Rescuing my Childhood Mac LC575 (And Upgrading the BEJEEZUS out of it!) Part 1

regret it's an inescapable part of life whether it's a missed connection an opportunity passed by or selling all of your bitcoin in 2014. there isn't a single person among us who doesn't live with one or two coulda shoulda's haunting their past my biggest regret though is a motherboard namely the motherboard to perhaps the most underappreciated mid-90s 68k max this lc575 an o40 based machine released in 1994 with a glorious built-in 14-inch trinitron display and this particular one is extremely special because i found this machine at a thrift shop many years ago back in the early 2000s when i was still a wee young high schooler and this exact machine was the genesis of my obsession with vintage max the only problem is it spent the last decade or so in a plastic tote in the basement and it turns out it's missing a few things like all the screws and all the drives and crucially the motherboard so today let's see if we can restore this very special mac to its former glory and maybe even take it a little beyond so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy rescuing underdog classic backs with piles of upgrades i hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel i have many more projects like this in the pipeline including getting ready for a display at vcfest 2021 in october so it's definitely worth sticking around now if i were a superhero like i don't know flailing arms man this mac would be my origin story like most of the other cool kids in my high school i really enjoyed spending weekends driving around the thrift shops and digging up old computer equipment but when i found this mac everything changed i was completely enamored by it the form factor the beautiful and bright built-in screen the sound the optical drive this right here was the first machine that i ever played warcraft on and i became obsessed with upgrading it far beyond its original specs it was through this mac that i first discovered sites like apple fritter and the 68k mla which drove me to further collect more macs and well here we are in this channel today but back then just as now the lc 575 was the under appreciated second class mac to everyone's perennial favorite the color classic and worse many 575s became sacrificial donors for one of the most famous mac mods the mystic color classic because the 575's motherboard was a drop-in compatible replacement for the color classic's original far less powerful board you could take your color classic from its stock 16 megahertz 68030 to a 33 megahertz o40 without any technical skill at all just slide the board out of the 575 and slide it right into the back of the color classic i don't even think you needed a screwdriver and all of this because people generally regard the color classic as the final and true air to the original macintosh the penultimate mac released in the original form factor and i'd just like to say that those people are wrong it's the 575 that holds that distinction and to prove my point let's look at the two machines side 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description below and sign up for data camp all of the first chapters in data camps courses are free and now back to the lc575 now unfortunately i don't have a color classic so we'll have to use some cutting edge special effects to add one in the color classic also releases the performa 250 came out in early 1993 it has a 16 megahertz 68-30 processor a standard four megs of ram upgradable to an artificially locked 10 megs although you could physically install more it just wouldn't work and a beautiful 10 inch trinitron display running at very near the original max resolution at 512 by 384 compare that to the lc 575 also released as the performa 575 this came out a few days shy of a year after the color classic with vastly improved specs it has a 33 megahertz 68 lc040 processor with a standard 5 or 8 megs of ram officially upgradable to 36 however unlike the color classic there was no artificial ram limit imposed and later users found that the machine could handle up to 64 megs of ram and i've even read accounts on apple fritter of users successfully installing 128 megs of ram in a 575. the lc575 also has a built-in tray loading cd-rom drive and a floppy drive compared to the color classics single floppy drive i posit that in fact the lc 575 was the penultimate all-in-one mac taking the dna of the original 1984 macintosh to the limits of 1994's technology and the color classic much like the tenacious d song certainly wasn't the greatest mac ever built it was just a tribute trying to mimic the past with modern components built with way too many compromises to even be useful back when it was new and that brings us to the motherboard much like the mystic color classic the lc575 had its own slide-in motherboard replacement upgrade in fact there were several power pc boards that could slot right into the back of the machine this was a much less popular upgrade though because the new boards would hang out the back of the machine by several inches micromac even sold a 575 upgrade kit at the time which included an expanded rear cover to fully enclose the new board so back when i first got this machine that was my plan i was going to sell the 575's original motherboard on ebay to go into somebody's mystic mod and i was going to find a power pc board to fit in its place and as far as i can remember i only got as far as taking the machine apart and selling the motherboard and it's in this state that i found it still missing all of the screws and the motherboard fortunately i did find all of the drives and some of the components in this paper bag sitting nearby so we're not completely out of luck and now thanks to alex from apple on the apex and i'll link his youtube channel down in the description below i once again have a 575 original motherboard and not just any motherboard this one has the power pc 66 megahertz upgrade card already installed which is absolutely incredible i could not have even dreamed of owning this motherboard back in the day so let's see if we can piece together a working upgraded power pc lc 575 and then see just how far we can push it yeah so this case is a little bit worse for wear there are cracks and color differences between different parts of the case actually because i rinsed some of this off in water that had some peroxide solution still in it so some of this stuff got slightly retrobrited and you can see the original color of the mac which is under this little square where the ready for power pc upgrade sticker used to be and this lost the lc 575 sticker a long time ago and i for some reason thought it would be a good idea to write lc 575 in the space where it went remember i was a 16 year old kid who found this at a thrift shop so cut me some slack so i'm just going to try a little bit of goo gone and see if this comes off because in addition to getting rid of goo this does say it works on crayon marker and more so yeah let's find out okay so that actually came off quite well there's just a faint hint of it remaining so what i'd like to do now is find or print a replacement lc 575 sticker to put on here so if you have any leads on the best way to do that let me know in the comments and alex was also kind enough to include a hard drive with uh well i forget what system is on here but the drivers for the card are pre-installed and it's actually already on the drive sled so thank you very much for that and alex also included a very nice note here saying hi sean here is the motherboard out of my macintosh lc 575 with a 66 megahertz daystar cpu upgrade installed with an extension you can boot off of either cpu resulting in two different startup sounds out of the same mac this was very surprising at first also enclosed is the hard drive out of the 575 it's working though a bit noisy and it has a clean install of system and includes the extension for booting off of the 601 i know these small capacity hard drives are getting hard to find a working order so i hope it'll be of use to you in one of your projects i was planning on making some videos about the 575 and some accessories i had for it but i haven't been very motivated to make good content recently maybe this board can be the star in one of your videos instead enjoy alex apple on the apex thank you very much alex again for this incredible thing this machine means more to me than i think you can imagine i'm so excited to get it up and running with its own real motherboard once again so thank you so much alex and again a link to his channel in the description below okay i've got our trusty green anti-static mat out so we can take a closer look at the accelerator and the motherboard here because it's actually really interesting looking at this you might think what's the accelerator actually plugged into because here are the two expansion slots but the accelerator is actually plugged directly into the processor socket where the old 68 lc04o processor was and this here that's a 68040 processor that passes through to that slot and underneath this big gold heatsink here that's where the power pc 601 66 megahertz lives so this accelerator actually has two processors on it so what i really want to do is just stick that motherboard in here and see if it works but this machine hasn't been powered on in over a decade probably well over a decade maybe 15 years so i think the best thing to do would be to plug it into power and see if it explodes all right plugged into power and i'm going to hit the switch i heard the crt warm up all right i'm gonna say that the power supply is good now before we put this thing together we need to do something about this fan because well it's disgusting and from what i remember it's also extremely noisy so i think you know what we're going to do it's knock to a time it has this weird kind of zero insertion contact we'll have to transplant that to the new fan through the cunning use of snippers all right so we don't need the yellow wire just the red and black and there we go are fully knocked wood lc 575 fan and now we'll just crack this thing open which is pretty easy since it doesn't have any screws anymore then we can pop the fan back into its home which is actually mounted in the back part of the case again with no wires just these two contact points which contact onto the board in the main chassis of the machine all right so let's install alex's hard drive here which has the convenient edge connector already installed and now our motherboard okay we've got our lovely apple extended keyboard 2 and our trackball power is connected let's flip the switch and i heard the crt initialize here goes power it chimed there it is it's booting up that's so awesome i have not seen this machine boot up in so so long this is absolutely incredible again thank you so much alex for bringing this super important to me machine back to life with that awesome upgraded motherboard well tragedy has struck you see i wanted to install the cd-rom drive and the floppy drive both of which seem to be working mind you so that's successful but to get to them i had to remove this front faceplate here which is kind of a huge pain to take off because in order to get it off you actually have to take a screwdriver and stick it in a little kind of slot here and push back this tab which is made out of now extremely brittle plastic and guess what in a surprise to no one i broke it off now i did gorilla glue it back in place and it seems to be okay but i'm willing to bet that it's not gonna hold hopefully when i put this back on it'll hold for that but the next time i go to take it off again i'm sure it's gonna break right back off and if i want to retrobrite this machine i'm definitely going to have to take this off again but i want to put it back on for now all right so fortunately it is holding but i know once i take this off again and stick this screwdriver back up there it's just gonna break off again so i guess i'll keep my gorilla glue handy but in good news i have backed up the whole hard drive onto this jazz disc and i have confirmed that our power pc upgrade card does work so we have our 601 processor upgrade control panel and i can boot this into power pc just fine but i think this hard drive is actually on the way out because once i leave this machine running for maybe 20 minutes and starts to make an absolutely horrendous noise so i think i'm going to take this 100 megabyte hard drive out and i'm going to replace it with this scuzzy to sd and i think i want to install a somewhat newer version of mac os on here probably 8.1 because i think that's actually what i had on this machine back when i first got it and then i think we might have a problem because the hard drive needs this zero insertion force kind of edge connector adapter and the scuzzy sd doesn't actually need the power from this jack here it gets enough power from the scuzzy bus itself so two problems i think we're gonna have to solve here one i guess we're gonna have to desolder this four pin floppy power header here so that we can fit this adapter on here and then the second problem is will the adapter even line up with the edge connector that's inside the case here because it's expecting a full-size hard drive and this is not a full-size hard drive so i think what i'll do is i'm going to desolder this connector and then we'll just see how well it lines up and if you have to maybe 3d print some sort of adapter to make it line up better i hope not but if we do we do have a 3d printer at our disposal all right that was a bit more of a pain to get off than i anticipated but now it'll fit our weird little foxconn connector just fine let's just stick this in the machine and make sure it works and we'll repurpose this sd card from our quadra mud experimentations and i think there might be a system on there not a ux i think it actually has seven six on here so yeah let's see if this boots yes this is gonna be pretty annoying to get back in there if you can see the slot is all the way back at the end so i'm gonna have to try to just finagle it back there yeah you know what that fits a lot better than i thought the scuzzy sd actually rests perfectly on the bottom of this kind of plastic track here and that lines it up perfectly with the edge connector at the very back so i think what i'll do is i'm going to figure out some sort of 3d printed mount to kind of just wedge it better in place and maybe take some use of this plastic track here and then if i figure something good out i'll pop it up on thingiverse all right everything's hooked up let's hit the button ah well that's not a good sign okay so i think it was the sd card because i swapped in a different one and now we appear to be in business booting off of the jazz drive which is the copy of the system that was on that 100 megabytes scuzzy hard drive so let's see if we can get a fresh install of mac os 8.1 on here and i wonder if it'll let us format the sd card through the stock drive setup nope comes up as not supported but i have another idea okay i found yet another system disk this is the original jazz disc that came with the curse mac this is actually the cursed max original os system 753 and i do have the patched version of hd sc setup here which sees the sd card so now we can format it and then see if we can pop a cd in and install mac os 8.1 all right we now have our mac sd recognized so that's great scuzzy sd is working just fine so let's install 8.1 we'll just make sure we're not installing anything that we don't really need like open dock and there we go installing mac os 8 on our sd card all right we've got mac os 8.1 installed and i've taken the liberty of moving the extension over that lets us control the powerpc upgrade card and i've also moved over some benchmarking software and installed a couple games but this video is already getting pretty long and i definitely don't want to rush tinkering with this machine in fact i want to savor it as much as possible because it is darn awesome so i think we're going to leave it here for now and we'll have a part 2 next week and it's going to be extremely exciting because we're going to install 128 megs of ram which hopefully works i think this monster of a memory stick will work and we'll also install a couple of these beautiful purple 512k vram sims from silicon insider which also i think these should work and then we'll take some benchmarks both with the powerpc and the 68040 processor and i think we'll play some games and see what this machine is really capable of so if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more all-in-one macintosh shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to chris alegretta tom stig124 justin d morgan chris calderon and greg from rutkin mods who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping make these videos possible you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 19,586

Rating: 4.9283819 out of 5

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

Id: trhfve0xgVY

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021