Upgrading Apple's 1992 Super-Powered BEHEMOTH, the Quadra 950!

[Music] this majestic beige behemoth is a quadra 950 apple's biggest and beefiest 68k macintosh tower from 1992 and this one has a very special story behind it and in fact made its way to the channel directly from its original owner who bought it brand new and i have big plans for this machine pun intended in addition to trying to upgrade it to ludicrous levels which is kind of what we do around here i think that this machine will make the perfect centerpiece server for our exhibit at this year's vcf east running our public circlemud server that you'll be able to walk up and play on various classic macs so today let's get our apple unix install up and running on this monster and see just how much memory we can cram in there and then let's try to compile circle mud so stay tuned and if you enjoy seeing beige behemoths be grudgingly brought into the modern age i hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel i have many more projects just like this in the pipeline which are definitely worth sticking around for released in may of 1992 the quadro 950 was a spec bumped version of 1991's short-lived quadra 900 keeping the same absolutely massive and nearly 40 pound tower case and cranking up the ridiculously high specs even further it upped the 68040 from 25 megahertz to 33 standard ram was doubled to 8 megabytes with an option for 16 and the hard drive now had options up to a massive one gigabyte you even had the option of a 2x cd-rom drive pretty fancy for 92 and when i say this thing is huge i'm not being hyperbolic i mean just look at it next to the quadra 700 which was its contemporary in the quadra line it's almost comically humongous but it was big for a reason unlike the quadra 700 the 950 was not intended as a single workstation or personal computer instead this was meant as a business server sitting on the floor or tucked away in the closet and noisily chugging away keeping your office full of other macs happy and productive and it had several special qualities to help it achieve that goal for one it has this built-in key mechanism which i always thought was so cool it has three positions off on and secure which are intended to limit access to various parts of the system when required you just turn the key to where you want and then remove it and now you can't change the machine settings again without the key the off position is as you would think it completely cuts off the power and prevents you from turning on the system the on position allows it to function like a normal computer push the power button and the thing turns on and you can use it like normal most interesting though is the secure position in this position the machine really acts as a server the mouse and keyboard and disk drive are disabled and power is continuously applied which means that as soon as there's power to the machine the machine will get power and turn on that way if the power goes out as soon as the power comes back on this thing will automatically boot back up and you know these keys really remind me of the sponsor of today's video skillshare who are the key to learning new skills skillshare is an expansive online learning community with thousands of classes built for creators and bridging an enormous swath of topics everything from writing to film video and art all the way to business marketing and even lifestyle subjects i've honestly gotten a ton out of the film and video lessons especially the excellent script shoot and edit from mkbhd one of my favorite tech youtubers i've already incorporated a lot of those learnings into the videos on action retro thanks to the short hands-on lessons about things like planning videos shooting and editing skillshare is curated specifically for learning so there's no ads and they're always launching new premium classes now including live classes so whether you're looking to up your professional skill set or dive into something totally new skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth and the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so thank you skillshare for sponsoring today's video more importantly though this thing was built to be extremely expandable it has 16 sim slots for memory which can each accept a 16 megabyte module and that makes for [Music] 256 megs of ram which is an absolutely absurd amount for 1992. for context the first intel macbook from 2006 came with just 512 megs and if you wanted to upgrade to 256 megs of ram back then well gary bartholomew wrote about his experience buying 256 megs in 1995 for his photoshop work and that cost him 6544. that's pretty darn close to the price of this entire computer which ranged from 8 500 to 9600 if you bought it new back in 1992 and speaking of buying this computer new there's a very special reason this quadrant 950 is here today it comes to us by way of long-time friend of the channel bill cal white and it belonged to bill's good friend tom who sadly passed away recently tom was as big of a retro computing enthusiast as any of us could be and he had an extensive collection of vintage apple max and amigas and a smattering of other machines but when tom bought this quadra it wasn't vintage at all in fact he was the original owner after serving in the military tom had a long and successful career in it and this quadra was there for much of it according to bill tom even lugged this behemoth around to lan parties when tom passed bill was entrusted to preserve his collection and i'm so honored that bill entrusted a few of those machines to this channel including this quadra and a few others so that i can share them all with you so the quadra 950 was one of the few macs released with a version tailored to apple's unix aux marketed as the apple work group server 95. the only real difference was the addition of a special pds card which had some features specifically for being a business server so i think that this machine will be incredibly cool to run aux on for our circlemud server which we're going to run at vcfeast this year one of the vcf themes is text adventures and mud was one of the most popular muds online multiplayer text adventures that were huge in the 80s and 90s and were a huge part of my childhood in particular they're basically the precursor to an inspiration for games like everquest and world of warcraft in fact when everquest first came out people accused it of being a graphical front end to a running circle mud or dq mud server underneath now when i first got this quadrat it did boot up but i think the hard drive's on the way out because it's making some funky noises and i just get a flashing question mark folder now so i think we should just dig in and start the upgrades and then boot it up for the first time hopefully using aux and i won't do a full tour of all the cool ports and features on this machine but i will link below to a video that has an excellent overview and also help me figure out how to take this thing apart which as it turns out is really simple and convenient as is the case for many apple machines from the early 90s once you carefully flip this monstrosity onto its side there's two tabs here and here which simply push in and the cover lifts off if only every computer was that simple so once we're inside the machine we have the world's most luxuriously spacious layout and it's also kind of interesting because this huge metal beast in the middle that's the power supply and then above the power supply are the caddies for your disk drives and your optical drives and then below is where your cards go which of course this takes new bus cards and the power supply is about the beefiest 90s power supply you'll ever see and it even has multiple power connectors only one of which is currently in use and then our 16 sim slots right up here at the top in two big banks so let's take this hard drive out okay so i think this was an aftermarket hard drive actually because this is a i believe it's a mini centronics scuzzy connector and it has this adapter here to turn it into a regular scuzzy cable and further bolstering the aftermarketness of this there are a mismatching set of screws so three of this screw and then one of this screw so i think this hard drive this seagate cheetah was added after the fact so we'll just take the drive out of here yeah and i don't actually see anything on here that tells me how big this drive is so as far as memory goes i dug out as many 16 megabyte sims as i could find and of course these fancy purple ones are from our friend silicon insider who reverse engineered and made these beautiful things himself and once again i'll link below to his incredible art on instagram and twitter because yeah he is a man of many trades now i could actually get the full 256 megs of ram if i took the memory out of my cursed mac but it's very hard to get in there and i'd have to take the whole thing literally entirely apart and well i just don't feel like doing that right now so let's get as much ram as we can in there so we have all of these 16 meg sims and then we'll use some of the sims that are already in the machine and see how much we wind up with all right so first i'm just going to take out this funky adapter since we're not going to need that for the scuzzy to sd and technically we don't need this extra power cable either but i'm just going to leave that in there anyway so i don't lose it so for now i'm just going to leave this connected like so and this gets all the power it needs straight from the scuzzy bus itself so we don't actually need to give it any additional power just need to make sure it's not shorting out on anything and now let's take care of this memory we get the floppy connector out of the way and then i love seeing nice metal ram clips so we don't have to worry about snapping any plastic as far as i know we do have to install ram in banks of four and the banks are marked here on the board all right let's power this on and see if it sees all the ram and boots into aux all right we are connected and uh just wait until you hear how loud this thing is and we got a not very happy sound okay after spending quite a while swapping around memory modules into different sockets via a master stroke of trial and error we finally have it booting and it's booted off the sd card we're booted into aux 3.0 and uh oh man is this thing loud just take a listen yeah we're definitely gonna have to do something about this fan noise because that is unacceptable but before we do let me just show you what i figured out was going on with the memory modules and why we were getting those error messages and to do so we'll have to take a closer look at these two memory modules right here so this module here is a four megabyte sim that actually came with the quadro when i got it this purple one though this is a vram sim from silicon insider and it's on the same purple pcb as the 16 megabyte memory modules that we put into the quadrant and all of those modules are now working but it was a pain to get them going and the reason is if you look at the profile of these two sims the purple pcb is significantly thinner than the original 30 year old 4 megabyte sim and the problem is in the ram sockets in the computer those sockets are about 30 years old and they've had these thicker sims sitting in them for all this time so really the problem is these thinner purple pcbs just aren't making a good connection and by swapping the sims around kind of trial and error in different sockets i was finally able to find sockets that they would fit somewhat securely in and then the machine will boot okay so let's see if we can deal with this noisy fan situation i have two choices here this noctua and this noctua both of these are 12 volt fans and uh they both should work but i think this one gives a much better airflow so i think i'm gonna hack this one in there and uh hopefully that'll keep it still cool enough but much much quieter so to remove this fan we just have to take out these four mounting screws but unfortunately that means we have to take this whole huge hulking power supply out of here and here is our absolutely monstrous power supply so big and heavy that they literally put straps to grab it from for when you take it out of the machine but all we need to do is take this fan off which is just four screws right at the front okay so i have skillfully spliced the connector onto the knock to a fan so now we just have to make sure that the arrow is pointing this way to blow into the fan and it should just be a straight fit and there we go our newly noctualified power supply and hopefully this is much much quieter okay well i am an idiot and i made a rather grievous mistake i put these original screws back in to hold the fan but the new fan is much thinner than the old fan so these screws actually went deeper into the power supply and evidently shorted something out because when i plugged this machine in it tripped my circuit breaker without even having it in the on position so i took these screws out i found these other screws which happened to be just a little bit shorter and i screwed the fan back in so let's try to plug this machine back in and see if it trips my breaker and see if i've ruined the power supply [Music] all right it's alive it shined but there's still a horrible whining noise coming from inside the machine i don't know if that's the fan or is that something else okay so i figured out the source of that high-pitched wine it was actually coming out of the floppy drive so i've disconnected that and now this thing is dead silent this knocked to a fan doesn't make any noise at all so i think i'm just gonna leave the floppy drive disconnected for now i'll figure that out later but we don't actually need a floppy drive i have a floppy emu and we have the cd-rom drive and we have zip drives and stuff so i'll leave that disconnected we're booted up now just fine in aux okay so i have the computer button back up and now it's time to get the mud files on here and see if we can set this up as a real server unfortunately to do so we're going to need a modern machine and my favorite bridge medium zip discs and our trusty googly-eyed zip drive and it will become apparent in a moment why we need a bridge machine but it's the perfect excuse to break out our g4 upgraded powerbook pismo which has an internal zip drive in one of our drive bays so the issue is for the server i want to use tba mud which is the modern continuation of the original circlemod codebase with some bug fixes and improvements and some extra stuff added in and the only way to download the files is through google drive which our quadra is never going to be able to connect to even if it's perfectly 100 configured to go online it just can't handle the https with that ancient 68040 processor so i'm gonna download several versions and stick them onto our zip disk and get them onto the quadra that way and two fun quadra updates one the screen has decided to stop displaying one of the colors so that leaves us with this actually kind of pleasing minty green appearance that you might have noticed and two i actually wound up digging up four additional 16 megabyte memory modules bringing us up to 256 megs of ram or as the quadra reports built in memory 262 144 k although i think system 701 is limited to 49 152k for whatever reason but it still sees the full amount and that is darn cool and i've also configured this for the internet so we should be able to reach out and connect to any website yeah that is one of the most important things for a server to do connect to the network and we've done it but to further test let's try connecting to the quadra from my macbook pro so we'll just try a quick telnet session to 10078 which is the local address here on my home network of the quadra and we're connected yeah look at that we are officially a real deal server okay so i've copied over all the mud files and i think the first thing we'll do is try to configure the latest available version of tba mud so first thing we need to do is run the configure script which should detect gcc and all of our aux unix features what we have and what we don't have so that the compiler knows what it can use and circle mud and tba mud are actually pretty well thought out to be cross-platform in that the configure script can generally figure out what's going on on a particular version of unix or linux or anything else and you don't have to do hardly any manual work to get it running so as long as it gets through configure okay then i think we're good all right the configuration script has completed successfully and it has generated for us a make file which is kind of like a custom recipe for installing and building the server on this specific install of aux so all we should have to do is go into the source directory and type make and then if any warnings or errors come up then we'll just have to tweak it and already i see there's some weird stuff happening so these warnings and stuff that come up each one i'll just have to stop the compile and go in and try to see if i can figure out what's going on so let's try taking out this compiler flag here which it doesn't seem to like on aux okay so i have been at this for hours and no matter what i do i just cannot get it passed at the farthest db.c and honestly it seems like a pretty simple error at this point that's killing it and i just cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix it and i've tried multiple versions of tba mud and circle mud even going way back into the early 2000s and even the 90s with circle mud 2.2 i cannot get any version to fully compile and i'm sure it's just something stupid that i'm doing because i am not particularly good at c in fact i'm not even technically a developer i'm a hobbyist level at best so fortunately i do have some help in addition to steve mackey iv who's actually going to be sharing the table with me at vcf east i have andy who is part of the vcf steering committee who's going to help me try to get this mud up and running on this machine yes that's right i have friends in high places but if you want to help out and you're good with c especially gcc 2.7.2 from 1995. drop me a note in the comments below because i can certainly use your help i really want to get this thing going because it's going to be a lot of fun at vcf but that'll do it for this video i think we have made a heck of a lot of progress again i'm not sure why the screen has decided to go minty green on us although again i kind of like it we now have a truly maxed out quadra 950 with 256 megs of ram which is absolutely bonkers it also has a scuzzy to sd running aux 3.1 super fast on solid state and it's connected to the internet that is really incredible and this machine is kind of a a grail machine that i've always always wanted and i'm so honored to have been entrusted in its care and i'm so happy to be able to share it with all of you but if you like this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more very tall and heavy apple shenanigans please subscribe and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to tom stig124 justin greg from rutg mods and chris who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these shenanigans [Music] possible you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 59,163

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

Id: z1XyeU6YyuE

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021