Mac Performa 6400/200VEE

On Apr 12, 2013, at 2:28 PM, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: Nope. It was just a terrible design for the case. It was awful when it was brand new, too; I have some scars from them. The Alchemy motherboard itself wasn't total garbage, but I think the 6400/6500 cases were some of the worst that Apple ever designed, maybe after the PowerPC-era all-in-ones (the 5x00, G3 AIO, eMac, later iMac G3s). Good luck; battery corrosion can be a big deal. I was lucky with my Quadra 700; the battery was located at the top of the motherboard and had dripped all the way down and eaten a leg and a pad off a surface-mount hex inverter. I'm lucky in that the affected leg was the power pin, which meant I could easily white-wire the Vcc from an adjacent chip; if it had been an actual signal pin, I might never have found where it went. The PSU is probably pretty similar to an ATX supply in that the motherboard pulls a pin high or low to soft-switch the supply on and off. I'm having trouble finding a pinout for the 6400's PSU, but try finding the +5V standby with a meter first. If that's not present when the thing is plugged in (no fans should be running), it might be toast. If you're able to find the power-on wire (often gray, but who knows), it's active-high (pull to +5V standby, not ground like ATX supplies). Try pulling it through a resistor first; you don't want to short anything out too hard if you have the wrong pin. 1K ought to do it, though you might need something like 100 ohms to pull the pin strongly enough. I don't know for sure. This is a page which details the connections from the Alchemy motherboard in the 5x00s, which I think was the same as the 6x00s in a different case. You could use that to figure out which PSU wire is which. The original is dead, so please pardon the long Internet Archive link. http://web.archive.org/web/20040609201611/http://www.icedevil.nildram.co.uk… I've definitely seen people use 3xAA holders as replacements for them. Most RTC/CMOS batteries (which is basically what the PRAM battery is) are non-rechargeable because you get about an order of magnitude more energy out of the non-rechargeable chemistry. I wouldn't expect this one to be rechargeable either, but I'm not 100% certain. Most Macs actually weren't SoG, to my knowledge. Some of the 68K ones were, and you could certainly get video cards that were (you needed them for a lot of third-party monitors that used 3xBNC or 1xBNC (for monochrome)). It's generally a straight-through adaptor that maps right on to VGA with no trouble. The pinout is pretty easy to find online. The last entry on this page (straight from Apple) details the adaptor pinout that came with the Apple Studio Display CRTs (Apple's last CRT monitors, which moved to the VGA DE15 plug but came with an adaptor for older machines). That's what you'll want to make if you're making one. http://support.apple.com/kb/TA44937?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US Most machines will. Probably all PowerMacs will; they'll most likely default to 640x480, which actually wasn't all that crappy until about Mac OS 8 (and that was more the fault of application designers than anything else). It's obviously WAY too small for the modern web, but most browsers you run on that machine probably won't handle the modern web that well anyway (with the exception of Classilla, which uses the mobile layout, so screen size might be OK there). Some machines can be a pain about it; I know my Quadra 700 won't even initialize the display if it doesn't see some sense codes (the Apple ones, since it doesn't do DDC), but that's somewhat unusual. It's also a much older machine. It's actually pretty easy to find on eBay or Craigslist, but it's not as common as, say, PC mice and keyboards. Nor as cheap. I'm kicking myself for throwing out three Apple Design Keyboards about ten years ago; they weren't great keyboards, but I find myself short on any ADB keyboards these days and don't have the motivation to get them on eBay. If you're looking for a good one, find an Apple Extended Keyboard (or Apple Extended Keyboard 2). They're good keyboards with real keyswitches and nice tactile feedback (and not as loud as a Model M), and durable as hell. I'm actually using one on my 2011 iMac through a USB/ADB adaptor because it's so far above anything Apple sold since. Some of the keys are... reluctant by now, but the keyswitches are actually easy enough to open back up and "revitalize" by bending the leaf springs out a bit. - Dave