Restoring and Upgrading a Mac from 1993!

hey everyone it's Colin how's it going often I like to explore unusual or influential retro Tech this time though we'll restore a fairly mainstream computer from its era but then give it several modern upgrades [Music] [Music] the Macintosh Quadra 605 wasn't really anything special when it was introduced in late 1993 its base specifications were the same as the LC and performa 475 models with a 25 megahertz Motorola 68 lc-040 processor four megabytes of built-in RAM and an 80 megabyte hard drive the only differences between those machines was really just where they were sold the lc475 was for the education market and the performa version was sold in electronics and department stores the Quadra 605 specifically was targeted more at the professional Market along with other models in the Quadra line and was generally sold through Apple dealers it was a bit unique in that while its internals were the same as its counterparts its case was slightly different sitting flat on a desk atop four distinct feet whereas the LC and performa versions resembled previous models with a distinctive upward slant that's not to say the 605 is any less entry level than the others it has a decent selection of ports with audio in and out ADB scuzzy two serial ports and video output but unlike higher end machines at the time which could be powered on from the keyboard it lacked soft power circuitry so one had to flip the main switch on the back it was meant to be a basic productivity computer and its price reflected that the computer alone sold for about a thousand dollars U.S and one could pick up a bundle including a monitor modem and software for about fifteen hundred pretty comparable to similar Windows PCS at the time but its simple nature also now makes it an excellent machine for those new to Retro Max this one was given to me as not working it was said to power on but would never display anything on screen I was glad to see that it's clock or pram battery had been removed as those tend to leak and seriously damage the motherboard but while most Macs don't need that battery in order to boot the 605 won't produce video without one could that be all this machine needed to test it out I grabbed one of my period accurate Mac monitors it's somewhat generically named the Macintosh color display and features a 14-inch Sony Trinitron CRT this one seems to have been used at a school based on its markings and bears some dings and scratches from use this asset tag on top has been solidly glued on and I decided not to attempt removing it as Plastics from this era have become very brittle something we'll encounter again soon but the most important thing is that this monitor still works quite well when I started the Quadra it did produce the normal startup chime but despite the new battery the monitor remained dark I suspected bad capacitors on the motherboard could be the problem but a cursory look showed no obvious signs of leakage instead I stumbled on a much more straightforward culprit most Macs from this era included video memory or vram soldered to the motherboard but it turns out this model is a little different in that vram modules have to be populated in these slots which happen to be empty I dropped in a couple of spares and sure enough that did the trick the display sprung to life if I didn't have those extra ones it would have been possible to order new Replacements as there are a few folks in the Retro Mac Community producing them four megabytes of ram was standard with this model and came soldered to the motherboard that might have been enough at its launch but someone had installed a later OS system 753 which had higher memory requirements which leaves less than two megabytes free for applications without having to resort to virtual memory an upgrade was in order and I found a 4 Meg module that I could drop into its single Ram slot eight megabytes total gives a lot more breathing room I wanted to wipe the hard drive which appears to have been swapped in from another Mac at some point it's got a 350 megabyte scuzzy Drive made by IBM which wasn't an option you could choose when the machine was new it's also got an asset tag from a university in New York and while I can't say I've ever seen individual components labeled like that I was somewhat surprised that the drive was even working at all many of these older scuzzy drives have long since failed normally to reinstall the Mac OS I'd need to resort to a stack of floppies or pull out an external CD-ROM drive but in this occasion I didn't need either as I had picked up an external blue scuzzy unit from Joe's computer museum for about 50 bucks fully assembled it plugs directly into the scuzzy port on the back of the machine and pretends to be a hard drive holding down shift command option delete when booting instructs the Mac to skip the internal hard drive and start up from the blue scuzzy instead I had set this one up with all sorts of useful utilities and software installers to make working on older Macs like these more convenient I got the internal drive reformatted which completed without any errors then I could kick off an installation of system 71 which had originally shipped with this model it uses even less Ram than system 7.5 and generally seems to be slightly more responsive ultimately this machine would end up going out to free geek Twin Cities to be sold at their thrift store so I installed a couple of other useful programs to help its future owner copies of the file archive utility stuff at expander as well as disk copy for managing software image files there was also one more thing I wanted to fix some damage from our old Nemesis brittle plastic the top cases held on with two latches at the back and a very common problem with this case style is for one or both of them to break thankfully this one had been taped on to keep it from being lost but simply gluing it back in place wouldn't suffice the latches hook into tabs on the bottom case and rely on the flexibility of the plastic to release them and that flexibility was long gone so I decided to change the rules a bit the top case didn't really need to snap on like it originally did so I sanded down part of the broken off tab so it wouldn't engage with the bottom case anymore to get out the other tab I removed the metal shielding from the inside looks like this machine might have seen a small liquid spill through its vent holes in the top there's some rust on the shielding that also stained the plastic but it doesn't seem to have gotten any farther than that I got the other latch sanded down too then set out to reattach the broken one I used super glue meant specifically for Plastics along with some accelerator to help it cure quicker and while this worked well I knew it wouldn't be enough on its own as is often the case with retro Tech these days 3D printing to the rescue I made a set of repair brackets that could be glued in they're shaped to fit the underside of the latches to give them support and will likely work with any of the Mac models that share this form factor you can find a link to the file in the description I got them glued into the case and between the brackets and eliminating the need to bend the latches to begin with it's unlikely these will ever break off again one final test and that was the floppy Drive did it need any repairs it did not which was nice so all I had left to do was clean the machine up a bit and put it back together but that doesn't mean we're done with this story far from it I had actually been given two machines and the second one was in slightly better shape specifically in that both case latches were intact I gingerly pulled off the top cover to find some differences inside it had its vram modules but also a ram upgrade already this was likely a high spec machine when it was sold as it seemed to have its original 250 megabyte Quantum branded hard drive the largest offered as an option in fact while reviews were generally very positive towards the 605 and its siblings they did often recommend buying the better configurations for only a few hundred dollars more one doubled the included RAM and hard drive space which was a lot less expensive than upgrading after the fact and upgrades are exactly what I had planned for this machine instead of going for something period accurate I decided to do a few more ambitious changes to maximize its potential first was the ram it came with eight megabytes but I found a 16 Meg module to drop in while this wouldn't hit the official 36 megabyte maximum 20 Megs total would be plenty so I could turn off virtual memory and not have to wait on the hard drive though that hard drive would also get swapped out in favor of an internal blue scuzzy module I've used these several times before and for good reason they're a solid inexpensive way to replace a scuzzy drive with a faster more reliable micro SD card I had sanded down the latches on the top cover like with the previous machine but even still I didn't want to have to remove it every time I needed to access that micro SD card so I turned again to 3D printing this time designing a custom bracket that would fit in the expansion card opening it's meant to work with this an adapter cable I picked up for about 10 bucks that has a Micro SD connector on one end and a full-size SD card slot on the other to make everything fit neatly it's necessary to remove the SD slot from its plastic housing which is simply clipped on then I used some strong double-sided VHB tape to stick the PCB to the bracket I carefully popped out the expansion cover its Plastics are likely brittle too and fed the ribbon cable through the opening the bracket then just snaps into place and manages to just clear the components on the motherboard the reason why I'd want easy access to the SD card is because of two new features the blue scuzzy offers which became available with a firmer update I was able to reuse the original drives bracket to hold the blue scuzzy and then I could snap it into the bottom housing and reconnect the scuzzy cable this short Molex pigtail wouldn't be necessary as the blue scuzzy can run off the power supplied by the scuzzy bus for termination I got the ribbon cable plugged in then folded up the excess and used some capped on tape to keep it neat the filament I used to print the bracket wasn't a perfect color match but since it's on the back of the machine it was no big deal [Music] what is a big deal is how easy the blue scuzzy is to set up and use a hurdle often encountered by those new to Retro Computing platforms is how to get an OS and software transferred over for a long time this meant needing Legacy Media like Zip disks or even so-called Bridge computers systems that have interfaces or drives to help exchange files between a modern computer and a retro one but blue scuzzy has three features that make all of that no longer necessary first is getting an OS installed the hard drive presented to the Retro Mac is really just an image file stored to the SD card you can make a blank image yourself using a tool like disk jockey which has predefined sizes for various Mac models or you can Define the size yourself what's even easier is to download a pre-made image you can pick a blank one so you can install the OS on your own or just grab one that's already had that done for you [Music] what about software that came on CD-ROM machines like this Quadra 605 didn't have a drive built in an external scuzzy drives are becoming increasingly scarce blue scuzzy has a solution for this too in that it can emulate being an optical drive just copy over a disk image file and name it appropriately so blue scuzzy knows what to do with it when you reinsert the card and start up the Mac it'll Mount the image as if it was a real disc and it's especially convenient for playing games the coolest feature has to do with moving individual files to and from a retro Mac if you download a program or file from the internet you can copy it to a special folder on the SD card once it's back in the Retro Mac just run the file transfer app to download it into the virtual hard disk this process cleverly uses the Mac OS scuzzy API to communicate directly with the blue scuzzy outside the hard disk it's presenting and it's possible to upload files the same way too using this machine was now a whole lot more convenient but there was one more upgrade I wanted to do these shipped with a Motorola 68 LC o40 processor clocked at 25 megahertz that offered a decent amount of performance for its time but saved cost by omitting a built-in floating Point Unit or FPU that was a kind of math co-processor and adding one could make some programs or games perform better so I dug out one last item from my parts bin a full 68040 with a built-in FPU it was clocked at the same 25 megahertz but it's hard to turn down a free upgrade so I carefully pried the original processor from its socket I took the opportunity to wipe up the bit of dust that had accumulated then dropped in the new chip sure enough in the benchmarks the overall CPU performance didn't change but the floating Point test saw a decent boost it's possible to overclock these machines to run at 33 megahertz and generally with good results but it involves desoldering resistors and everything I've done to this machine so far has been easily undoable if I want to revert to stock with the mechanical hard drive gone the only sound from this Quadra is from its lone system fan I figured I'd swap it out for a modern quieter replacement but managed to snap one of the retaining Clips in the process of course I did brittle plastic strikes again and worse I had made a mistake when ordering and the new fan was too tall at this point I figured I'd just leave well enough alone I already had replacement capacitors for the motherboard on hand so I decided to tackle replacing them another day the first Quadra 605 would end up in the hands of another retro Enthusiast but I wanted to keep the second one for myself I have a lot of fond memories using similar Macs from its time period and the 605 specifically has a bit of a cult following among Mac collectors so it's great to have one of my own no it wasn't a high-end machine in its day but it was a solid one and with these new upgrades it's even more capable than ever before if you liked the video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe you can follow me on social media at this does not comp and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 92,036

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Id: R8j8oovQMAc

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022