The Quadra (Centris) 610 - Review of Apple's Mid-Range Pizza-Box Macintosh from 1993

An in-depth review of a Macintosh with a highly decisive form factor. The Pizza-Box shaped Quadra 610 (which is a re-named Centris 610) was Apple's middle of the road Mac for early 1993, replacing the Macintosh IIsi. This was replaced in mid 1994 by the Power Macintosh 6100 and Performa 630, giving it a year and a half on the market.
YYsMG looks into what this Machine came equipped with, both inside and out, as well as a few peripherals, and how it holds up running System 7 and some games of it's era. This 68k Mac is overall, an enjoyable experience.

Find me on Twitter at: / yysmg

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[@Walczyk]

voice and cadence is so good 100/100

[@Obakedake]

This was the Mac my family got when we upgraded from the Mac plus. Mid-range but hot damn those color graphics and CD ROM capabilities made many enjoyable afternoons and evenings of gaming for me. Wish I still had all my old boxed games. Thanks for the memories!!

[@deathnutz]

Had one of these! I remember having PowerPC envy for the entirety of it's ownership. :)

[@mikegreiling]

My father bought this exact computer for our family back in the early 90s. I have many fond memories of playing games on this model. Aperion, Mealstrom, Asterax, Strategic Conquest, Tristan, Dark Forces, etc... I really want to re-acquire one of these someday

[@jonpurdydotcom]

Re: why is Map a Control Panel: because you can press the Set button to set your location and have DST switch automatically.

[@1magazine]

I actually like the pizza box form factor haha! The 6100 is one of my favourite Macintosh which is in the same type of case. The Centris is nice too. Please do more Macintosh videos, they’re great! 👍

[@kinapuffen]

My family had a Quadra 610 when I was a kid, but ours had a regular cd-tray.

[@sgtunix]

Cool. I just bought a Quadra 650.

[@phipli]

Two ADB ports is an age thing. Older Macs have two, then they started cost cutting. Remember you can connect more than just mice and keyboards and not everything has a pass through. Some early monitors also had an ADB hub in them! Portrait Display and the 17" Multiscan to name a couple.

[@Shiunbird]

Cd access times are important for developers. For example, if you are writing a game, it can make difference between being able to stream data from the disk or having to store it in RAM, thus determining level complexity. If you can load a level from the disk as you go, you can have much larger worlds than if you must load them in RAM in advance. As you well said, RAM was costly. :)

[@Venatius]

It's only a footnote, but I always find it a delight to see some remembrance of Total Distortion. That might be a good one to cover in a future episode if you had the inclination!

[@TuNnL]

Yeah, I used the slower Centris 610 version of this Mac for my student employee position in college. The crux of my job was to write summaries for every book the university press published... on Amazon. As you can imagine, it was an excruciatingly slow computer which hung on a regular basis. Luckily, I move on to a student employee position at local PBS affiliate. Can't remember what computer I had there, but it was much faster and more powerful. 💁🏻‍♂️🖥️

[@nil0bject]

they didn't have graphics cards, so if you increase the clock speed of the cpu, you increase the refresh rate

[@Jaxermd]

You can file the latches down a bit to make it easier to release. I have two 6100s and a Centris 610.

[@sergejgajic]

i like when the monitor is sitting on the pc box

[@mashakos1]

showcases a Mac that is barely average at playing games. Introductory price: US$2,520 (equivalent to $4,460 in 2019) BREH

[@andrewdupuis1151]

I still have Macintosh Centris 610

Are you sure that the FPU would’ve speeded up spreadsheets? Its main advantage are trigonometric functions, which are rarely seen in typical spreadsheets. Any idea what the advantage in Lotus 1-2-3, Claris Resolve, MS Excel would be?

[@andrewdupuis1151]

i still have adapter for vga monitor i think they be hard to find no

[@ghwstvr7904]

What's the game at 10:13? I remember playing it a ton but can't remember what it was called.

[@blunderingfool]

The benefits of going over 60hertz is to reduce eye strain. CRTs under 75 hertz will cause eyestrain, even if it takes a while at something like 66.7. Going over 75 stops this happening at all for most people. I found that out on my old packard bell computer, fiddling with the settings in windows 98SE. Wish I could have kept that old monster of a mnitor, it went up to 85 hertz at 1280x1024. =P

[@pentiummmx2294]

I have a CRT that can only do 60 hz, and it's some cheap no name one from the late 90s, it is pretty mediocre, and occasionally makes a click along with a flicker when running but it's pretty bright though.

[@blunderingfool]

@@pentiummmx2294 Hmm, that's rather odd. If you're having to use an adapter for it then it may not be allowing the monitor to run at it's maximum refresh rate because it's not providing appropriate EDID information. Maximum refresh at any particular resolution can be hard to determine, you need to know the maximum horizontal scanning frequency and do some maths that's beyond me. Since it's often hard to break a post-80s (I think) monitor by going out of range (Over-driving I guess?) then you can set a custom resolution in your GPU control panel (AMD Radeon Software, Nvidia's alternative, or Intel's tray application) and see if it'll run at the refresh rate you specify. I was able to push a very odd CRT I bought to 800x600 at 87 hertz. I set the display timing method to GTF since it was more era appropriate, someone more knowledgeable can probably offer better help. Worth warning, the adapter I was using for this went flaky after a day, could just be cheap chinese tat or maybe the conversion chip inside just got fouled up pushing a display over-range. Proceed at your own caution, obviously.

[@kichoforrest]

Where can i get that adapter so I can run a monitor. I cant find a proper chord.. Please help

[@pentiummmx2294]

i only have 32 mb on my pentium 133 PC and 8 mb on my 486 DX2 66 PC so 36 MB is ok, maybe overkill for a 68040 25 MHz mac.

Indeed, ESC next to space is hilarious, but what would you need "PrintScreen" for with Mac OS?

[@YesterYearsMacGames]

Fair point, I've never used the print screen button, but its there on the successor. I heard anecdotally that the FPU helped with the large sprawling corporate spreadsheets that had all sorts of figures doing all sorts of things on all sorts of pages but I don't have a source, so perhaps this should be taken with a pinch of salt.

@@YesterYearsMacGames The FPU won’t help with addition, subtraction, multiplying and only slightly with division within spreadsheets, as the number of iterations there is limited, and there’s far more overhead for running through the decision tree which cells to update. I couldn’t measure a difference with Excel 5 on an 68LC040 vs. 68030 when updating a 1000+ cells sheet, even if I added some sin/cos/tan stuff which is rather slow on non-FPU machines. In total, spreadsheets are so slow anyway in calculating numbers, the FPU won’t matter. Things are totally different of course in specialized software, like some Raytracing programmes, or specific calculations in compiled software. My summary is: Don’t bother for the FPU in everyday’s Mac software …

[@giserson2]

I have a couple of Performa 630 (so a quadra 630 with the 68LC40) and one very similar monitor, a failing mouse and a keyboard. One of them doesn't boot, but the motherboard boots in the other machine so I'm assuming the PSU is dead. The cases aren't in great condition either, being seriously yellowed and scratched up, one of them seems to have some sort of AV card installed. Is there any point to keeping/trying to sell them or are they just trash at this point?

[@YesterYearsMacGames]

I watched a unit only, 630 with a knackered power supply sell recently for £50. A working one with a keyboard and mouse can easily fetch over 70 with good pictures and decent write-up. Best bet would be to sell the 630s separately as they are easier to ship and the monitor separately as local pickup.

[@ButilkaRomm]

Hi, what is the game at 0:41 ?

[@YesterYearsMacGames]

Thats Sim City 2000

[@superstar64]

Whatever, my 660av is more fun.