an LCD Panel on VGA using an Adapter with those tiny rows of Switches as you've got. Seems I've chosen the wrong settings on it, as an result the Graphics started smelling funny ... Guess the best Times of this Graphics Card are over. Does anyone have a Compatible Graphis Card Available for Sale ?? And what are the Correct switch settings on those Adaptor to VGA ? Can anyone help me out here ? Thanks in Advance
Some years back , I found a 6300CD with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse thrown out at the curb for recycle and it still works fine today. I hadn't used it for quite some time and when I went to adjust the control buttons on the monitor, they became so brittle that the plastic buttons all pushed inside the case! Eventually when my health allows I've got to open up the monitor and do a little restoration. I am a PC enthusiast and never really bothered with Apple anything as I REALLY HATE Apple Corp, (Microsoft and Bill "Gates of Hell" isn't so "angelic" either!) but their retro machines do have a certain "charm" I must admit. I am glad that I saved the 6300 from the local landfill. 👍👍
I cut my teeth on two types of computers in the mid 90s that taught me everything I know: a Windows 95 Pentium 166 I built with my mom, and FLEETS of Powermac 5200 and 5300 at my school that I got a summer job cleaning and reimagine at my school district. They performed fine, if there was a difference compared to other powermacs, I couldn't tell. They crashed about as much as any other computer without memory protection and true preemptive multitasking (which was often, we didn't have memory protection back then on either PC or Mac, multitasking was basically hacked on not baked in). But they were so easy to get into, especially compared to my PC at home. I wanted one so bad!
Damn I forgot why they were that bad. Anyone probably remember the Mac Color Classic was really bad performance as it runs on 16 MHz bus also. Same with the Apple TV too. Color classic II was even better but wasn’t sold in the USA. They could take PowerPC upgrades. Additionally, some of the 68k performas didn’t have full 68040 processors so they removed floating point feature which was used for math games or math programs etc. the dreaded 68LC040 processors.
I can attest to the fact the bus on these systems was garbage. They came with a ridiculously slow IDE hard drive, like 2MB/s peak if I recall. They had SCSI, but the performance of it was bad too. I called Apple support so many times they finally conceded that the design was flawed and I should only expect 5MB/s from external SCSI devices even though older 68K Macs could get almost 10 MB/s with the same drive. I bet they were so glad when my warranty expired.
That machine looks and feels slower than pre Spindler Quadras running the same OS and software. I had one of the series and it was so awful and buggy I destroyed it so there'd not be any evidence of it for future generations. I've basically avoided most hardware made in Spindler days in my collection, so I only have the good stuff from Jobs and Sculley era, and then some of the better stuff of the later Jobs era. Surprisingly, there's nothing of value lost when skipping that few years either. The PowerMac G3 models are superb in every way to the 60x series PPC models and don't have a single drawback. So basically jumping from Quadra 950 to PowerMac G3, you can run all the software in between, have compatibility with each other of them in every way and the performance jump there is basically what it should've been all along, quite like going from the slow as molasses PowerBook G4 1.4GHz models straight to the very fast at introduction 2.16GHz Dual Core Duos in the better Apple architecture migration.
I had one of these before I bought a G4 tower. For a PowerPC the speed was disappointing out of the box. I recall the back page ads in MacWorld being full of upgrade cards for every other desktop PowerPC Mac. But this one was a dead end. It was a rather short period between the time I purchased it to the time I gave it away. Maybe 4 or 5 years! Contrast that to my 19 year old iBook G4 now running Sorbet Panther, which is still quite useable and not ready for eWaste. And I’m more of an average user, not (yet?) a vintage computer hobbyist!
I guess I am a little confused about the Register, Data, and Address Buses. All the way up to the G5, they were 32, 64, 32, respectively. For the G5 they went to 64, 64, 64 respectively. So what was the slowing factor again? The register and Address buses?
I know the monitor is a bit less important, but I don't understand scrubbing off the NEC logo. That's like scraping off the Apple logo on the computer. It's technically equally relevant. Just my 2 cents.
The 603 and 603e processors have a 32/64 bit data path, so the 4 cycle rumor is just that, a rumor. It is fully capable of loading from ram normally, at a slower 32 bit bus width limit. It IS slower than contemporary macs, but its not a cpu cycle issue, but a bus bandwidth issue
I used to call this beaut the “Bomb Screen Box” 8 seemed to help but life pretty much sucked until the iMac DV. Very few complaints since. (Beyond feeling like the OG Air was an insult to our collective intelligence)
Yes , the absolute dog of all macs .The only other machine running macos from that same period that sucked more was the cheap and very nasty umax. Had to wait until the imac came along for the next painful support experience, with the dawn of the 'spudger required' for desktop servicing. On the upside , they all predated OS-X so supporting the software was less stress.
Wow, what, 2 years make! You were a lot more subdued on your commentary back then. BUT I have a ton of 030 Level games and Hope to get an Old Mac like this that can play my games and maps too!
Not even playing games through the machine itself and using the personality card... lol... I was wondering what level of emulation madness you were using. Generally N64 emulation is intensive as it comes and due to poor optimisation of the SGI chip to emulate an N64 it requires something in the order of a 2ghz chip and a decent graphics card.
we have the LC 630 with full 68040 cpu. wished we waited a bit longer for the PowerPC version to some degree. But it would have ben a while b4 the 6360 version, meant to be one of the best of this family.
I know this vid is old but, please, the N64 controller grip... using the stick means you grab the controller using the central grip not the left one D:
I picked up one of these little suckers at a thrift store for cheap. My own metric to gage the goodness of an old 90s Mac or PC is will it play Doom at decent framerates? It will, so I like it.
i just got a 6300cd as a throw back. my first computer was a 630cd which is what i wanted. however i wanted to be able to run more old programs so a PPC was required. thus i chose a 6300. not sure if i made the right choice
The thing that I don't like about these old Mac is the plastics over time they have become super bridle. When I got my Powermac 6100 I broke the clips on the top cover just trying to open the case.
A nice computer, clean, well build, I don't like the silver generation where they look all the same, clearly at that time the computer where nice, expandable upgradable.
And I seen this Macintosh Power PC Performa 6205CD is it the same as that PC I've never used a make. someone has one for sale that lives in my town for 50$
I had one o these as a kid my dad got one for me and one for my sister when were kids from his school where they were surplus. The first computer I could truly call my own. I remember trying to play neopets on 56k dialup!
I hope that's not a 68k port of Doom you're starting up. It won't be optimal regardless of whether there are any architectural problems in that machine.
