Man, it caught me off guard, that hard drive was manufactured/replaced in the day I was born.

It talked to the RP2040 and came to the realization that a tiny micro controller from today was (probably) more powerful than the entirety of itself and passed out from age and shame. Like an old man getting to see a glimpse in to the far future on his death bed.

@RandomDudeFromYT

7 ай бұрын

"My time has come. You must continue your journey… without me." - The old PowerBook probably

@mlmmt

7 ай бұрын

welp, to put it in perspective, the mac has more ram, but the RP2040 has a dual-core 133mhz ARM proc, compared to the 33Mhz 68030 in the mac...

I find it funny that the BlueSCSI and its Raspberry Pi Pico is not only an order of magnitude faster than the hosr machine, but it could even emulate the host machine significantly faster than 1x speed!

@kreuner11

7 ай бұрын

Really? A Pico? The Pico is a micro controller

@SullySadface

7 ай бұрын

​@@kreuner11You're a microcontroller

@kreuner11

7 ай бұрын

​@@SullySadfacea microcontroller is a type of low power SOC

@sneekeruk

7 ай бұрын

I guess if its a 68000 based mac, you could use the amiga pistorm to replace the cpu to and emulated one many times faster using emu68?

@soli-ethd

7 ай бұрын

CPU-wise that's true, but you have a lot less RAM and other features that you'd want for emulating. A Raspberry Pi Zero, on the other hand, could run circles around this laptop and emulate several of them at once.

Open Transport... my dear lord that's a blast from the past. Instantly took me back to my Performa 630CD days!

30 years later, we now have Wi-Fi.

I'm restoring a Powerbook 160 myself right now, and I'm a bit of a crossroads as to what to do with the battery. Thanks to your video, now I know there's a modern solution!

Blue SCSI seems to be THE upgrade to get for retro hardware.

@absalomdraconis

7 ай бұрын

If you have a SCSI port. Otherwise (or even in addition) a GoTEK will usually be at the top of the list.

Great video, Sean! I love how clever new tech makes old hardware -- even much, *much* older hardware -- usable today. Hey, I hear Adrian Black has some free time on his hands these days; maybe he can help resurrect that first machine.

Have you looked at the RAscsi graphics card emulation. I read that this was in beta some time ago. I have been wondering if you can actually add colour to an SE30 with RaSCSI emulating a graphics card from back in the day? Love the videos!

I would love some sort of "Fan of JANK" T-shirt. I just picked up both a 17" iLamp and a TiBook G4 1 GHz and I'm looking forward to loading Sorbet Leopard or Adelie on both!

totally just ordered a power book blue scsi with wifi cant wait to get my old power book online lol might consider that battery also

Now i see what you and Steve were doing at Starbucks in York! :) Hilarious, but really cool. I should do this with my 540c PPC!

@mattcintosh2

2 ай бұрын

No need to hack, the powerbook 500 had an optional pc card module, and an orinoco wifi card will run on system 7.6

@MichaelAStanhope

2 ай бұрын

@@mattcintosh2and when was the last time YOU saw the ever elusive PCMCIA adapter for the PowerBook 500's?

Finally, portability.

Wow, trying same with my PowerBook 180. Got a new battery and ordered theOldNet serial Wi-Fi modem. Now I might have to try the BlueSCSI

Plenty of speed compared to modems. I remember spending hours compressing images to try and make them move at a reasonable speed on 28.8 or slower. I have an old MacBook of similar age that is also dead that is in my queue to fix, good to see there are modern battery and hard drive replacements too.

The RPi Pico is absurdly powerful for something that only costs a couple bucks.

@kolotxoz

3 ай бұрын

Now we just need it with 640k of ram

oh sick realy happy to see this!

I've had great results here using the IOGEAR GWU637 for WiFi w/WPA2. If you have a USB port you can plug into that for power and the adapter just plugs into ethernet. Works great on my G3 iBook clamshell! Sadly I still can't find a battery for the iBook.

"I'm a fan of jank" and that's what I love about Action retro 😍

ur soldering skillz are improving. gj

Great Video Sean Love The Mustache nice touch

I see the production quality went into the stratosphere for this one!

@halfsourlizard9319

7 ай бұрын

I mean ... he grew a 100% legit totally-real moustache for us!

What an amazing coincidence! We have TWO local, independent, non-chain coffee shops with the same name where I live!

Action Retro: "Let's get this 1993 Powerbook online!" Tim Cook: *No, this is not how you're supposed to play the game!* Ad scripters: *RRREEEEEE!!!* My Windows 98se pc: "... first time?"

makes me wonder if the power rail wasn't done in a way that expected the power draw of a spining disc that the lack of it killed something.

@onlyontuesdays99

7 ай бұрын

Oh wow I hadn't even though of that

Very cool, sir!

I misread thos whole title. I thought you were hacking a public WIFI network with a 1993 PowerBook. Either way I love the videos you make!

alright that Tale of Two Cities gag had me rolling.

If only someone invented a time machine and left this mac and SCSI wifi-adapter and a router back 1993, imagine the fun someone would have with this laptop!

@zeruty

7 ай бұрын

If going to all that trouble, might as well bring an m2 MacBook back to then

I would love a video about BlueSCSI use in old PC´s. There is a lot of KZread videos about SCsi Mac and Amiga, but little for PC :-(

@brandonupchurch7628

7 ай бұрын

In general SCSI has never been used heavily in PCs, only on high end workstations or Servers, pretty much the standard drive format on PCs during the 80s was MFM or RLL in the 90s 16-bit IDE caught on heavily, in between that you had a few machine that used ESDI or 8-bit IDE but SCSI was never really common in the PC world and you'll generally only find it on super high end stuff that's not very common these days, for the most part no one is going out of their way to try to cram an old scsi controller into a PC when they already have IDE available and there are plentiful solutions that already work. Blue SCSI and the like were really only created out of necessity of, as a way of replacing ailing hard drives in machines that have no easy way to add mass storage other than SCSI like older Macintoshes.

@harrynorway

7 ай бұрын

Yes, It is a niche marked. Most use cases are for DOS PC´s without CD-rom built in. Parallell CD roms are slow, and Scsi CD-rom are rare and expensive. @@brandonupchurch7628

Very cool, would it work on a PowerBook 100 as well? Just need to replace the 6V SLA battery with a 2S LiFePo battery too…

Grate video thank you

Love that shirt, where can I get it?

@stevencarlson5422

7 ай бұрын

this

It's not a bug it's a feature👍 Still think it's kinda funny I love this channels retro shenanigans even though I'm not a Apple user. Though I'll admit if back in the day had we or some we knew had a beige desktop style G3 with a pc compatible card installed maybe just maybe I'd be a pc and mac guy.

@halfsourlizard9319

7 ай бұрын

I mean ... seen from the right perspective any bug IS a feature.

@JohnSmith-xq1pz

7 ай бұрын

@@halfsourlizard9319 True... I think

Your websites look super retro-futuristic on flip phones like the Cat S22 flip, especially 68k news!

Is there a similar thing available for the early ibook G3? their airport cards no longer work and I want to take my clamshell on the road again :(

Usenet and Irc still works with old computers

Love the moustache!

My first laptop! Had one of these in 9th grade and we used a (Kensington?) playing card sized box via the HDI30 connector for ethernet... Which every desk had a plug. We could chat with FirstClass client, and access the 4 cd-roms in the library. Lol. I eventually got a 180c and it was WAY better.

Did you do the voice over of some cutscenes on command and concquer renegade ? LOL very similar voice.

Those are some serious drag-soldering skills you have there, sir.

I have a powerbook 180 but it doesn't turn on. It was the one I took the school with me in the 90s. One day it slide to the front of the school bus and hasnt worked since. At first it was a dead hard drive, but over the years now it just don't turn on at all. That might be because of dead capacitors from age though. It sits on a shelf as a glorified brick now.

The moustache is a nice touch.

I've a Mac SE/30 and an iMac G3 graphite (also an iMac Snow, but it appears to be very dead). I'm kind of interested in getting a vintage mac notebook. Any advice on which would be best, or which I should avoid? I'm wanting something that's 68K, preferably active color display, thought b/w is fine if it doesn't have ghosting, as I'll want to play games on it, and will run Mac OS 7-7.6. Basically a more portable, color, SE/30. Does such a beast exist?

@cliff8928

7 ай бұрын

Sounds like you might want a 190. It was the most modern 68k PowerBook.

That is totally usable text internet.

@aibrainlet8041

7 ай бұрын

His search engine is amazing on modern terminal emulators too, it makes text websites completely readable in a terminal

Reminds me a lot of browsing with my old Kindle :D

Incredible! :O

You have become too powerful, I believe that you are actually a time traveler with some of the things you get

@ActionRetro

7 ай бұрын

hahaha

That screwdriver is almost as cool as you!

great episode!!

I literally just got a Powerbook 150 so this video is very timely!

@cliff8928

7 ай бұрын

Pretty sure there’s no internal SCSI on that model.

@andrewschultz77

7 ай бұрын

Yes, it was the first to use IDE in place of SCSI.

@helfire23

7 ай бұрын

There is external scsi which you could use a hd30 to db25 easily enough

@wd-bs4xz

7 ай бұрын

@@helfire23 @cliff8928 @andrewschultz77 I misspoke, I have a 145 which does have internal SCSI as far as I know.

Great video (apart from the news)!

That t-shirt gave me some intense linux ptsd

Your ability to destroy tech is only rivaled by that of /dawid destroys tech/. A+ for effort!

I made the same yesterday with a MacSE!

That hipster skit was great.

They are nice but the real downer is the you need to keep taking the sd card out. What was once the called the RaSCSI can be managed entirely by a web interface, no need to the the card out and you can swap the images around anytime you want while the machine is on.

I too always drink too much coffee before soldering. 😂

So do I understand it right that you can’t switch networks the fly? You’d have to take the adapter out and tell it a new network to work with then reinstall it?

@ActionRetro

7 ай бұрын

yes that's currently a limitation, though I think someone smart could make an interface to switch networks fairly easily

@hardline2a

7 ай бұрын

@@ActionRetro its pretty impressive even as it is now. I’ll never be smart enough to invent cool things like this but I like watching your videos about such things

Love the shirt. Bought one for Halloween

I am getting an old PowerBook that I gave away before learning to do some refreshing on my own. I wonder if you are open to helping by zoom if I run into difficulties with it? Of course this would be compensated work. Please let me know. Thank you.

ill give it a try..

jcs has retired the powerbook batteries now..the bluescsi with wifi emulation is great though for the 540c

I am only disappointed by your lack of header connectors. Outside of that, excellent work!

where can we get your tshirts ?

I’ve got a PowerBook 170 that’s not booting. Once I get that fixed I’m doing this!

Which screwdriver is that?

Is this doable on say....a PowerBook 140 by chance?

Oh, now I want one for my PowerBook 1400! Is there a “Blue-IDE” for non-SCSI powerbooks? 🤔

@JeremyLevi

7 ай бұрын

Unfortunately no, there's no such thing as a Blue-IDE. For the PowerBook 1400 though, you do have the old faithful PCMCIA card slots so you can slap in a compatible WiFi card that way at least.

Raspberry makes the world go round. I found out that my new fightstick for playing fighting games uses Raspberry pico for it's extremely low latency and ease of use to translate it to other consoles without said latency. (PS4 being the exception thanks sony) Like even it's PS4 implementation is faster than my old Qanba Q1 stick. Just amazing. Those frames matter in fighting games.

are you me?? i've been playing around with getting internet into places it doesn't belong for a while lol. i have an old 90's thinkpad and so far i have been playing with streaming data over serial (RS-232). i also have an old palm pilot that actually has an off the shelf 56k modem PCMCIA card! PCMCIA is like the dark arts of doing things you probably shouldn't with tech that's old. you can get a LOT of really weird PCMCIA cards that do all kinds of bizarre things

That shirt is awesome

Where did you get your electric screw driver from?

@Xenotypal

7 ай бұрын

wondering the same thing.

I am surprised it even had a modem.

I have a tiny little horn that I enjoy tooting: my personal DaynaPORT was used for the initial reverse-engineering for the RaSCSI project, which ultimately led to this implementation. My contribution was mailing it off, and doing absolutely nothing else. BUT STILL. I WAS INVOLVED. SORT OF.

@judgegroovyman

6 ай бұрын

You played a critical part! Nice work!

@PotatoFi

6 ай бұрын

@@judgegroovyman YES! RECOGNITION!

What if was the double side tape that wasn't enough and made a short to the color laptop

If I would find an ISA Adaptec 29xx scsi adapter and this bluescsi, could this give my 386 wifi? 🤔

@JeremyLevi

7 ай бұрын

I think the main barrier would be you'd need a driver to support the DaynaPORT SCSI Etherent device the BlueSCSI is pretending to be. No clue if there's a DOS/Win3.1 driver that supports it although I've heard there's an old Linux driver for it.

i’d be really interested in better screens for this era PowerBook if any one has any knowledge of such, my 190c screen got cracked in a move.

9:38 It was worth it to make this video just for this shot. This is my mew desktop wallpaper now.

+vegeta whats his power level? - Its Powerbook with Wifi!

now we only need some internal solutions for newer powerbooks (like the pismo).. i'd give a lot of money for an airport-slot-compatible wifi2lan adapter.. my chinesium thumb modem is okay but takes up an usb port and dangles like a loose colostomy xd

I've got a boxful of 100 and 500 series Powerbooks, with all the main batteries removed. I haven't touched them in years - I wonder if any of them still work!

@coltonbooth7387

5 ай бұрын

I’ll buy one or two of them off you!

Was anyone else impressed that there’s still some OG PoweBooks out there with IO doors that are still intact? My 140 hasn’t had one since the 90s. Kinda cringed a little when it was being put into the bag with the door open.

Its pretty funny that the rpi pico is probably multiple hundreds of times faster than the entire powerbook and is only used for wifi.

I hacked a Wifi into a 486 desktop, which was a cheat, utilizing an RJ-45 hooked up to a wireless Gateway access point, which could talk to my main router, but ever since the router fried, that lonely 486 has no one to talk to.

It looks like you might need to replace the capacitors on your PowerBook 165c.

loved

hey you should revisit the turbo mac :D

I have a v2 in a PB180 and no matter what I tried I could not get a 2GB image to work. Had to resort to 1GB.

I wish I could do this on my PowerBook 5300cs

As much as Ioved using the using my Old PB-520c in the day, I think this is stretching it a bot. This BlueSCSI, on say a 2005-2015 to Powerbook I would like to see!

Did you put on that fake mustache upside down? LOL? 9:49

Hey Action Retro, did you know that "jank" is called "gambiarra" in Brazil, and that we tend to use it a lot? 😅 Greetings from Brazil, love your channel!

I would love to have a laptop like that just for fun.

trackball mouse in late 90s in megacity

You should have a tshirt made saying Fan of Jank

9:40 ah, the classic upside down Apple logo.

The whole Starbucks bit for some reason reminded me of a old Top Gear gag. Well done

You said it was a greyscale display?

The slow loading is probably related more to the CPU and RAM than the network connection.

@alextirrellRI

7 ай бұрын

No, it's a known issue that the BlueSCSI v2 does not get full throughput on Wifi.