First post, by vladstamate
- Rank
- Oldbie
Recently I have added a Macintosh Performa 6115CD to my collection. This is the 5th vintage Apple I have and the most powerful. It came not working so I had to repair it by replacing the motherboard and the PRAM battery. I've also added 64Mb of memory in addition to the 8Mb soldered on the motherboard. I've been having a lot of fun with it and I wanted to share my experiences.
First the hardware:
CPU: PowerPC 601 at 60Mhz (bus speed at 30Mhz)
Cache: 32Kb L1 and 0K L2 (more on that below)
Memory: 72Mb (60ns memory, but it really operates at 80ns due to motherboard limitation)
Video: integrated 640x480 @ 16bpp
HDD: 250Mb SCSI (limited to 5MBps)
CD-ROM: 2x speed SCSI
Netword: AAUI to Ethernet adapter
Sound: On board 22Khz, Stereo (stereo jack in the back).
More pictures of the internals here.
Then the software:
OS: System 7.6.1
Browsing: Netscape Communicator 4.8 / Internet Explorer 5
FTP client: Anarchie
Essential: Stuffit
Faster 68k emulator: SpeedDoubler
Appearance Manager (to make it look nicer)
Games: Ultimate Doom, Quake, Marathon, Civilization 2 Demo, Simcity 2000 Demo and others
Setting things up
It came with almost no software so I first had to install StuffIt (the only way to do that was to use a .img file and do a rawrite to a floppy). Then I put IE5 and Netscape. One of the biggest wins was installing SpeedDoubler as that made the 68k emulator faster. For example Ultimate Doom felt like on my 386DX40 but after it felt faster than my 486DX2@66.
Game benchmarks
Quake (timedemo demo1) 7.6FPS
Marathon
Low res/256 colors - 26fps
Low res/16k colors - 17fps
High res/256 colors - 16fps
High res/16k colors - 11fps
Doom - feels faster than my 486DX2@66, I cannot run a timedemo as there is no command line....
Overall
Overall it "feels" (for whatever that is worth) like a 486DX4@100Mhz. From the SW point of view though everything just works. I mean everything installs with no issues and well I seem to find anything I want. There are no IRQs to deal with, drivers to install, setup programs to execute. Anything I put in just works...Like insert a CD audio and it just plays it. Sure you can open "Audio CD Player" if you want to change tracks, but you do not need to. Once I got other the "catch-22" with StuffIt (where you need StuffIt installed to install StuffIt, because it only comes as a StuffIt archive) it was the easiest setup I have ever done.
Internet browsing is actually pretty good. A small surprise here is that Internet Explorer is actually rendering websites better than Netscape Communicator.
Upgrades
- HDD: I am running out of space on 250Mb so I will be upgrading to at least 1Gb SCSI drive, possibly more.
- Cache: this is what is really hurting the performance. I need the 256Kb L2 cache stick, and I have one on the way from eBay. That should give me about 30% speed improvement. With a 1Mb L2 cache stick I can get 80% speed improvement.
- Better video card. I need to get an HPV 2Mb RAM card so I can run 1024x768 resolution.
Thanks
Thanks for people at vintage-computer forums (now vcfed.org) and Vogons user lolo799 who helped to set it up and find software for it.
I will add more pictures/screenshots later as I am still gathering them.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HbC_nq8t1S9l7qGYL0mTA
Collection: http://www.digiloguemuseum.com/index.html
Emulator: https://sites.google.com/site/capex86/
Raytracer: https://sites.google.com/site/opaqueraytracer/