11 Apr
2013
11 Apr
'13
3:33 p.m.
On Apr 11, 2013, at 17:10, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>
wrote:
I found a Mac Performa 6400/200VEE at the dump today,
but no keyboard / rodent / display.
Is that the smooth-cornered minitower? Those things were
nightmarish to take apart, but otherwise ok.
It seems to have 128MB of RAM installed, along with a
video I/O board (the 'VEE' bit, I suppose) and Ethernet board. The downside is
that there's some significant battery corrosion toward the bottom of the system board
PCB.
I'll try some vinegar and see how it goes, but obviously it doesn't make sense to
source a keyboard, mouse and display from anywhere if the system's toast.
1) Is it possible to wire the 15-pin monitor connector up to a PC's VGA monitor? Or,
Yes. Adaptors aren't hard to come by, and that generation of
Mac should support DDC codes from modern VGA monitors.
The absolute best adaptor to use, if you can find it, is the
Griffin MacPnP adaptor, which has a bank of DIP switches
to set the monitor sense codes (necessary for older, more
finicky Macs) and/or pass the DDC lines through. I have
a number of Mac/VGA adaptors, some of which just pass
the sense lines through verbatim and some of which have
the sense code hard wired to what the manufacturer thought
was right (for example, a 1024x768 VGA monitor came with
an adaptor that was hard-wired to declare that it only
supported 640x480 and 832x624).
2) Can I hook the composite out on the video I/O board
up to a TV and expect to be able to see something at boot time? (I'm not sure if that
board's only initialized after the system's booted)
Maybe. Not as familiar with this one.
Done with hard disk disconnected, obviously - but will
the system even output anything to the display with no keyboard or mouse present?
Yup! It'll boot all the way that way, though it won't be very
useful unless you have a server in the Startup Items folder
or something. If all is well, you'll see a grey (B&W checkered)
screen and a floppy with a question mark if there's no
startup disk.
If you need a mouse, I have a few spares of which I
could send one. I wish I had spare keyboards, but for
some reason, my ADB keyboard collection seems to
have shrunk.
- Dave