Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Austin Pass]

On 16 Jul 2016, at 07:39, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:

>> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm
>> having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate
>> representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from
>> Classic CMP'ers.
> 
> My "heavy duty" OS 9 rig is an dual 1.25GHz MDD that I upgraded to a dual
> Sonnet 1.8GHz, with 1.5GB RAM and OS 9.2.2. Everything flies on it. I haven't
> had any obvious compatibility problems.
> 
> Al makes a good point though: have a spare power supply. My MDD blew
> through two.
> 
> You didn't ask, but my preferred heavy duty 68K is the Q800. You can
> overclock them easily with chipclips and they are the beefiest 68K Mac
> that will still run A/UX. A/UX at 40MHz is a delight.
> 
>> In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending
>> to use.  I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get
>> 9.2.1 on it relatively easily.  Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should
>> be considering?  It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?)
>> although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use
>> Ethernet to connect it to my LAN.  Was a gigabit ethernet card ever
>> released with Mac OS 9 drivers?  I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I
>> can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked
>> with classic Mac OS?
> 
> I've never seen a GigE card for OS 9. There is of course 100Mbit support.
> I would love to be proven wrong.
> 
> The Sonnet SATA cards work well with OS 9 and are completely bootable. I
> used such a card in a 7300.
> 
>> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I
>> should look to get my hands on?  What's the state of the art in classic Mac
>> OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained?
> 
> Sort of, as I have time. I'd like to do more with it but TenFourFox consumes
> much of my free hacking cycles currently. That should let up relatively soon
> since I've made the executive decision to fork TenFourFox at Firefox 45ESR
> (due to the looming spectre of Rust becoming a build-requirement, and
> known and expected issues with Electrolysis multi-process with the 10.4 SDK).
> Still, the biggest need for Classilla currently is moar crypto and that's
> rather hard to get right.
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
>  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
> -- Know what I hate most?  Rhetorical questions. -- Henry N. Camp -------------

I think that has me decided then - I'll go with the MDD.

I'll hit eBay too for some PSU replacements.

I'd love one of the Sonnet upgrades but sadly Mac upgrades seem very thin on the ground this side of the pond, unless I'm looking in the wrong places.

What graphics card do you use, out of interest?

-Austin.