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Yesterday, for the first time in about a year, I tried powering on the Macintosh Performa 450 (LC III) from my past writeup about Apple’s backwards capacitor . It didn’t work. The screen was black, it played the startup sound, and then immediately followed up with the “Chimes of Death”. Nothing else happened from that point on. Here’s what it sounded like: This was a little frustrating because last year I had already replaced all of the capacitors and cleaned where ...

This post is about the original OMAP3530 BeagleBoard from 2008. Yes, the one so old that it doesn’t even show up in the board list on BeagleBoard.org anymore. The Beagle Board , not the BeagleBone. During my Chumby 8 kernel escapades, at one point I ran into a UART bug that affected multiple drivers , including the omap-serial driver. This led me to buy a BeagleBoard so I could verify the omap-serial bug on hardware. After I figured out the bug with the UART driver, I realized that the OMA...

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I rescued a special recovery partition from an old Macintosh Performa 550’s dead hard drive . This partition had been lost to time and it was a race to try to save it before the remaining Performa 550 machines out there with their original hard drives were reformatted or destroyed. It has now been preserved on the Macintosh Garden . I have a few updates to that post that I’d like to share. The first update is that some extra discussion took place ...

I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now. This story starts with me on a lazy Sunday using Hex Fiend in conjunction with Eric Harmon’s Mac ROM template (ROM Fiend) to look through the resources stored in the Power Mac G3’s ROM. This ROM was used in the beige desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999. As I write this post in mid-2025, I’...

I recently found myself needing to change the monitor that a cheap HDMI “dummy plug” pretended to be. It was a random one I had bought on Amazon several years ago that acted as a 4K monitor, and I needed it to be something simpler that didn’t support a 4K resolution. The story behind why is a long one that I’m still figuring out and might eventually become a separate blog post in the future. If you’re not familiar with dummy plugs, here’s a quick primer: they ...

As part of my research into the Macintosh Performa 550’s factory recovery partition , I paid a lot of attention to eBay listings for these computers. I came to an interesting discovery that I had already suspected: big CRT-based Macs in this form factor are regularly damaged in shipping after being sold on eBay. Most vintage computer enthusiasts are well aware of this, but the plastic in old computers tends to become very brittle as it ages. With Macs in particular, machines made from 1993...

I’ve been noticing a lot of fun stories lately about bugs in old software that suddenly showed up in newer Windows versions. For example, here’s an excellent writeup by Silent about a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that laid dormant until Windows 11 24H2 came out. MattKC also recently posted a cool video about the massive project of decompiling LEGO Island , which also solved the mystery of the “exit glitch” that happened in newer versions of Windows. Nathan Baggs h...

In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a hopeless search, and how persistence eventually paid off. There’s still an unsolved mystery too, so I’m hoping others will see this and help to fill in the blanks! T...

As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I thought it would be fun to share my take on it anyway. What I’m talking about is how a lot of these hard drives just refuse to work anymore. This is very common wit...

This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction. I’ve been playing around with MAME a lot lately. If you haven’t heard of MAME, it’s an emulator that is known best for its support of many arcade games. It’s so much more than that, though! It is al...