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Help needed ID'ing mid-90s Mac Performa

C

carguy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 13, 2004
6
0
Hi all,

I've just recently acquired a 1995 vintage Mac that I'm trying to ID.

There's no badge on the front, but the plate on the bottom says M3076. This seems to suggest it's one of the Performa series (or Quadra maybe, not sure what the difference is).

I have no idea whether it is 68030 or PPC based - "About My Macintosh" says "Power Macintosh", Mac OS 7.1.5, while it has 48MB of RAM (it's been upgraded) and a 300MB hard disk.

And that's about all I know! I really need to know what type it is - have been told it could be any of 630, 6200, 6300, 6320 - so gawd knows!

I have tried to ID it further by using a couple of progs downloaded from the internet, but I am having a nightmare transferring them to the Mac - put them on a DOS floppy, but the Mac says they're all "PC Exchange Files" and won't let me run them! Help!

Cheers,
Martin.
 
One other thing : it's making an annoying whistling sound like a dodgy CRT - is this normal!? Works perfectly other than that!!
 
If the about box says that its a Power Macintosh then its PPC based. According to Mactracker, the only PPCs with an original OS of 7.1.x or older are the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 and 8100 models (all the PPC Performas had 7.5.x). The 6100 originally came with a 160-250 MB hard drive, the 7100 came with a 250-700 MB hard drive and the 8100 came with a 500 MB-2 GB hard drive. So I'm guessing it's either the 6100 or 7100.

Hopefully you have a program called 'Apple System Profiler' on your computer (as evil_santa just said). If you can find it, open it, and see if it says anything.
 
you can try everymac.com for images. I dunno if the early models varied greatly in looks. I had a Performa 6400. The specs you have sound close to what my Performa 6400 had.
 
Thanks guys.

I have been trawling the net all evening and not managed to come up with anything conclusive. Just took it apart (how hard!?), and found the CPU - XPC603FE75-2b.

As far as I can work out, a 75MHz PPC 603 would make it a Performa 6200, with memory upgraded to 48MB, but curiously only a 500MB IDE disk (I read they shipped with 1 gig drives).

These things any use? I know nothing about Macs!
 
The following Macs had a 75 MhZ PowerPC 603 processor and 500 MB hard drive:

Macintosh Performa 5200CD
Macintosh Performa 5210CD
Macintosh Performa 5220CD
Power Macintosh 5200
Power Macintosh 6200
Power Macintosh 7200

As I said look in Apple System Profiler. It might be in the Apple menu, if not do a search (command-F) for it. That should tell you what it is.
 
HexMonkey said:
The following Macs had a 75 MhZ PowerPC 603 processor and 500 MB hard drive:

Macintosh Performa 5200CD
Macintosh Performa 5210CD
Macintosh Performa 5220CD
Power Macintosh 5200
Power Macintosh 6200
Power Macintosh 7200

As I said look in Apple System Profiler. It might be in the Apple menu, if not do a search (command-F) for it. That should tell you what it is.
Click to expand...

BTW is it an all-in-one configuration or a desktop model.
 
It's a desktop machine, from what I've gleaned from the help you guys gave me, taking the thing apart, and what's around on the web I think it's a 6200 (it's the usual 3 box configuration).

Apple System Profiler isn't on there, and neither is stuffit which I understand I would need to get at an hqx(?) file.

Can anybody tell me how I can transfer an executable to the mac via PC floppy? Surely it can't be a catch 22 of "need software on Mac to access sofware from the PC", where the software I need isn't on the Mac!?

:confused:
 
iindigo said:
I know System 7.5 and up can read PC disks of any kind - floppies, HDs, etc. Not sure about System 7.1 though....
Click to expand...

My mistake, it's 7.5.1, not 7.1.5 :rolleyes:

It reads the discs fine, but I can't run anything I copy off them. I need a way of changing the filetype from PC exchange to executable - without copying a new program on to the Mac, as obviously that won't work as I won't be able to execute it! ;)
 
carguy said:
My mistake, it's 7.5.1, not 7.1.5 :rolleyes:

It reads the discs fine, but I can't run anything I copy off them. I need a way of changing the filetype from PC exchange to executable - without copying a new program on to the Mac, as obviously that won't work as I won't be able to execute it! ;)
Click to expand...


You sure its a mac compatible program that you are trying to run?

You may be able to copy it to the hard drive and use ResEdit to change the filetype.
 
Don't use ResEdit, use FileTyper. But then you'll need to look for that... And then there's the MacBinary thing. Where did you get the executable that you want to run? You won't be able to run PC .EXE files.

Up in the upper left corner there is a blurry-looking color Apple icon. Click that, and a menu will pull down. The first item should be "About this Mac". Click that.

A window will appear that will say how much memory is in the machine. I think this includes virtual memory. Inside that box there may be a button that says "Apple System Profiler", or it may be on the menu that pulled down when you clicked the Apple icon.

I realize it probably never occurred to you to click on the Apple. Sorry we take things for granted. I only started using Macs about 8 or 9 years ago, and there was a lot of initial learning I needed to do. The file type stuff drove me completely nuts. (What?! The system uses two four-character strings which are completely invisible and can only be changed with a third-party utility? What were they thinking?)
 
carguy said:
My mistake, it's 7.5.1, not 7.1.5 :rolleyes:

It reads the discs fine, but I can't run anything I copy off them. I need a way of changing the filetype from PC exchange to executable - without copying a new program on to the Mac, as obviously that won't work as I won't be able to execute it! ;)
Click to expand...

PC executables or .exe files can't run on the Mac. You can open files from the PC on the Mac but not run the applications. Sorry to break it to ya.
 
Thanks once again for all the responses!

1) There's nothing in the "About This Mac" menu with regards to Apple System Profiler, doesn't seem to be installed on this system.

2) I'm aware that only Mac native applications will run on the Mac, and not PC ones (I grew up on RISC OS / ARM architecture so I know all about this! ;) ). However, I have been downloading Mac applications on my PC (Apple System Profiler amongst others) as .hqx and .sit files, and transferring them to the Mac via PC floppy. That's when I have the problem - they stay tagged as "PC Exchange Files" and any attempt to get them to execute means that another application tries to load it as a text file!

Does that make sense?

There surely must be a way to copy applications in this way? Otherwise I have no way of getting software onto it! There's no standard serial port / ethernet so the only way I have of transferring software to it is via disk - if this won't work, what can I do!? It's useless to me!
 
The reason that you can't use those files is that you don't have Stuffit Expander, which is needed to uncompress them. Version 5 (newer versions won't work on Mac OS 7) is difficult to find in an uncompressed form, but hopefully you'll be able to find it with a Google search. Also, you could try uncompressing files on another computer before transferring them (there's a Windows version of Stuffit available).
 
kaylee said:
dont know if anyone else has mentioned this: mac tracker might be of some help to you - its a program with details about various models of apple computer.
Click to expand...

That's what I used to narrow it down. :)
It's certainly a very useful program. I used to use Guru, but it was discontinued a few years ago and it didn't offer as much information.
 
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