[sgi02]

Hope I posted this in the right section ,I appoligise if I didnt.

During work today , my office manager comes , and tells me the she has a ton of mac stuff she wants looked over , and I mean a ton! Most of it was older , but the kicker is that almost all of it is brand new!

For those interested in a little back story , my office managers boyfriend owns and rents apartment complexes. A few years back one of his tenants just decided to leave town. When he went through the apartment he found a ton of mac stuff that no one ever claimed , most of it brand new! Most of the equipment sat in his garage for the past three years until it made it to my office today. I told her that most of it was older stuff and she told me to just throw it all away , she didnt want to be bothered with it. So here I am with a ton of older Mac stuff , but not quite sure what to do with it all

The machine is a UMAX Supermac S900 , This machine was still in the factory shrinkwrap , the box had never been opened and the unit had never been turned on. It has a 604e @ 200 Mhz , 32MB Ram and 1.2GB SCSI Hard Drive Running OS 7.6. I also have two SCSI tapee drives and about seven external SCSI hard drives ( I think most of them are 4GB) Three of them are brand new , shrinkwraped in the box and the other ones are used , no idea what they have on them.

Considering the condition of this machine , I would really like to keep it and attempt to use it as another computer. I was wondering if anyone had any reccomendations on what to do with the machine , and what you might reccomend to upgrade on it in order to possibly run OSX. Any replies are appricated , and I took a few photos that may be helpful. Thanks in advance!

[bradoesch]

I was gonna suggest leaving it shrinkwrapped and buy a similar machine for $20. Maybe it wouldn't have been worth more sealed anyway.

[Cody Dawg]

Boy, does THAT ever bring back memories!

[ReggieX]

The Power Mac forum is more appropriate, but since that's the same vintage as my old Power Computing clone, my main advice would be to not bother with OS X on it at all. MacOS 9 will run fine, but 8.6 with Speed Doubler will run faster.

Get an IX Micro card for cheap from eBay so that it runs well, and keep it on the old MacOS.

[Captain Obvious]

That’s about the equivalent of a Powermac 8500. So the value is about the same which should be about $25. You might be better off selling it to a collector who would be willing to pay a premium for the unit since it is in new condition.

If you want to upgrade it you are looking at paying $15 per stick of 128mb of RAM. Upwards of $30 for a lower end G3 upgrade card and $10 for a USB PCI card. Those are the minimum upgrades I would do and is also about the cost of getting a used Beige G3 which has a faster BUS speed, can support more RAM, uses cheaper IDE hard drives and optical drives, and supports OSX without hacks like xpostfacto the UMAX would require and maybe not even work for you.


Get rid of it unless you have all the old parts and software to upgrade it already.

[Lateralus]

Great find my friend.

I'm a *huge* fan of SuperMacs myself. If you should so decide to not keep her, feel free to drop me a line.

[mitchell_pgh]

I would take a bunch of photos of it and throw it on eBay.
Let some other guy let it collect dust and take up space.

(I'm tired of having old computers lying around [it took me a long time to get to this point in my life ])

[OpenStep]

Wow, that inside picture chassis looks EXACTLY like an older Dell I recently gutted. I think it was a 166 MHz Dimension and it had the same space for the hard drive mount and same 3.5" style monting and exhaust fan. Weird!

edit: sort of like this

[Psychonaut]

Congrats on the find, you lucky sob. I loved the clones and wish I could stumble accross one such as that. I would really suggest keeping 7.6 as what better use is the machine other than a blast from the past?

More pics would be great. (The original box, instruction manual, back ports, front with the bevel-thingie open...)

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by OpenStep:
Wow, that inside picture chassis looks EXACTLY like an older Dell I recently gutted. I think it was a 166 MHz Dimension and it had the same space for the hard drive mount and same 3.5" style monting and exhaust fan. Weird!

edit: sort of like this

UMAX bought the S900 case from the same manufacturer that Dell bought their mid-90s Dimension case from. Only difference was the face plate.

[Eriamjh]

Three years ago it would have been more useful.

[Big Mac]

Yeah, the Supermacs were pretty neat looking. Never got to see or use one IRL. Congratulations on the find. 8.6 is of course the best version of the Mac OS, IMO. You may want to think about Linux as a side project, too.

[benb]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Yeah, the Supermacs were pretty neat looking. Never got to see or use one IRL. Congratulations on the find. 8.6 is of course the best version of the Mac OS, IMO. You may want to think about Linux as a side project, too.

That will be very hard. The S900 (if memory serves me) has a Twin Turbo 128 8M video card. My pretty decent Linux skills have never gotten KDE or Gnome working on this card. It probably is possible for someone with enough skill, but is it worth the time?

[DeathToWindows]

Cool find... but dubious utility

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Nice find!
I had a Umax s900 for years, and it was a real workhorse. I still have it, though I no longer use it.

Running OSX would be a real challenge, and probably not worth the effort. However, OS9 will run nice and snappy provided it's upgraded IE: more RAM(mandatory)/possibly a G3 daughtercard/ put a few of the higher capacity SCSI HDs in it.

Even thought it's a nice machine, I wouldn't put much extra money into it. Even upgraded as far as it will go, it's very outdated, unfortunately.

One actual funtional use would be to turn it into a home server- possibly add a PCI ATA controller card which will allow it to use large capacity IDE drives, and in that case a low cost 10/100 ethernet card. (The built-in ethernet is only 10). If nothing else, it could be a decent machine for basic file storage.

[sgi02]

Well.. Thought I would update this thread....

After the inital post it pretty much sat in my garage for a while until I got ahold of a ton of old FPM and a mac USB card for free. I installed them and they actually made the machine useable , quite the upgrade from 32MB , its at 464MB now. I loaded OSX 10.1 via Xpostfacto and it was quite a trip to see it run on the old 604e processor. After this it was only a matter of time that things would progress...

A few weeks leter with some extra cash to burn I decided upgrading the machine and installing Panther would make a fun weekend project. I nabbed a G3 333 in a XLR8 MachCarrier + an additional 160MB Memory off of eBay for $16.00 Shipped. I also nabbed a Radeon 7000 PCI 64MB , its a flashed PCI card for around $45.

Installiation went pretty smooth , though I was cursing myself for forgetting to remove all of the foriegn language packs , that made the install take forever. After that I was up and running! I installed all of the latest Software Updates , installed shadowkiller and did a bunch of little tweaks , It seems to run great with PCI Extreme and its actually quite snappy considering its age. Being that the machine has a 1996 Datestamp on all of its parts its amazing that it can run Panther so well , it also plays a mean game of Quake 2 as well

The biggest downside so far is that I have gotten about 2 random Kernel Panics within the past few days that I have had the machine up and running , I understand that this is becsue of soldered on cache on the motherboard and the only true way to disable it is to solder a jumper point on the motherboard. While I am tempted , I think I will leave her just the way she is. Thanks everyone for all of the tips and advice you helped me with to get this baby back up and running.

And just if your wondering im typing this message on it Cheers!

[olePigeon]

I'm curious what other older Mac stuff there was. Anything like Mac Classics or LCs?

[JoshuaZ]

You could gut it and make it into a coffee maker or fish tank or flower pot.

[macintologist]

Could you post a video of you using it (the screen) so we can see how (un)snappy it is?

[sgi02]

Sure , Here you go

http://www.supload.com/vid/MOV01447/863727332/mpg/

[Lateralus]

That's really not bad at all.

I'm assuming you've applied the PCI Extreme hack given the fluidity of the GUI.