I Found a Beat Up Power Mac 9600

[@socamx]

It's great seeing the 9600 get some screentime. I still have mine that I upgraded the snot out of in the 2000s. Same 9600/300, but it has a 700mhz Sonnet G4, Sonnet Tempo Trio (USB 2/Firewire/ATA133), and one of the rarest things I own: a Mac Edition Voodoo 5 5500, complete with original box and inserts.

[@Tekenduis98]

I love how random and rare these machines are that you come across! Great work

[@lewislauricella1416]

The timing on this video is crazy! The other day, I was given an immaculate 8600/200 and AppleVision 1710AV that had been in a store room for the last 23 years. It almost got eWasted, but a coworker saved it before it got turfed - Booted it up the other day, and aside from the dead (thankfully not exploded) PRAM battery and an intermittent 4GB second HDD, it all works perfectly 🤯

[@jonzenrael]

They didn't like us using these in the local college (they were in a seperate room of their own). The trick was to walk straight past reception with your head held high like you were a tech who had a right to be there.

[@kramerdesign9443]

My 9600 is missing that same drive blank!!!! Thank you so much for uploading the STL!!

[@annajohnson5779]

We had an 8600 paired with a Sony trinitron monitor of similar size, so this takes me way back to my memories of using photoshop for the first time as a teenager (version 3) as well as some of the games we played too. Only thing missing from this memory is the hopeless epson photo printer, the smell of dust, the MacAdvocate mousepad, and the purple imation CD burner that sat on top.

[@userperson5259]

This looks like a super fun project. And those machines are total unicorns anymore.. awesome you found one.

[@theGamer93]

My grandpa supplemented his pension at a local publishing house. They threw away these very Macs there in 2003. My grandpa brought me two of them. That was my first own computer. I had macOS 9.1. It was really great.

[@retropuffer2986]

Can't wait for this series. I always love seeing these tower Macs get some retro love!

[@jorisw_]

Please always include the boot up! I wanna see how quick it is booting from SD with 1.5 GB. Lord knows we've all stared at that sequence for years combined.

[@lumibraulius]

Best first 2 seconds video intro ever!! (Regards from Spain ;) )

[@thechillhacker]

Lol this is like the Fruit logo'd alternate reality version of my Power Tower Pro 225. Went from literally at the trash pile at the local transfer station (actually got the keyboard and more stuff from original owner as I caught him dropping it off) to a G4 400MHz, 1GB RAM, 256GB SATA SSD and DVD+-RW with hand-modded sata controller, Radeon 9200, 16 channel DAW I/O, HP-IB, etc. Love it! Can't wait to see how she comes!

[@St3althWarrior03]

The 9600 is my favorite pre-G3 PPC Mac, so many ways to upgrade and customize. I have a 9600/300 “Kansas” model with a 250mhz G3 upgrade CPU card in with 12x 64mb RAM for 768mb total and a Zip drive. Even though this beast is quite large and heavy, it sits on top of my desk because I love the way it looks.

[@MrMoto655]

I bet that thing was a screamer back in the day. You can run modern NetBSD on those if you ever get so inclined, especially with your specs. Can’t promise how good X11 will work though😆 Something like IceWM or FVWM might work.

[@ScarlettStunningSpace]

I don't know why, but slapping the computer will aways be funny. Great content as always

[@dummptyhummpty]

Can’t wait to follow along. I picked one of these up a couple of years ago. It was used by a movie music composer. Surprisingly it had a G3 upgrade and I’ve since added SATA and DVI.

[@BurleyBoar]

THANK YOU FOR EXPLAINING THE TALL DIMMS! I asked for this in a video long a go because I couldn't find the right words to search for it. Now I know they are four 32MB simms lashed together. Probably cheaper using old memory chips. Again thank you. I understand waiting for the right machine to reuse and explain.

[@SAerror1]

Thank you for doing the hard work of recreating a bezel! I've been looking for an adapter for my 9600 to regular square 5.25" front bezels so I could stick a cd changer in mine.

[@s6edge7]

My man , why , this is going to be a hamlet (Shakespeare) of powermacs like you got so many of them with their own story to glory

[@johnnyzippo7109]

I just really , really , really like your content , I have absolutely no idea why or even that I was interested in this computer , but apparently I am , you are talented man .

[@hclnet]

My 9600 I've had since the 2000's has always been a little wonky looking even with all of it's plastic intact. Part of the problem of it being a little off for you is it looks like it's missing the two bondi colored clips that attached to the big pegs on the side of the drive cage and gave the upper and lower hinged parts more bracing.

[@helfire23]

I bought a 9600 new back in the day. Picked up a new one recently, has a G3 card in it, BlueSCSI v2, Ultra 360 drive, 7" PC Card, USB, and video. Trying to use up all those PCI slots. Only 768MB of ram though :)

[@Pentium4Proto]

I love how weird yet normal it looks, at the same time.

[@ArniesTech]

Absolutely love the looks of retro machines 💪

[@kaitlyn__L]

That intro has such “I liked them before they were cool” energy lmao

[@alextirrellRI]

Loving this. I have a 9600 in storage and this really makes me want to pull it out. I remember it had a faster SCSI card, but I think the drive has died. I think I even have some upgrade parts for it as well?

[@egbront1506]

Mine came with a Jackhammer SCSI card. Maybe a little faster than the onboard SCSI bus but I use a PCI to SATA converter with mine now.

[@mikek1187]

This form factor has a soft spot in my heart. I had the G3 back in the day and regretted getting rid if it. I now have TWO of these G3 models in my collection 😁

[@ordinosaurs]

Still have one. Great bit of kit, found it in the garbage years ago, and used it paired to a scsi epson film scanner to digitize my pictures in the early decade of the century. Brilliant industrial design, but the Open Boot implementation is a nightmare. It's so much riddled of bugs I still feel my skin crawl to this day. One of the very rare computers I gave up switching to Linux (and I did some Sun and DEC workstations, so I'm not adverse to a good challenge from time to time !).

[@jamtea388]

Very impressed by that 3D print. I could not handle that curve.

[@izzieb]

What a great piece of industrial design. Helen Keller would have loved it.

[@dilianvt]

Ok but why Helen Keller? Helen Keller never had a Machintosh

[@JohnVella1968]

​@@dilianvtI know that it wasn't my original comment, but as an academic exercise, I'd like to invite you to research Helen Keller.

[@EricK-m9l9t]

He referenced Helen Keller because she wouldn’t be able to see how bad it is

[@JohnVella1968]

@@EricK-m9l9t thank you, Eric, for ruining a perfectly good learning opportunity! 😂

[@EricK-m9l9t]

@@JohnVella1968 you’re welcome

[@GendoPrime]

I have been on a reasonably priced hunt for one of these for like five years now.

[@kolkoreh]

I had an 8600 back in the day (bought it used in 2003 or so). Still my favorite computer I’ve ever had

[@andresbravo2003]

Happy MARCHintosh my friend!

[@Fifury161]

I used the 9650/233 as my desktop machine, hooked up to a 28" CRT back in the day. I still have it. Oh and it was upgraded with a DAT drive - complete with the official face plate. Your model appears to be missing the green levers that kept the hinged part in place.

[@slebetman]

My dad had one of these for Photoshop work and several 7200 for general DTP work back in the day before upgrading to a bunch of G4s. I remember playing games and photoshop on this late at night when my dad pulled all-nighters editing and proofreading text on the other machines.

[@orektez]

ya know there's a ram jumper trick i've used to get more ram working in a casio fiva, it's for laptop sdram.. but i wonder if it'd work with desktop sdram. essentially it let me use a stick of 256mb in the casio when it would originally only work with a single stick of 64mb. the guide was on a japanese site and also showed someone getting a 512mb stick working with theirs. i've seen laptop sdram to desktop sdram adapters in the past i wonder if the mod wouldn't work with the desktop ram if someone could use that adapter and get the jumper'ed laptop ram working on a machine. anyways you jump pin 62 to pin 68 and it bypasses some size check i think.

[@ArniesTech]

I absolutely LOVE this Kind of content. In fact I got several super ancient Windows PCs which I am going to review and hopefully revive 💪😎

[@Ryan.Lohman]

I love the 9600 because in high school I used to capture video on it.

[@CRYPTiCEXiLE]

Great video exciting to see what ur gonna do with this beast of a machine

[@fkthewhat]

I just wanted to say apart from a great video as always, the cleanup montage without dreadful generic public domain youtube music was much appreciated xD

[@ShiggitayMediaProductions]

You've inspired me to continue tinkering with my PowerMac 8500 that I've upgraded to a G3/300, and 512 MB of RAM... I've been wanting to see if it'd run Mac OS X 10.x but I don't have enough space on its current 2GB HDD.... Once BlueSCSI v2s are in stock assembled I'mma get one and do just that (see if Mac OS X 10.x runs on it). I'm excited to see what you hack into the 9600/300 there! This'll be fun!

[@TheRus13]

Put a Morph operating system on your mac.

[@ShiggitayMediaProductions]

@@TheRus13 Nah I'd rather not... I'd rather have a working experience lol.

[@Drkmirror]

Me and my Wife Scored a pair of this model, loved them.

[@Natomon01]

Can you imagine your favorite PC store offering memory "by-the-pound"?

[@tractorman7733]

Id love that, Assuming the price wasn't by the hundreds lmao

[@queens.dee.223]

Unrelated to my other comment, I have a beige G3 and a Quicksilver G4 that I'd love see get put to good use, even for parts. Happy to split shipping or even drive them to someone near NYC.

[@computer_toucher]

I hope you're gonna try it out with scanning some huge images or rendering huge raytraced spheres etc

[@bluephreakr]

_The_ way to do a universal mount solution for various SD card adapters would be to have a two-piece system where device mounting and card placement would be sorted out. Then it would just be a matter of inserting the card with hardware from the front and having it fasten in place with live hinges holding this carrier in place.

[@NaoPb]

That is so cool that you made a face plate for it. Great video!

[@john_ace]

This is the later revision for the high-performance 604ev. The last 604 CPU used in the Mac. This means that it does no longer have cache on the mainboard but on the CPU-card instead. The nice thing is that the ROM has a working version of speculative access and is best for the G3 (5-10% more speed in certain cases). The Tsunami and Kansas have two PCI-'zones'. The upper 3 PCI slots are shared with internal peripherals and the lower 3 are directly connected to the system bus. Graphics cards are typically installed in the 4th slot to have the whole PCI bridge for itself to maximize speed. If you have a card that writes into the framebuffer (like video editing or acceleration cards), it is important to install it in the same 'zone' as the graphics card. The case is missing the latches for the drive-bay mechanism btw. I have two of these machines. One with a 700MHz G4 and the other with a 400MHz G4. Both machines have more than 768MB of memory. I tend to use the Adapter AHA2940U2B card since it allows very good performance with little CPU involvement. I also have good experience with Acard and Sonnet IDE cards with UDMA capable CF. A generic Realtek 8139 card helps a lot for data transfer and a USB card is also well advised. Even though the plastic off they machine is much less prone to brittleness than the 9500, it can be a bi*ch when it comes to the small plastic latches used for the drive bay covers. I have repaired some of these covers with ABS cement and some donor ABS. It needs a bit of work to get the repairs into the correct shape, though.

[@danielrhodes7594]

Great video. I have a 8600/300 and a G3/300. I have been looking for a 9600/300.

[@FrankConforti]

Oh dear! About a decade or so ago, a private shooting range lined up a bunch of old computers as targets. The Mac 9600 was one of them. This wasn’t plinking with a .22, these were serious caliber rifles. By the end of the day, needless to say, the 9600 looked like Swiss cheese but it held up better than the other old PCs.

[@RobTheSquire]

Even though i'm not a Mac guy I do like the old ones that you can upgrade and mod without people giving you a strange look as you would get trying to upgrade the ones that we have today.

[@jamesburke2759]

One of these with a Matching 21" CRT was one of the first mac's i ever bought and sold.

[@Squonk06]

Sean may have cleaned off all the grime, but that Power Mac is still SCSI.

[@GalenlevyPhoto]

Wow brings me memories when I was looking at those fast Macs in the 90s.

[@bryans8656]

Your videos are addictive 🙂

[@ericbauer4559]

Love me some 9600. Also, that’s like a grand worth of ram you have there.

[@hitvibez]

Love to see VOY Elite Force on here, the brig cutscenes in that game always made me LOL

[@JeffGeerling]

7:06 lol measuring RAM in "pounds" 😂

[@ActionRetro]

😂

[@JoshLloyd]

I would love to see more of your install of Elite Force on this Mac!

[@스즈미야하루히-e4i]

I really like how the 9600 looks. This looks better than the G4, G5 design imo. And it has more ram than my laptop!

[@rkmugen]

Hope you get to max-out a Power Mac 6100 some day too! (ie. the very first Power Mac)

[@DerekWitt]

I used to have a 6100 pizza box. Cool little machine. Mine had 24 Mb ram (if I remember correctly). I had to use that Ethernet dongle for networking. It ran MacOS 8.5 quite nicely. Unfortunately it had a bad case of Varta.

[@rkmugen]

@@DerekWitt Mine was maxed out with a Sonnet G3/500 card (but limited by the mobo's 30mhz bus, so the card was stuck at 480mhz). I ran 72 mb of RAM.... 128mb would've been possible, but the heat output was just too much for such a small box. I also added an Apple HPV video card, from a PowerMac 8100, and also used the Ethernet dongle (10 Base-T AAUI transceiver) to get the thing online. One other thing I did was swap out the green power LED (near the hard drive bay) with a super-bright blue one. :) The sad part is, there was no Linux support for the Sonnet upgrade card. NewerTech G3 upgrade cards were able to run Linux accelerated, but IIRC, suffered from bugs that kept messing with the date/time settings.

[@DerekWitt]

@@rkmugen I also ran Linux on my 6100/66 at one point. I may have had a 500Mb hard drive (just don’t remember how big). This was actually my first Linux server.

[@DerekWitt]

I never thought of a stealth G3 in a pizza box form factor. :)

[@oldipodee]

when he said dragging old macs into the modern day i felt that, im kicking an old 2010 iMac i found abandoned in my teacher's closet while helping clean out any ancient computer out of there into 2023 and this thing has no clue what it's even doing. left behind in 2012 with Mac OS X Lion, 4GB of ram, 2012 versions of Adobe apps. Also found a 2012 MacBook Pro with a ton of missing parts, and salvaged some parts for my 2011 MacBook Pro, and my MacBook isn't having such a hard time now, it can handle many continuity features, and AirDrop. In terms of CPU and graphics, this thing is getting cooked doing what I do.

[@AlfOfAllTrades]

I love the 8500, 9500, 8600 and 9600 series computers. My first PowerMac was an 8100/110 and I very much regret parting with it, even if it was a b**ch to take apart. "(well not really, if you have 90's cars for reference...). The 9600 was a powerhouse dream machine.

[@FlanGaming]

I stumbled upon an 8600 with a 1 GHz Sonnet upgrade card and 768MB of ram at a recycling center. It had a 128GB IDE hard drive mounted in the bottom of the case, which led to the discovery that it had been used as a server, since the drive had OS X Server 10.3 installed.

[@KiraSlith]

*Slaps Mac, FDD fascia falls off and door pops open* This baby can fit so much 90s Apple nostalgia. *side car falls off*

[@fsfs555]

The Kansas board actually took the standard L2 cache away from the logic board - because the "High Performance Processor Card" moved it onto the CPU card (the 200MP and sub-300MHz models used either the old board or an L2 cache module). This "inline cache" ran at 100MHz, 2x the speed of the bus-level caches. The Kansas models are usually preferred because they're more accepting of fast G3/G4 upgrades without the soldered cache that occasionally causes problems. The ATX mod isn't difficult, but you have to wire up a custom circuit to control soft power (IIRC, ATX's POWER_ON signal is basically the opposite of what Apple used, so it needs to be reversed). I have one of these and its power supply blew up, but luckily I was able to fix it with some new power ICs.

[@egbront1506]

The downside of the later Kansas board was that it was no longer compatible with Rhapsody, so you needed to find a Tsunami board if you wanted to run Mac OS X 1.0.

[@steveg5122]

I just got a flashed of Radeon 7000, would go great in it. Better fit than my g3 upgraded 6360

[@atptourfan]

Yes! New Action Retro!! KZbin notifications FTW!😅

[@James-fm4lk]

Not the last Power Mac to have PCI slots. I have a first-gen G4 Power Mac with PCI.

[@EnvAdam]

Raspberry pi pico 👀👀 I love working with the RP2040

[@2dfx]

Damn, this makes me regret selling my 9600/300. Had a G3/500 card and 512MB of RAM. Running OS X on it was quite the experience on the stock IMS Twinturbo.

[@ActionRetro]

haha i'm definitely putting OS X on this thing

[@DonMr]

​@@ActionRetroand Minecraft.

[@be236]

I had a Power Mac 8600 at one point in time, but later sold it.. wish I had kept it.. though I did keep a Power Mac G3 Minitower...

[@leecremeans5446]

Oh, memories of playing with this monster's little brother (a Power Mac 8600/250) back in the 1990s and 2000s...

[@IOSam]

It's just funny how back in the late 90's everybody thought these beige Power Macs looked outdated, while we all drooled over the new and shiny translucent blue and white G3... And today we all look back in awe at the incredible beauty of the simpler lines of the beige Power Mac 9600, while smirking on the crazy toyish looks of the blue and white G3. In retrospect, the idiosyncrasies of 90's design are nothing but delightful!

[@GarthBeagle]

Love that memory check wait when booting these with that much RAM 🤣 One easy trick, if you're not already aware, wait about 2 seconds after it chimes and then do a soft reset via the keyboard which'll skip the memory check

[@DaveAdams222]

03:46 🎶 I'm questioning . . . .my life choices . . . . 🎶

[@jdmcs]

"I wonder if we can turn those megahertz into gigahertz?" Well I think your desk is already megahurting from the 9600... so be sure to lift the 9600 correctly so your back doesn't gigahurt.

[@GaryBeltz]

What is the white slot between the RAM slots used for?

[@bradnelson3595]

Amazing job reproducing that drive cover.

[@bradnelson3595]

That should be enough memory to run the old Netscape browser and let it memory-leak to its heart's desire.

[@87sjg]

I salvaged a 9600 from the trash pile at my university and sold it on eBay over a decade ago. Near mint condition, tons of AVID video cards etc in it. I likely should've kept it... but I needed money at the time.

[@RiggityWRECKED]

Power Pete is my favorite classic Mac game.

[@bretsteinmetz3342]

A gig and a half of ram? That bad guy from Under Siege II would have loved this!

[@LynxSnowCat]

Meow; I've found that using a _flat bed scanner_ is the easiest way to get detailed 1:1 dimensions of random parts and PCB assemblies from other people, though it's rare that a modern LED type scanner has the depth-of-field to capture details further than a few mm.

[@ast3663]

awaiting part 2 😄

[@queens.dee.223]

"... ruined everything ... with success." Real "paved paradise and put up a parking lot" feelings from that statement. I miss the days of the Pirates of Silicon Valley.

[@stephanemignot100]

I should have a look on my mother's 9600, or fix my upgraded beige G3 with a Radeon 7000. I can use OS9 and X with the eMac 1.25ghz so one day maybe.

[@iiidiy]

1997 me is (supportively) jealous... and 2023 me is very excited to see where this goes!

[@JeffWaynee]

I wanted a PM 9600 so bad in the late 90's.

[@sedrosken831]

Man do I want to find one of those MultiScans. I really, really want a Trinitron monitor, but the prices those things go for these days... yuck. And I don't even want one quite as impressive as that one -- one that maxes at 1024x768 at a decent refresh would be fine for me.

[@thecorruptedbit5585]

13:09 I wanna see the 300 GHz build!

[@keithyakouboff8755]

Where did you get such a bright and sharp CRT?

[@channelite]

We had a Beige G3 233 in the same form factor.

[@flekkzo]

That Sony monitor is giving me nostalgia. Used to have one.

[@ShearWater509]

Although I still have the B&W G3 and it's gargantuan matching 20" apple studio display! You want to hear a desk beg for its life...put one of those things on it! Haha

[@shadowfox-nf6zi]

What a difference between this level of upgradeability and Apple's current Gestapo approach wherein the end user is an enemy to be contained.

[@macguru9999]

Having one of these. (4000usd 1997) was the equivalent of getting a 2019 mac pro in about 2019-20 (say 16core 384 2tb afterburner etc about 18,000usd). very very expensive but lots of power. Similarly in their day , the macintosh IIfx ( stood for ***cking expensive 10,000usd 1990). The mac pro 3,1-5,1 were cheap in comparison, although you could option them up too.

[@carl4889]

Have you got a link for that ATX power supply adaptor? I could do with one for my own 9600.

[@bad_collector]

love the 9600! the RAM is stupid expensive to get 1.5GB though

[@joshuat502]

Sorry I am late but their is a powermac 8600/200 with everything and the printer I think that would make a really cool video

[@ran2wild370]

Ohhh! Cool! I've been always asking people about what was special in these machines. Now I see what. They were much better than PII.

[@jamiemarchant]

WOW! You should make it into a server with that much ram.

[@zachswy]

In 1998 or 1999, my high school got a grant for 2 beige G3s for a vidoeography course. I don't remember how much RAM they each had, but something like 768 MB or maybe a Gig. What I do remember, is that the RAM for each of these machines cost $22,000 USD. So 1.5 GB maybe would've cost $50,000 in 1997? ~$91,000 adjusted for inflation?

[@jensputzlocher8345]

The beige G3 has got three RAM Slots, so you can put in 768 MB RAM max. My beige G3 DT also got a Sonnet G4 800 upgrade card. i also upgraded it with an ATI Rage 128, a USB/FW-Card and an ATA133-Card. Thanks to Xpostfacto it was my daily driver running 10.4 until 2008, when i bought a new Intel MacBook.