Re: Rebuilding Power Macintosh 9600

In article <290920240831355501%vintageapplemac@gmail.com>, scole
<vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:

 
I've been meaning to rebuild a PM 9600 for some time now. I had four of
the things, all in various states of distress; one that was
particularly souped up and had been my main battlestation  for a number
of years but was very tatty, and the others that ranged from ugly on
the outside but fine on the inside to full of rot inside but
cosmetically fine. I had the makings, then, of at least one really nice
example.

Update: I got this finished last weekend. Or, at least, finished for now...

I wasn't happy with the SCSI2SD set-up I had, so recalled the
recommendation someone gave to use a BlueSCSI and went ahead and ordered
one. It did take me some time to get my head around the way that these
need to be used, the placing of a hard drive image on the SD card rather
than simply formatting the card itself. I also decided to find the
original instyall media for the 9600 and managed to get a sensible deal on
the install CD from a guy in America. When that arrived I installed the
BlueSCSI board and got 7.6.1 up and running.

Once that was done and seeming stable, I started adding in upgrades.

First of all, the CPU board. I went with a Sonnet Crescendo G4 500Mhz (I
think, or was it 400Mhz??). Booted up and all was working correctly.

Next, I installed a Radeon 9200 Mac Edition video card. No OS7 drivers, so
no accelerated graphics and fancy stuff, but the basics of the card works
without software, and the display on screen was noticeably sharper and
better oriented than I was getting from the stock video card.

Then I started adding more RAM. I had previously had a total of 1GB RAM in
a 9600 and was hoping to get all of that into this rebuilt machine. Alas,
no dice, once I had managed to get four pairs of RAM installed, booting
between each addition of a pair to make sure they were OK, the final
couple of pairs just wouldn't allow the machine to boot properly, kept
getting the breaking glass error sound alert. By that point, I didn't have
the energy to pull all the RAM and start again trying these pairs in
different slots, so figured that the half Gig or so of RAM I had
successfully working was good enough for now.

I had bought a little wheeled trolley/stand from Amazon and plonked the
9600 onto that, hooked the various wires to it, and wheeled it into place
under my desk. It does look very majestic, the styling of these big-box
beige Macs is a real visual treat imo.

Only thing is, I need to learn OS7 again! It's been at least 5 years or
more since I was last a regular user and there's enough difference between
7 and OS9 that I am feeling very clunky as I blunder around, not quite
knowing where everything is...

Anyway, I am a happy boy, I have an insanely over-powered OS7 machine to
play with now. :)