Apple Power Macintosh 7300/200

Crunchy Apple. Click for more photos!

The mid 90s were a weird time for the fruit company... Steve Jobs was long gone, they'd been licensing their designs to other manufacturers to try spread the Mac OS love but things were still rough.

That's the era this mid-range Power Macintosh is from. PowerPC 604e 200MHz power, 50MHz bus, 32MB RAM, 256K cache and a spacious 2GB hard disk were standard features - all lovely job in 1997 when it was available. But its true strength comes from the fact that it used a solidly designed case (more on that later) and had a bounty of expansion options - it was a Mac that theoretically could grow with you.

And grow it has!

Specifications

IBM PowerPC 750 G3 333MHz CPU w/ 512K backside cache

128MB EDO memory (5V 168-pin DIMMs!)

Apple M3979 mainboard

18GB 15K RPM ultrawide SCSI hard disk

AppleCD 12x SCSI CDROM drive

ATI Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card (Mac firmware)

Atto ExpressPSC PCI SCSI controller

Apple Outrigger chassis

MacOS 9.2.1

Unique features

It's the only beige Mac in the fleet at this time - so pretty much all the unique features are as a result of that - it runs classic Mac OS (although with shenanigans we could make it run OS X), it's pretty spritely and has all the usual accoutrements you'd want or need.

The Outrigger chassis is kinda neat in that the drive cage and power supply flip out sideways to gain full access to the mainboard, with a little foot to hold them up. Alas, due to maintenance its had, this no longer quite reaches...

Personal history

This was in fact, my ex wife's childhood computer, passed down to her by her uncle.

Her mother found it while cleaning up around the house and it ended up coming home in the car with us, complete with the Apple Multiple Scan 15 monitor to match. Sadly the fun was short lived as a classic Power Mac 7x00 fault came up to bite me in the ass - the power supply exploded in dramatic fashion.

The machine sat waiting patiently for its turn to get some love. Years. The marriage ended. I moved house. I moved house again. I moved house once more. It followed me everywhere just not quite getting seen to. Other Macs had gathered. I gave them all away, but I couldn't bring myself to get rid of the OG, the 7300...

Now Marchintosh is a thing and we celebrate all things Old World Mac. The time had finally come.

Another 7300 popped up further up country. My buddy offered to collect it and pull the PSU for me, he could keep the carcass... surprise, its power supply is also smoked and its board flaky! He's kept on working on it and ended up with a pretty cool machine too, but he did send the dead supply down for surgery.

With some creative rewiring and a hex inverter courtesy of my main man, I retrofitted an old 400W PC power supply into the 7300 power supply casing and transferred the Mac wiring harness. Success - it sprang back into life!

That's then the malaise took hold. It wouldn't boot with a drive connected to the fast SCSI. It wouldn't boot off original restore media. It wouldn't let me use the SCSI drive I had laying about as it wasn't Apple blessed. I recall a series of hijinks where I used the Amiga's external Zip drive, booted off generic MacOS 8 media, installed to the Zip disk, booted from that instead which allowed me to install FWB HD Toolkit which injects its own hard disk drivers and finally, we got MacOS to install on the 2GB SCSI drive that I had in it.

It just never ended from there. I ordered some exotic upgrades from Japan for it, did some horse trading for more stuff and fished up more, including the extra RAM to bring it up to 128MB, some extra VRAM and a G3 333 accelerator. All well, but it was a bit fickle to boot and the PIC based PS/2 to ADB adapter was fussy.

So I imported an Atto ExpressPSC SCSI controller to end the nonsense once and for all, combined with a rather rapid 18GB enterprise-spec Seagate SCSI drive. That woke it up in a big way!

Then came the Radeon. It now has the 3D chops to handle actual FPS titles, though input devices still prohibited this. But as suddenly as it got good... it just stopped wanting to boot.

Future plans

Recapping. It's 30 years old, with SMD caps sprayed everywhere. I feel that replacing those should help stabilize the board significantly.
Reflow the connectors. Apple opted to use surface mounted slots for the RAM, VRAM, CPU and PCI slots. Shock horror, that's a bit fragile too. Could be worth touching up the joints if we can do it safely.
Maybe the compatibility card? I have an Apple PC Compatibility card, which is essentially the Compaq in factory trim, as a PCI card. It needs a lot of power, makes lots of heat and needs a special passthrough cable though... eehhhhh maybe.
PS/2 adapter. I just received a new one that's of the era, need to see if it's more capable than the PIC one I already had.
The case. It's brittle as a potato chip, the slightest wrong move and bits of plastic fall off the damn thing! It's also a bit yellow... so do I attempt a retrobrite or do we leave it alone lest we make it more brittle?
PRAM battery. It hasn't had one in it as long as I've had it... adding one would significantly reduce the fuss it gives on startup.
Power button. It's shattered, I should look at printing a replacement.