Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists

you know all those YouTubers who find an old Mac in a dumpster and restore the thing to make it look brand new they're masochists all of them how do I know this year I joined them you know the saying in for a penny in for a pound for old Tech it should be in for an old Mac and for recapping the motherboard replacing the ram cleaning up residue from an exploded battery trying five storage adapters to find one that actually works finding out that wasn't even the main problem then spending hours Sc

avenging forums for Clues and that's before we even get to the old software I can stop anytime said no retro Enthusiast ever by the time you light up your first you're hooked and good luck avoiding the next vintage computer Festival if it's anywhere near you I picked up this old PowerBook 3400c from a graphic designer like 10 years ago and I got this other powermac from a school this year I'm building out a retro Corner in my new office so 2 months ago I decided to see if the power book would bo

ot so I plugged it in pressed the power button and it actually boots up but testing it out I ran into some issues like random crashes or ejecting floppies only worked sometimes I'm not deep into restoring old Macs in fact the last time I even opened one up was back in 2018 when I helped my sister with her 2011 MacBook Pro so I thought it would be best to phone a friend yeah so I'm Steve from Mac 84 I am on the mac84 YouTube channel I run that and what I basically do is Tinker around with old App

le stuff like it's 1995 so the first thing I usually do is just open it up give it a general inspection you never want to just power it on because you don't know what the state of the machine is in oh I mean really the best thing to do is to open it and take a look inside I mean a lot of these are going to have leaking batteries and stuff and you know it might have been last turned on 15 years ago and it was fine then but today if you just plug it in it's going to explode because battery leak an

d capacitors are shorted and corroded so before you plug it in you should really open it take a look inside so I guess do as I say and not what I did after booting up this PowerBook I open it up and sure enough it's a good thing I pulled out the battery because it was getting pretty crusty I also talked to Colin from this does not compute and he mentioned I should also check the main battery so I looked more carefully inside the main battery compartment and there it is some corrosion so yeah pul

l the pram battery yank the main battery and those are relatively painless operations but I started inventorying all the little quirks I found on these machines so I could see what I could fix like The PowerBook just locked up sometimes and the G4 well there's a reason this thing was nicknamed The Wind Tunnel Not only was it loud that speaker had been bashed in at some point and sounded pretty ratty when my kids come by I want them to experience Computing from the past two decades at least that'

s my hope I have a lot of work to get these things back in fighting shape one of the coolest things back then was you didn't need any internet at all to do just about anything like all this software it just works some of it needs a serial number or you have to put in the disc to play Lord of the Rings but otherwise the internet wasn't sitting there trying to get into your life all the time but today the internet's everywhere and all our devices are connected and that's why I'm happy to use today

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rk it's easy to use on anything like my Mac iPhone or even Linux well at least Ubuntu obviously you have to trust surf shark if you want to use them as your VPN 2 but I like them and I haven't had any issues so if you want that extra bit of protection or just to lift GE restriction sign up and enter code red shirt Jeff for an extra 3 months free or use my link in the description but these two Macs were both from the era right before the internet was always on everywhere tracking you all the time

and they were both Apple at the top of their performance game these two models were both pretty pricey but the 3400 story is especially interesting so that's a crazy expensive laptop but it was also the world's fastest laptop of any computer for like 6 months and that's a pretty decent amount of time considering how fast technology was going in the 9s but the Macs around this time are pretty special to me I owned a blue and white G3 and it was the first time I ever edited a video on my own comp

uter I made some really dumb videos like smashing printers but it was awesome I also found this old working gl1 camcorder and I loved editing like it was 1999 and I'm not unique here a lot of people get into Retro Computing for the same kind of reason this was where I really got my first taste of production because my school had AV club and it was pretty active and we were lucky to have nice computers like this but enough reminiscing let's get right to it I decided I wanted to restore both of th

ese Macs so they'll last another 20 years or more and who better to help than a dream team of Mac restoration Specialists hi I'm Sean action retro uh really in a vintage computer especially macintoshes I remembered watching Sean's series on the world's fastest powermac G4 a couple years ago and I don't have any aspirations to upgrade the thing as far as he did but he obviously knew his way around this machine not only is it beautiful but it's the most powerful it's kind of the cream of the crop

and they're very upgradeable I mean the CPUs are on daughter cards so you can find a faster MDB CPU stick that in there it's really extremely flexible that's good news and you know this thing is more Pro than the current Mac Pro I mean it has four hard drive Bays two optical drive Bays four Ram slots a daughter card for up to two CPUs Wi-Fi expansion a built-in modem gigabit Ethernet fire wire and USB AGP and four PCI slots besides the weird power supply this thing is a beast the modern Mac Pro

has everything soldered down and even though it has some expansion slots only a few cards actually work in it my G4 is pretty loud though this design was beautiful but it was showing its age Apple was really starting to kind of push the boundaries of how much performance they could get out of CPUs in that form factor I'm pretty sure the reason why the G5 got a complete complely different redesign and looks like a cheese grater is because they needed the air flow more than just to make it look co

ol it has an interesting history to it it was the last G4 machine before Apple switched to the G5 and the cheese grater design and all that what's also kind of funny about it and what makes it somewhat desirable to collectors these days is it's the last machine that can natively run Mac OS 9 like officially I didn't even think about that I remember at the radio station I worked at they had tons of software like Fox pro and pro tools didn't run on Macos 10 for a long time Apple wanted to drag peo

ple into the OS 10 era but it had a lot of growing pains sometimes you lose the context around these old machines but that's part of why I love watching retro channels on YouTube but Apple was still Apple even back then this Cinema display uses a weird ADC plug and doesn't have any power plug it pulls power through the GeForce video card that means it has a non-standard video card and a weird power supply power supplies are starting to fail on them and they're not a standard like PC ATX power su

pply the pinout is different and what's a real bummer is the power supply is not just a weird form factor and a weird pin out but it also has a 25v DC rail coming out of it to support the Monitor and that's 25 volts DC and like there aren't any PC power supplies that output that I started getting a vibe from Colin and the other YouTubers I talked to that retr Computing isn't all just joy and Nostalgia the better approach is if the power supply in one those fails and you really care about an ADC

monitor try to repair the power supply if you can you know take it apart figure it out you know or just find another one of course those are getting expensive too and those will probably fail at some point as well but welcome to Vintage Computing right luckily the power supply seemed stable but this system did have issues but first I wanted to give it a good cleaning I gave this new air blower a try and it worked better than I expected it's nice to not have to use C after that and a bit of elbow

grease this thing is looking almost new I popped in a new pram battery too and I'll put a link to all the parts and more details on my blog in the description since this video isn't really a walkthrough I tried upgrading the ram to 2 gigs which is the max this G4 takes and the first time I did it I ordered some PC 3200 Ram from OWC which I found out would kind of work but would also kind of not work so I yanked that and got some PC 2700 Ram which worked much better I also decided to repaste the

CPUs taking off the massive aluminum heat sink revealed the 2 G4S and a little crusty old thermal paste if you have old paste or bad contact with the heat sink the fans on this thing can get even louder so that's one of the first things to check on an old machine if you have a lot of fan noise I also upgraded the internal hard drive to an SSD and the first adapter I tried was this cable CC adapter unfortunately it seems like the G4 wasn't happy with it it would boot sometimes but get stuck othe

r times I narrowed it down to it not supporting ata's cable select feature a feature that was pretty new at the time this machine was built I replaced it with the startech.com adapter and that solved my boot issue I also tried getting Mac OS 9.2.2 installed and eventually found out that you have to run a special version of 9.2.2 on this G4 and it was hidden away on one of the restore CDs go figure so for now I just went with 10.4 after Sean recommended it a few more parts arrived too that smashe

d in speaker was easy enough to replace with one from eBay and the install went perfect actually a little too perfect because now that this speaker works it's absolutely ear shattering how loud the startup bong [Music] gets I even tried a few different ways to quiet down the boot sound but nothing really worked I also did a fan swap for the massive system fan and the two 60 mm fans inside the power supply that install was a little tricky since I wanted to do it without removing the power supply

completely but alls well that ends well if you're doing a fan swap make sure you get the right fans with high CFM rate you can't just throw in some silent noox fans and expect the system to run well also double check the fan connector pinouts these things aren't quite standard like the four pin fan headers we have today but with the new fans how' we do well pretty good actually here's before where it was like 48 DS and afterwards it's definitely still noisy but a more respectable 41 DB around th

is time a care package showed up Colin managed to find original keyboard and mouse for the G4 thanks to freegeek Twin City so huge shout out to them this system was coming together I also threw in a USB 2.0 card and this one with an NEC chipset just worked out of the box giving me four USB 2.0 ports on the back getting files back and forth was a lot faster since I could use any of my old USB 2.0 flash drives but faster still was gigabit Ethernet the firewire and USB ports are limited to around 4

00 megabits but gigabit Ethernet could go faster so I set up net on a Raspberry Pi 5 to run an apple talk file server it's crazy how many little retro projects out there run great on a Raspberry Pi I call this one my apple pie and I open sourced my ansible playbook to set it up for my old Max so a few weeks in I have this G4 running better than new it boots up in like 12 seconds and my file copies over the network get up to like 80 megabytes per second and playing the original Halo on a machine

that's even faster than the first Mac I ever beat Halo on it's definitely worth it I I mean I have to to say that otherwise how can I justify spending almost 400 bucks on all these upgrades but the G4 was built in 2002 that's only 5 years after The PowerBook 3400 but that 5 years made a huge difference the 3400c was the best portable Apple made before Steve Jobs returned and apple actually rehired jobs right before launching the 3400 but this laptop was Gil Amelio's brainchild and we like to loo

k at the clamshell iBook or The PowerBook G3 as the starting point that led to Apple's laptop dominance but really the 3400c as thick and clunky as it was was really where those things started Colin was telling me about how Gil saw a hole in Apple's lineup he's like you know our laptops are really underserving that professional market and the professional Market I mean you know you have a Mac Studio so do I that's where the margin really comes into play so he basically said you know what we need

to have a professional level laptop that's the fastest thing it can be that's the best computer it can be and if it's expensive so be it as long as it's worth it people will buy it and the 3,400 sold for $5,000 in 1997 and that's 97 money Apple really threw everything at this laptop what's actually cool about the 3400 and this kind of comes back to just them trying to go all out with that computer is on the back you probably notice there's an Ethernet Jack built in and having built-in ethernet

on a PowerBook like that was a big deal because even with a lot of PC laptops you had to buy a PC card for that what's crazy about that Port is not only is it 10B T ethernet it's also a 336 modem you can plug a phone line straight into it and it's a 336 modem what's crazier on top of that is included with the machine was an adapter that would you let you use both at the same time why anyone would do that I don't know but like that's kind of how all out they went I mean this machine is pretty cra

zy you get up to 128 Megs of ram a 3 plus GB hard drive a 12x CD ROM and up to a 240 MHz power PC 63 chip the one I had was a bit more modest the low-end 180 MHz model but tucked away there's even crazy features like a subwoofer built-in behind the display no wonder this thing's so thick that thickness also makes it somewhat of a joy to work in almost everything's replaceable and pretty much every screw inside is a Torx T8 they didn't use security screws back then I was able to get files on and

off the thing using this CF card adapter but at least initially when I was booting the system 7.6 it came with I had to use a utility called HFS utils on my Mac Studio to copy files back and forth I put the details on that in a blog post too but I ran through testing everything I found that the CD ROM worked for the most part sometimes it would cycle through reading something and give up but the floppy Drive worked it just needs some work on the eject mechanism and that pram battery was toast bu

t the lithium ion battery actually runs the laptop for like 20 minutes so that's kind of neat I tried upgrading the hard drive to an SD card and that worked but I would also get weird issues with it I also had some trouble formatting it sometimes long story short I ran into some of the same issues I think Sean hit on his PowerBook 1400 I tested like five different hard drive Replacements and ultimately only one seemed to be completely reliable but there were still random crashes in the meantime

I could at least get system 7.6 running somewhat reliably and even tested out some of the old voices I remember back in Apple's early text to speech days well before Siri the light you see the end of the tunnel is a headlamp of a fast approaching train and my son was already getting hooked on Eric's solitire sampler just like I remember back in the day but in the course of debugging the drive issue I also found out this machine can't seem to read 700 megab CDR discs I went as far as to bu Old St

ock 650 Meg cdrs to confirm it could read them and I even tested both in my ancient Apple two-time cd which also had no problem with older CDs but couldn't read newer 700 megabyte discs I also wanted to see if I could get a USB card to work and unfortunately Apple's little USB driver utility won't allow me to install it on the 3400 things got really frustrating though file copies would stall out and The PowerBook would just crash during boot or sometimes right after boot that's when I started te

sting more boot drives I actually had to snip a pin off this Sia adapter and I also tried a little mini PCI Express SSD with this adapter some adapters worked better than others but that crashing issue could have been the death of this machine I spent a few days debugging it and I was going to give up but I tried one last thing through the magic of buying another I picked up another used 3,400 off eBay the listing had no specs and it looked like something melted off some of the plastic so chance

s are it was going to be toast I was hoping it would at least have some Ram or a spare hard drive cable I a test but I open it up and besides a little dog hair this was actually an incredibly lucky find my machine was the base model 180 MHz with 48 Megs of ram this junker it was the top-of-the-line model it had a 240 MHz 604 EV which was also a newer process node so the chip itself was smaller even though it's faster and it had a rare 128 MB RAM module installed plus a new hard drive cable I gut

ted my system and swapped out everything and I booted both of them up and wouldn't you know the eBay machine boots up too so now I have a working spare though the mouse button broken and the bezels toast but this is huge because now I have working spare parts for almost everything even the old battery holds a charge still and that 128 Meg Ram module seems to make all the difference too it's either that or something on the motherboard because now my 3400c is running Mac OS 8.6 like a champ the on

e thing I can't figure out yet is Apple share it gets an IP address from my router but no matter what I try I can't get it to connect to my apple pie at least not yet I'll leave that problem for future Jeff for now I'll let it fly some toasters like I used to do on my old Mac 2ci but this Mac can also play all my old shareware games like spin doctor super mairs Spectre VR and glya 3 just like on the G4 there's nothing like playing these games on real Hardware no emulation is quite the same I sti

ll have a couple things to do including replacing all the electrolytic caps boom just did a video on how those caps degrade over time it's better to replace them now while the computer's still working if they start leaking they could cause permanent damage so when I overload the capacitor and it bulges those tiny grooves on the top break open allowing the release of the pressurized gases I'm also going to get this P scuzi adapter working soon and I might pick up a blue scuzzy 2o it uses the chea

per pip Pico that whole scene there's a lot of options these days which which is just awesome to see especially when it's integrating commodity commodity End quotes you know Hardware these days like the Raspberry p Pico you know it's four bucks and you can get them at micr Center and just solder it onto this PCB and off you go it's just wild it's cool to see how many Community projects are out there keeping these old knacks alive but it's been a journey plugging in this camera the first time bro

ught me right back to high school when I edited my first video but I also remember how Apple always seemed to be a little two hooked on Magic from the PC card having a weird Auto eject mechanism to the crazy ADC and scuzzy connectors I think some people don't realize Apple used to be even worse at form over function well it's hilarious because everybody gives Apple crap about dongles these days but like they were proprietary dongles back in the day I mean HDI 45 was the video out proprietary thi

ng for the first generation of Power Max then you had HDI uh 30 I believe for the power book scuzzy then every PowerBook had either a different ethernet adapter or something else and it's like yeah that's they were far worse back in day at least most of the stuff is USBC I also had to pull my bent paperclip out of retirement because Apple was too cool for an eject button on the floppy Drive I think every Mac User used to have a stash of paper clips to eject floppies and stuck CDs but in the end

was all this worth it no at least I wouldn't say for most people for me yeah the Nostalgia is worth it but this G4 it eats through 200 watts of power when it's just sitting there nothing heck this Pi 02w is 200 times more power efficient and it doesn't even have a fan but you know what the P doesn't do it doesn't run Halo exactly how I remember from my childhood but no I wouldn't recommend getting into retr Computing unless you really want that Nostalgia high and you're willing to sacrifice a lo

t of time for it I've made it my goal to try to at some point replicate my original um High School video and audio work flow and be able to kind of get back to that point just to uh either open up old projects that I might have lying around or um even just to have fun exploring it and seeing some of the things that maybe I couldn't afford back then which is a great reason to get into some of this old Hardware if you're not in it for the Nostalgia and you can't stand a little pain you can emulate

a lot on basilisk or sheep saver also there are modern ports for a lot of old games like nanosaur bugdom and even glya 3 which is on Steam in the end I think the biggest driver though is the Retro Community there there really is a huge outpouring of support and just love for these old systems I mean there's a lot of cool history about it that might be some of why we do what we do I mean there's people creating awesome new hardware projects and software projects and all sorts of stuff and by and

large like I've had very few negative experiences like doing like so much and I've I've talked to so many people and bought and sold things and traded things and repaired things and like nine times out of 10 you're going to meet a fantastic person that's going to help you because they want to see you succeed they are going to have the same excitement that you have about this product or this system that you're working on and they want to see what you do with it or you know could you push it furt

her than it's supposed to be pushed you know and I really couldn't end it on a better note the reason I'm sharing this journey with you is partly to justify the pain and misery of a full month spent restoring two old Max and maybe to prej justify spending another couple months restoring this original Apple 2 and Mac classic both of which have pretty interesting stories behind them until next time I'm Jeff Ging