I purchased a Macintosh Centris 610. Why? No idea. I just fancied it. It seemed like a
lot of computer for £35. Especially when an Amiga or Atari from the same era is much
more expensive. This is what I got for my £35.
- Apple Macintosh 610 Centris
- Motorola 68040LC CPU clocked at 20Mhz
- 4Mb RAM (Basically the onboard RAM)
- 512kB of Video RAM (Onboard VRAM)
- SCSI HDD with onboard controller
- FDD 1.44Mb (or as I call it, God foresaken Apple FDD)
- System 7.1 OS
- No CDROM (it was only an option back in the day)
- Ethernet adapter.
Original Price $1,860 for reference a Atari Mega STe was $1,799
The Mac was relatively easy to upgrade. Adding an additional
512kB of VRAM and 64Mb of System RAM was as easy as
ordering it off the web and slotting it in. It just worked. One thing of
note, is the Mac is very modular. It opens up and slots appart and
back together very easily. It is remarkably well built. Undoing two
screws is all that is required and things like the HDD, FDD, Power
Supply slot securely in and out. It’s a very elegant design.
What I added:
•
Adding a video adapter dongle is an essential, unless you have a compatible Mac
monitor kicking around.
•
I upgraded the Motorola 68LC040 processor to a 68040 Motorola. Which includes an
FPU. Again, I just looked around the internet, found a CPU and when it arrived just
slotted it in. No drama at all.
•
I added a SCSI2SD adapter to swap out the old and noisy Quantum HDD that came
with it. The Mac was quite finicky about this, eventually I learnt it was necessary to kid
the Mac by changing the Vendor ID and the model in the SCSI2SD firmware. It then
sprung into life.
•
Vendor ID = “ SEAGATE”
•
Product ID = “ ST225N”
o
…and yes, the ‘spaces’ above are required.
o
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/27215-fitting-a-scsi2sd-in-a-
68k-mac/
Thanks to Big Mess of Wires, I
can stop wrestling Satan.
http://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/
•
Floppy Disk. As usual floppy disks on this old system
was tantamount to naked mud wrestling with Satan.
To add insult to injury and after a week of infuriating
internet research, it transpired the FDD in my 610
wasn’t the original. It was a good deal older than the
system and due to this only supported obscure and
ancient Apple Mac Floppy Disk formats. I initially
replaced it with a correct FDD but then Windows 10
started playing silly buggers with floppy disks so I
purchased a SD-to-floppy emulator for the Mac and
didn’t look back.
•
CDROM
For reasons I won’t go into, I had an Apple CD300 external CDROM kicking
about. Try as I might, it wouldn’t work on a System 7.1 machine and due to,
at that time, the Apples FDD not playing ball, I once again wresteled to
upgraded the OS from 7.1 to 7.3. When I finally did, the CDROM sprung into
life.
•
To get files onto the Mac I used a
tool called MacImage which allows
you to create ISO images by
adding files and then burning the
ISO image to CDROM using
Alcohol 120% on PC
