No One's Ever CPU-Swapped a TAM Before

the 1997 20th anniversary Macintosh was only ever released with a single processor option a 250 megahertz power PC 603e and although there were a few upgrade cards released for it during its short life they were weird Cash Card upgrades that only worked under classic Mac OS not BOS or Linux and crucially not Mac OS 10. well I just got back from VCF East where dos dude 1 brought his entire BGA soldering setup and we did The Impossible by swapping the onboard 603e processor for a full-fledged G3 something that has never been tried before so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy the idea of deeply technical computer modifications as performance art or you're wondering what the heck that could possibly mean I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel so this weird boys are friendly neighborhood Tam the 20th anniversary Macintosh that we've done a ton of weird stuff to from pedestrian things like fixing all the internals from spare parts from a power book that we had lying around two questionable design choices like re-clothing the ratty old speaker Fabric in this black speaker cloth like the prototypes had and I'm glad so many of you are with me on that choice and we've done some weird stuff to it like taking the only G3 upgrade that was ever available for it and swapping in a G4 if you haven't seen any of those Shenanigans I'll link to some of them right here well today we're taking things way further because we've done an upgrade that to my knowledge has never even been attempted before to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about let's start with a quick rundown of the problem that we're solving and by problem I mean roadblock to using this thing as it was never intended you see the 20th anniversary Macintosh whereas bespoke and futuristic as it looks is basically a hodgepodge of 90s Macintosh desktop and power book Parts shoved into an interesting case and although it was only officially upgradable using its single PCI slot and com slot 2. in reality you could shove upgrades in here meant for other Macs especially the Power Mac 6500 which basically is this thing's logic board you can fit the 6500s Dual PCI Riser card in there and it would work just fine although put a little too much pressure on the slot and even better you could use these cash slot CPU upgrades in there which could give this upgrade challenged machine a G3 and with the little soldering Wizardry a G4 and that's awesome but still weirdly Limited let's take a closer look at how this cash card upgrade works and I'll show you what I mean the processor in machines like the 6500 and by extension The Tam was never meant to be upgraded and in fact Apple kind of specifically designed it to not be upgradable however back in the 90s companies like sonnet had kind of an arms race on upgrading otherwise non-upgradable macintoshes and for machines based on this motherboard they came up with this which doesn't actually replace the processor on the motherboard it bypasses it this installs into the cash slot which otherwise would be just a cash card and Via an extension in classic Mac OS the machine initializes this processor forgets about the old 603 and then just runs off this and that is excellent for your classic Mac OS based Shenanigans but if you want to do any other kind of non-macos shenanigans or even Mac OS 10 Shenanigans well those operating systems don't have an extension that can initialize this card and thus those os's will only work off of the original 603e which in POS is okay and in Mac OS 10 is a little bit no good so fast forward to this past weekend I was at VCF East which is a wonderful three-day celebration of vintage Computing in Wall New Jersey also exhibiting this year was World Famous soldering wizard dos dude one who brought along an entire BGA soldering setup and was doing live BGA rework during the show as what I can only describe as engineering performance art lately Colin has been CPU swapping various power Macs that had specific surface mount 603e processors for G3 740s which are pin compatible one such machine being the PowerMax 6500 which is the same exact motherboard nearly as what's in this Tam I fully documented everything for your viewing pleasure and I'll show you right after this word about today's sponsor PCB way not only does PCB way offer high quality PCB prototyping and production they also offer on-site PCB assembly and they can Source some of the components with their TurnKey service but I bet your project needs more than just pcbs well PCB way now offers a ton of additional Services high quality 3D printing injection molding they even offer CNC Machining and Sheet Metal Fabrication literally every part of your next project can be prototyped and built with PCB way so if you have any PCB or prototyping needs I hope you'll give pcbway.com a try so funny enough this upgrade wasn't even planned beforehand Colin mentioned to me on Saturday that the Tams processor might be G3 swappable with the gear that he brought and in fact there was a 50 50 shot that we could do it because well some 6500 motherboards had a surface mouth processor and some of them had a qfp socketed processor now given how annoying and fragile The Tam is to take apart I was a bit worried at first but by Sunday I realized when am I ever gonna have this chance again with the gear there and the processors there so I'm sure you can guess the decision that I made so I tore into this thing with a crowd watching and took it apart further than I've ever disassembled it before and putting the Tam's logic board next to the 6500 was really interesting there were nearly identical The Tam even has this weird hacked on breakout board where the audio jack would normally be I mean it's almost comical anyway Colin fired up his impressive full table's worth of rework station and gear and he pulled out the pile of 740 series g3s that he brought along and I suspect that he always has a pile of early g3s on him at all times in case of emergency anyway as he set up the board on the pre-heater and he got the rework station ready a pretty sizable audience gathered because VCF East was packed Colin wasn't phased in the least a bit of flux around the old boring 603e some directed heat applied and off it came next he cleaned the pads and got ready with the G3 freshly prepped with solder balls a generous application of flux careful placement and a bit of directed Heat and on it goes honestly it took me more time to disassemble and reassemble the tan than it took to actually do the CPU swap now the G3 required some adjustments to the voltage and frequency resistors and funny enough donor resistors came from a dead MacBook Pro board so technically there's a bit of MacBook Pro inside this Tam now too first boot up test was a success and note that at this point the Tam is entirely held together by a single totally normal Computing sticker which is totally normal and the thing just worked it booted first try and more importantly BOS was now running on the G3 and it was fast as all get out so now we have the world's first and only native G3 Tam but just what can one do with a native G3 Tam Shenanigans here let me give you a quick tour so let's actually start this tour here in BOS because that's actually honestly the most interesting thing to me because if you'll remember BOS was only running on the 603e before even though we had that G4 card on there and uh let me tell you it makes a heck of a difference I had this running BOS at VCF on display and when it was on the 603e doing something like running sheep shaver to emulate Mac OS on top of POS which is of course hilarious well it worked but it was slow and if you tried to do something like run Wolfenstein 3D it would barely run but now check this out it is playable I mean a little bit of a slideshow but before it was literally unplayable on anything but a postage stamp and now if we set the screen size to something a bit smaller it is pretty good and again let me remind you this is a Mac running a third-party OS BOS emulating Mac OS which does kind of pass through the processor but still this is a lot of layers here now that's all well and good but let me show you something native there was a power PC version of Doom released for BOS which worked pretty well but it was very very slow now look at it it is like screaming on here oh man smooth as butter I had to put it down to like a postage stamp on the original processor it's got music it's got the sound effects incredible still a bit dark I think maybe I can play with the color depth of the system a bit but look at it buttery silky smooth [Music] never said I was good at it so that's POS now incredibly and for the very first time ever not only running on an unsupported Macintosh the 20th anniversary Mac but running on an unsupported processor inside of an unsupported Macintosh oh my goodness that is a lot of layers of awesome okay now let me show you a couple things under classic Mac OS and then as you may have guessed we're gonna see about Mac OS 10 at least if it can boot the installer after we did this upgrade I spent an inordinate amount of time just sitting at our exhibit playing Wolfenstein 3D on here because although it played pretty well before it is now buttery smooth and especially paired with this sfx plus ADB controller this is freaking awesome look how smooth and fast it is I cannot believe it I was calling this thing my uh bootleg Apple Pippin oh man okay and now the moment that you may or may not have been waiting for what happens when we try to boot Mac OS 10 on this thing and uh to give you a little context why that's so interesting well if you read up online about trying to boot Mac OS 10 on a tam you'll read lots of accounts of this bricking The Tam however I'm sure it's possible I think the issue is open firmware resolution but I think some of that might be negated by this just now being a native G3 machine meaning it should boot Mac OS 10 no problem anyway let's just see if we can get Mac OS 10's installer to boot on this thing and just make sure the installer can see that we're on a G3 so to boot 10.2 Jaguar we technically don't even need any hacks like X post facto and in fact 10-2 Jaguar should work on a 603e processor although actually the box for this says that it requires a G3 or G4 with 128 Megs of ram so anyway let's see if it'll run on our newly created G3 no all right we will need X post facto and actually in order to use xpos facto we have to go back into the IDE SSD it won't work on the SATA drive because the SATA drive needs a weird nvram script anyway I won't bore you with that right now we'll save all that stuff for the official video installing macquest 10 on this thing for now let me just gloss over some of that go back to the IDE drive and try to boot it with X post facto thank you all right so I've tried all sorts of things here I've tried booting from different CD based versions I've tried booting from real media burn media uh different versions of Mac OS 10 and it just does not want to actually boot into the installer I think I'm gonna have to do a bunch more tinkering because I know it's possible I'm a hundred well 99.5 sure it's possible to boot Mac OS 10 on here but I'm not going to do that tinkering today I'll save that for a bonus video where we will trial and error through a whole bunch of stuff to try to get Mac OS 10's installer to at least Boot and if you enjoy that kind of thing patreon Tierra started at just a buck and you get access to things like bonus videos and other Shenanigans but I'm gonna call this video here and uh yeah holy crap the world's only native G3 Tam my mind is blown I can't believe that I have this thank you dos dude one for well doing this at VCF East uh always awesome to hang out with you and your shenanigans are second to none but if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see what I'm gonna do next with the world's only G3 native Tam Please Subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to Alex Hoffman Camilla noseda Chris allegreta Chris Biggs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson control out Rhys Daniel Hubbard Frodo Jedi Gaspar Heller Greg rutke Harris Brody Jason papaz Justin Hemmings Justin Reed Lyle truid Michael mulhern Paul Spencer Ryan Scott Thompson Sue Tech Tom Woodfin and Unknown Soldier 41 who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 65,213

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: RvLiSEK-KrI

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023