Upgrading the "Jurassic Mac" Quadra 700 to Unspeakable Levels!

hey it's a unix system i know this well it's not technically a unix system yet but i have big plans for this quadro 700 a computer that i've been pining for since i was a kid when i first saw a fictional dinosaur themed park with questionable ethics and a lab full of these powerful and alluringly well-proportioned beige boxes so today let's explore this system install a few interesting and quite beautiful upgrades and start prepping this machine for some really big plans that i have for it which might even include you so stay tuned [Music] the quadra 700 was one of the most powerful macs of 1991 introduced in october of that year and occupying one of the highest end spots in apple's lineup until march 1993. shipping with a 25 megahertz 68040 and 4 megs of ram soldered to the motherboard and actually upgradable to a pretty impressive 68 megs of ram it shared the top end of apple's lineup with the quadrant 900 which was a massive full tower behemoth really intended to live as a server in an office but the 700 was a high-end workstation and it became unintentionally iconic it was the first mac marketed in a mini tower configuration essentially packed into a mac 2cx case lightly modified to stand on its side which honestly is pretty lazy someone in apple marketing probably said hey we should make a mini tower and then some engineer went okay and flipped it on its side so i guess it was like 4pm on a friday or something but it wound up looking awesome there's just something about that vertical floppy drive the asymmetrical face the placement of the apple logo and the dimensions of the machine which really come together oh and it was also heavily featured in that dinosaur movie where the hero hacker famously uses a battle station with dual quadra 700s to expose the dangers of unfettered science run amok and i think a lot of other people my age probably saw that movie too when they were kids which is why the prices for these machines have become well a bit absurd i paid more for this quadra than you might reasonably pay for a modern computer so thank you all for watching these videos and supporting me on patreon and making that possible and also a huge thanks to pcb way for generously sponsoring this video get an instant online quote on custom pcbs and now even custom cnc machining and high quality 3d printing and the pcb way call for pcb design tutorials ends in just a few days so check out the link in the description below you can showcase your pcb designing talent share your expertise and even win some cool prizes so if you have any pcb needs i hope you give pcboa.com a try for their low pricing and turn around as fast as 24 hours so this quadra isn't in the best physical condition it's fairly yellowed and it has a few obvious chips dents and other imperfections which actually helped me get a pretty good deal on it well comparatively because honestly i see gout machines like this there's tons of people who chase down pristine examples of classic machines to preserve which is great but it can leave ugly yet otherwise fully functional computers relegated to parts machines or worse landfills so i love finding examples like this and trying to turn them into something special and seeing just what fun we can have actually using these old machines after all this is action retro not museum retro so give me your tired your poor your cracked and slightly dented and i'll upgrade them to ludicrous levels and install weird operating systems on them which brings us to the upgrades i'd like to do today two of them you'll be expecting we'll install a scuzzy to sd to replace the kind of sketchy 700 meg hard drive that this thing came with and we'll also max out the ram to 68 megs using four sticks i stole from my normal se30 plus the 4meg soldered to the motherboard the third upgrade though is probably something you haven't seen before we're going to max out the video ram using these beautiful purple vram sticks which have a really interesting story behind them so let's install the drive and the ram and then we'll talk about what these sticks are and what my plan is for this quadra 700 now this computer has to be just about the most pleasant computer ever made to work on i mean it's a mini tower but really it's a desktop just turned on its side and if we remove these little quadra feet here which i actually made myself the top of the machine lifts off with just two tabs in the back no screws no mess no fuss and the ease of access doesn't stop with just getting into this machine in fact this whole thing comes completely apart without any screws at all can you imagine that on an apple machine today i mean check this out the hard drive comes out just unplug the cables and squeeze these two little latches here and it just lifts straight up and away next the power supply there's just a little piece of plastic in here that you push forward and it lifts straight out not a single screw next you can take this whole drive caddy assembly out just unplug the floppy drive cable push back on this tab and pull it back look at that amazing still not a single screw encountered and then we have our motherboard here quite nice and again just held in place with a bunch of clips i've already replaced the battery when i first got this machine because obviously you don't want the old battery sticking around because it can leak but yeah the speaker even comes out just as easily with a single clip here and you can slide it straight up and away and once you get down to the motherboard it's actually quite interesting we have our 25 megahertz 68040 two new bus expansion slots the pds or processor direct slot which this is where you can install processor upgrades including apple's own power pc upgrade and a lot of other ones made by daystar and sonnet which are incredibly difficult to find we have an unused rom slot which i don't think was ever used and then we have all of these memory slots and what's interesting is these top six slots you might think well that's system memory but no this is actually for the video ram these four slots here this is the system memory and right now we have the four megs of ram soldered to the motherboard plus another four megs of ram in these four slots here but we're actually going to replace that with these which are 16 meg modules that i borrowed from my working se30 and now we'll install our beautiful silicon insider 256 modules which it takes six of them to bring the system up to two megs its maximum video memory and that's just going to give us a lot more options of color depths and actual screen resolutions that we can use including even some pretty modern screen resolutions okay and now let's just take a moment to appreciate how beautiful this vram is you may have surmised that these are not stock apple parts instead these were created by a guy from france who goes by silicon insider a name that is quite befitting of the incredible art he posts on twitter and instagram both of which are linked below oh and funny side note it turns out that he and i have likely crossed paths before despite him living in france because as a fellow tattooed tech enthusiast he often comes here to the philadelphia tattoo convention but recently he's taken to a different art reverse engineering and recreating vintage upgrades mostly memory that's extremely hard to find and he's done it using very non-standard tools which have allowed him to imbue his artistic sensibilities as a core component of their design i mean just check this out that little happy mac in the middle here it's actually a transparent background and if you shine a light through it you can actually see there's a little happy mac with even a little cursor on the screen and little ones and zeros in the background which he did by manipulating the various inner layers of the pcb because he did not use standard pcb and cad software to make this he did this in adobe illustrator oh and funny side note number two this melding of deeply technical and artistic expression they're just side hobbies for silicon insider his day job is actually paleontology which funny enough is exactly what i wanted to do when i was a kid and we both actually have multiple dinosaur tattoos you know this quadra episode really keeps coming back to dinosaurs doesn't it now silicon insider was kind enough to take some time and tell me the story behind these chips when world events took a turn this past year he found himself stuck in the uk for two months unable to work and as one does he spent a lot of time cruising ebay for vintage computer stuff and found that old vram sims were basically unobtainable so as any paleontologist worth his weight in silicon would do he began to reverse engineer them starting with 256k modules and then 512k and then well he just kept going branching out to all sorts of different modules including old powerbook ram which is really hard to find and i'm really excited about but what's really interesting is how he designed the pcbs as much an artist as an engineer he used adobe illustrator instead of industry standard cad tools and this allowed him to map out pcbs just as fine as you would on any other software but also allowed him to add a stunning amount of artistic detail which would not be possible with normalcad software well i'm very grateful that his interesting path in life has led to the creation of these beautiful modules and i'm also very glad to have been able to talk to him and make a new retro tech friend and hopefully the next time he's in philly for the tattoo convention we'll have a chance to hang out okay so now we need to put our scuzzy to sd adapter in this little bracket here which actually brings us to the very first set of screws we've encountered in this whole process today so just four screws to hold the hard drive into the bracket and then we'll take off the scuzzy to sd bracket here because we're actually going to use this nice 3d printed bracket i found on thingiverse which should let us mount right in this bracket using the screws that came with it there we go that fits in there great let's get this installed there we go that is solid and then to test this i've actually made an sd card from a backup of the cursed mac i just used dd to copy a disk image directly to it so this is system 7.6 we'll boot this and just make sure everything that we just installed works all right let's power this thing on and see what happens all right well we're booting into mac os without color alright so let's just see if we can get some color here we'll go into control panel and monitors and look at that we have up to millions of colors so yeah i guess that vram works if you go to about this computer we'll see that yeah system 7.6 running on well what this thinks is 70 megs of memory but it's actually 64 megs plus the four megs on the motherboard so we have 68 megs of ram working just fine but i don't think system 7.6 is the best version to have on this quadra instead the quattro 700 is one of the best machines possible to run aux which is apple's unix from the 90s which has a mac os front end and is super cool and in fact i think you might get to see that in person because i plan to use this as a server as i mentioned in a couple previous videos i'm planning on exhibiting at vcf east this year and the theme is text adventures my plan is to set up a local mud or multi-user dungeon which is a multiplayer text based game and i'm going to use this quadra 700 running aux as the server and i'm going to use the aux port of gcc and the gnu tools to compile and run circle mud then on that local network i'll have several of my macs that you've seen in previous videos like the cursed mac set up as clients that you can actually play the mud on and we're even planning a special new build that hopefully is going to be capable of playing the mud on a very old but very cool computer which you'll see in some upcoming videos and also i'm planning on sharing the table with steve from mcity4 who's going to be there for at least part of the time so there's going to be a ton of cool machines between us so definitely stick around and make sure you're subscribed to the channel because i'm gonna have a lot more videos of getting cool stuff ready for vcf and i'm gonna try to turn this quadra into the ultimate aux server but as far as future upgrades for the quadrat go aux is really finicky about the machine it runs on it has to be a 68k mac and it has to be a full 68040 or 68030 that has an fpu and it won't run on anything else no power pc nothing so if i'm going to use this as my aux server it's really not worth trying to find an upgrade to make this a power pc machine even though it's possible with that pds port so i probably won't try to find a power pc upgrade unless i come across one then maybe i'll go for it like maybe this one oh and fun bonus i found this brand new sealed in the box zip 100 drive for mac which is scuzzy and i really want to use this with the quadra because i have a usb zip 100 drive and a zip 100 drive in my powerbook pismo and that'll make it really easy to move files around as i'm tinkering around with the mud server so let's unbox this and see what the brand new scuzzy zip100 experience is like all right so we have a cd rom with our drivers and stuff although that doesn't really help us with the quadra that only has a floppy and uh zip accessories catalog yeah business registration no postage necessary i guess i could still send that in i mean iomega still exists right if you don't have a cd-rom please send me the zip installation software in a floppy disk simply fill out this card include a check money order or credit card number and mail it to the address below wait this doesn't actually say how much money to send them choose shipping and handling method so i guess you only pay for shipping so i would send them a check for five dollars and fifty cents and then allow two to three weeks for delivery for my zip installation software and a floppy disk i'm gonna visit our website on the world wide web wow this is a very 90s looking owner's manual but it's nice that they include a full color owner's manual with a creepy little cartoon fella right there cool all right brand new zip drive and in the box we have a power cable our zip drive itself and a nice zip branded scuzzy cable so shiny and new plasticky well just look at this incredible setup this quadra 700 with this iconic monitor keyboard and trackball combo and this tower of power iomega with jazz drive and zip drive so i'm super excited for all the fun stuff that we're going to do with this machine installing aux and turning this into a mud server and hopefully you'll be able to check this out in october for yourself if you come to vcf east in new jersey but if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more quadra shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to justin greg from hurricane mods chris sorta eclectic connor and spike who are my highest eared patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible [Music] you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 45,593

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

Id: YmUYIa7PVHk

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021