Welcome to Vogons! 😉

And nice finds! 😀
I still haven't been able to get a GF1 (cheaply 😜)

GXL750 wrote:

Yesterday, I picked up a circa 1995 Macintosh LC630 with a 250mb hard drive, 33mhz 040 cpu, 36mb ram and Mac OS 7.1. Haven't done too much so far with it but somewhere in my basement is a CD flder full of old Mac games from my elementary school days.

M68k Macs are all sorts of fun. With an '040 and that much RAM, you could probably run System 7.5.5 on there, which can be downloaded from Apple's website. (Well, you actually download 7.5.3 and an update)

BTW, is anyone here familiar with the Vortex 2? On this Dell I have, some MIDI files sound incredibly great but most I play time off cue and run with the wrong instrument. Signal to noise ratio is great and MP3s are good but I couldn't find a worse midi synth if I tried. Soundfonts can't do a thing!

Their synth is poor. Best thing to do is add a DB to the card. Or, with Windows, use a softsynth.

I installed Yamaha's S-YXG100 which is great to listen to. However, that' doesn't fix MIDI in DOS. If I ever find a daughter board around here, I'll add it.

There's plenty of cheap XR385s on eBay, which appear to be NEC manufactured DB50XGs with Yamaha chips.

I got mine for under $25 AUD.

With an '040 and that much RAM, you could probably run System 7.5.5 on there, which can be downloaded from Apple's website. (Well, you actually download 7.5.3 and an update)

Why trash a perfectly good 7.1 install for 7.5? IMO, the only thing System 7.5.x has going for it is that it's freely available... it was never particularly stable, it's slower than 7.1, and it won't really do anything that 7.1 can't with some easily available addons. If you really want something newer, track down a copy of OS 7.6.

I think I have a copy of 7.6 somewhere. However, in my experience, 7.5 and 7.6 really don't act much differently. Well, whatever the case, I am not actually planning to change the OS at all; 7.1.2Pro is what it shipped with and is designed to run so I'll use it.

BTW, as promised, here's some pics (click thumbnail for larger). BTW, is that Micron heatsink looking cool or what?

Really? That hasn't been my experience. *shrugs*

Huh... I have that same motherboard that's in your Micron system. I'd been wondering what sort of system it came out of.

Another interesting thing I notice, that Micron case looks almost identical to the 1998-2000ish Dell Dimension/XPS cases, just a little difference in the front faceplate. Those are pretty nice cases to work on, once you figure out how they're put together, but I always thought they were entirely proprietary to Dell.

The difference between the case on my Dell XPS and the Micron is only in power button and faceplate. Well, along with a few minor differences inside not worth mentioning. Both cases even have "Copyright 1995 A-Tech" written on the inside of most plastic panels.

I also once had a UMAX SuperMac back in the day that used the same case.

GXL750 wrote:

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2011-4/1365981/tn_micron_in.jpg […]
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That sure is an odd cpu cooler you have

It is. That CPU cooler makes me think of a stack of pancakes painted blue.

Whoa. That's one awesome cooler.

I'm not sure how effective it is, but on a P200mmx, it doesn't have to be. That thing is seriously cool looking though. If I owned that box I'd be taking the side off periodically to stare at it 🤣.

Not a P200MMX, it's just a Pentium 200. Yeah, when I got the computer, that heatsink was a bonus. BTW, that pic is now obsolete as the 4mb S3 Virge card has been replaced by a 4mb Matrox Millennium.

GXL750 wrote:

Not a P200MMX, it's just a Pentium 200. Yeah, when I got the computer, that heatsink was a bonus. BTW, that pic is now obsolete as the 4mb S3 Virge card has been replaced by a 4mb Matrox Millennium.

]

Wow, 200mhz Pentium. Somebody spent some serious cash on that thing when it came off the assembly line!

Non MMX is actually cooler too unless you're running 3d on it too 😁.

It must have been quite expensive in 1996 (datestamp on rear of case reads 08/1996) but it originally had a P133. It's the oldest computer I've ever seen to have an ATX case.

Not sure what site I read this trivia, but it basically mentioned that the Pentium 200 was a rare CPU and hardly sold. Most non MMX machines had a Pentium 133 or 166. The 200 model was extremely expensive considering what performance boost you got over the 166 model.

To make matters worse, as soon as the Pentium MMX model launched, nobody wanted a non MMX model. So all of this resulted in very few systems shipping with a Pentium 200 chip.

Yup, those 200 non-mmx's were hardly existent in the wild. I did get a couple from cpu-world though, they are out there, if you want them. And for non-ridiculous prices 😀
Only thing is, only Socket 5 boards (and the odd Socket 7) won't officially work with MMX chips. And Socket 5 boards aren't exactly all over the place, nor are they sought after by collectors.