It has been a while since I did another project involving vintage Macs. In 2021, I got a Power Mac G4 Mirror Door and added a bunch of upgrades, including a SATA adapter with SSDs, memory, USB, and a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 video card. It’s the fastest PowerPC Mac running Classic Mac OS 9 and X games.
However, it has some incompatibilities with certain games. Also, Mac OS 9 is a bit too new, as I mainly used Mac OS 7 (also known as System 7) and 8.1 while growing up. I played primarily games on an Apple Performa 630 CD and eventually some version of the Performa 6200, considered one of the worst Macs. In short, it was pretty slow, but I probably didn’t notice since I was a child.
I was looking for an older PowerPC Mac that can run System 7. Pickings are slim as vintage computers are getting hard to find that work that is in decent shape. It will be pretty rough, even if you find one that works. However, I found this Power Macintosh 8100 for $100, which is in decent shape, except for the loose CD panel, which seems familiar at this age. You can print new 3D versions, which I might do someday.
I have booted it up, and it seems to work as it booted to my external SCSI hard drive, which I still have. However, I can’t do much since the seller wiped the internal HD, and there is no operating system. Since I have no CD-Rs, I must wait for the BlueSCSI to arrive. I plan to do a few other upgrades, such as a Sonnet Crescendo G3 Accelerator card (which should improve 68k emulation) and add 32 MB of RAM (if there are free slots) that I took from the Performa 6200. Also, I may need to repair some plastics as they can be brittle on Macs this age.
With that, I will wait until all the parts arrive and revisit. The logic board and the PSU will need a recap at some point, but hopefully, with the latter, there might be an adapter to use as a more modern replacement.
If you want to read more on upgrading the G4 MDD to be fast, they are on my old side blog:
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