New to vintage macs - Auckland

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New to vintage macs - Auckland

Postby Stargorn on Thu Mar 19, 2015 11:03 pm

Hi everyone,
I have been a long time admirer of old apple computers, but have never got round to buying one. Last week, I saw a cheap auction advertised on trademe for x2 Macintosh Plus, a Mac Classic and a Mac Classic Colour, along with their respective mice, keyboards, and a bunch of extra cords. I wound up getting them all for $60. When I went to pick them up, it turned out that the guy selling them was an ex apple technician and also had an Apple IIe, a Motorolla Starmax 3000/200 with monitor, two 5 1/4" floppy drives, a brand new large clear blue and white apple monitor, a heap of spare RAM for the Mac Plus/Classic and a heap of other mac bits and pieces that I took away. Exciting!

So far, I've tested the Mac Classic (working in OS 6.07), the Starmax (working in OS 9) and one of the Mac Pluses started up after I opened it and reconnected the disk drive and power. I've plugged in the other Plus and the Classic Colour and neither is working but I haven't opened them up yet to have a look. I don't have a monitor to use with the IIe, so I may just wind up selling it. I've also cleaned up the Mac Plus keyboards and am going to make a converter to USB so I can use them on my modern PC and Mac. They are great to type on.

My problem now is that I can't find a way to get new software onto any of them. I have a packet of apple 3 1/2" 1.44MB floppies and nothing else. I have a long list of games I want to put on the Mac Classic. My initial plan was to get the Starmax hooked up to the internet, download the game images and burn them to floppy. That plan failed after I spent a day trying to work out how to get the Ethernet to work and failing. My next plan was to download them on a pc, burn them to CD, then transfer them to the Starmax. Unfortunately, the Starmax isn't seeing the CD drive. I'm going to continue trying to get the Starmax to work but in the meantime, if anyone has spare games on 3 1/2" 1.44MB, or OS/games for Mac Plus, I'd be very stoked.


TL;DR - Hi, I'm new to vintage computers, working on restoring 4 old Macintosh computers to game-playing status. Looking for any spare games/OS people might have for Mac Plus/Classic.
Stargorn
 
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Re: New to vintage macs - Auckland

Postby Gibsaw on Fri Mar 20, 2015 9:03 am

Stargorn wrote:TL;DR - Hi, I'm new to vintage computers, working on restoring 4 old Macintosh computers to game-playing status.

You're gutting them and installing PC motherboards? (Yes I'm having a stir. The Mac was never a great games machine. :D )

Anyway. In all seriousness. The IIe is going to just be composite NTSC or PAL. You can use it on your TV through the composite AV port. You're more likely to get colour if it's an NTSC IIe, as the "PAL" version is NTSC with PAL timings, which most TV's don't understand, but you'll get a picture. Switch off the "colour" switch inside if that's the case and you'll get a clearer picture.... and the IIe is the easiest to get software onto as long as the disk drive is working. (See ADTPro)

Do any of the working machines have network cards? (ethernet.) If they do, then all you have to do is put up an NT server and you can use the internet and an "appletalk" fileserver. MS Supported "AppleTalk" right up to Windows 2003 R2.
"dsakey" on trademe. Apple II's are my thing.
Gibsaw
 
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Location: Auckland

Re: New to vintage macs - Auckland

Postby Stargorn on Fri Mar 20, 2015 1:54 pm

Thanks Gibsaw, I'll give that NT Server thing a try and see how I go. The Starmax has a network card and Appletalk. I've never worked with anything lower than OSX Tiger, so it's all learning for me. I got the Mac Colour Classic working this morning, turns out the thing won't start up without its little memory battery, and the battery was unsurprisingly dead, so I popped in a new one. Now there's only the other non-working Mac Plus to look at.

Gibsaw wrote:You're gutting them and installing PC motherboards? (Yes I'm having a stir. The Mac was never a great games machine. :D )
I definitely agree with you on the compact Macs being limited for gaming. Unfortunately, I've fallen in love with the form factor, the look of the small screen, and also the feel of the keyboard/mouse on the Mac Plus. I'd feel bad gutting one, but I can't say I haven't secret dreams of doing something like this: http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=10. I do have that one Plus that isn't working yet...

Gibsaw wrote:...and the IIe is the easiest to get software onto as long as the disk drive is working. (See ADTPro)
I'm less enthusiastic about the IIe without a screen (the keyboard is its only redeeming feature to me). If I wanted to play IIe games with a new screen, I'd probably just run an emulator on my modern Macbook or iMac. I could always gut the IIe to use the keyboard with a Mac Mini, Raspberry Pi, PC, or something but I'd feel even worse doing that, especially if it's working. The insides are visibly good on first inspection, though I haven't opened up the PSU yet.
Stargorn
 
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Re: New to vintage macs - Auckland

Postby mrad01 on Sat Mar 21, 2015 11:13 am

I was the NZ product manager for Motorola and Power Computing clones - your StarMax machine would have come through me! I too have a collection of Compact Macs - if you have any specific questions, please ask - I've fixed nearly every model recently. Mac Pluses are usually pretty easy - what are the symptoms?

On the IIe side of things, forget emulation, it's such a cop out. Its like kissing your sister. Games on the real hardware (esp if you have the hardware sitting there) are much much better than crappy emulation. But that's just what I think of course! :o

M

Stargorn wrote:Thanks Gibsaw, I'll give that NT Server thing a try and see how I go. The Starmax has a network card and Appletalk. I've never worked with anything lower than OSX Tiger, so it's all learning for me. I got the Mac Colour Classic working this morning, turns out the thing won't start up without its little memory battery, and the battery was unsurprisingly dead, so I popped in a new one. Now there's only the other non-working Mac Plus to look at.

Gibsaw wrote:You're gutting them and installing PC motherboards? (Yes I'm having a stir. The Mac was never a great games machine. :D )
I definitely agree with you on the compact Macs being limited for gaming. Unfortunately, I've fallen in love with the form factor, the look of the small screen, and also the feel of the keyboard/mouse on the Mac Plus. I'd feel bad gutting one, but I can't say I haven't secret dreams of doing something like this: http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=10. I do have that one Plus that isn't working yet...

Gibsaw wrote:...and the IIe is the easiest to get software onto as long as the disk drive is working. (See ADTPro)
I'm less enthusiastic about the IIe without a screen (the keyboard is its only redeeming feature to me). If I wanted to play IIe games with a new screen, I'd probably just run an emulator on my modern Macbook or iMac. I could always gut the IIe to use the keyboard with a Mac Mini, Raspberry Pi, PC, or something but I'd feel even worse doing that, especially if it's working. The insides are visibly good on first inspection, though I haven't opened up the PSU yet.
mrad01
 
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Re: New to vintage macs - Auckland

Postby Stargorn on Sat Mar 21, 2015 1:59 pm

mrad01 wrote:I was the NZ product manager for Motorola and Power Computing clones - your StarMax machine would have come through me! I too have a collection of Compact Macs - if you have any specific questions, please ask - I've fixed nearly every model recently. Mac Pluses are usually pretty easy - what are the symptoms?

That's awesome! A big second-hand thank you from me. I think you're right about the Mac Pluses being easy to fix. In the end I took out the 256k RAM limiting resistor and popped in 4 sticks of 1mb RAM to replace the (I assume faulty) 256k RAM. I now have 2 working Mac Pluses, however I don't have any 800k disks, or a powered external SCSI hard drive; the Pluses will have to wait for now. Today I'm trying to get a network set up for the Starmax. I know next to nothing about networks or OS9, so it's a steep learning curve and hours of reading - fun though. I live for learning and problem solving.
Stargorn
 
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