I zoned out for a brief moment and I see he installed BeOS in the meanwhile. That shouldn't surprise me.

@smiththers2

Ай бұрын

i knew as soon as he made a 2nd partition that OS shenanigans were going to happen lol

Can confirm, we had the Motorola machines in the office at Be and even then, they were, um, not our favourites.

I was expecting "And here is Minecraft running on the worst Macintosh clone."

@burts06

Ай бұрын

Ik same

@Jabjabs

Ай бұрын

Time to bust out Classicube on BeOS!

@kenon6968

28 күн бұрын

well shouldn't it be DOOM?

@RWBHere

2 күн бұрын

@@kenon6968 lol

If 65scribe's account of things is accurate, Apple was hoping the clones would slake the high volume, low end portion of the market. So Motorola was indeed doing what the board at Apple wanted.

@redstone0234

Ай бұрын

Some of UMAX Clones where targeting the sub 1000$ Market This lead themselves to Continue having the Mac Clone licence

@PhillyMJS

Ай бұрын

This is correct, Apple wanted the cloners to go after the low end and leave them the high end. I assume Motorola complied with that since Apple was a large customer of theirs.

@johncate9541

Ай бұрын

@@PhillyMJS And Motorola did just that, but still got the shaft from Steve Jobs after he took over. It was Power Computing who infuriated Apple, by making better "Macs" at a lower price than Apple was.

@KarlBaron

Ай бұрын

Apple assumed that the clones would go after the low-end since that's what happened in the PC world. Hence Spindler negotiated the MacOS licenses to be a fixed, low price. Gil Amelio came in, saw that the clones went after the high end, and decided to release MacOS 8 in order to renegotiate the clone deals to be a percentage of the sale cost so that even high-end clones would actually make Apple money while still keeping the Clone market. UMAX was the only company that agreed to the new deal, hence there is a UMAX-branded version of MacOS 8 out there. When Steve Jobs came back he kept up Amelio's negotiations (originally Jobs was just going to be interim CEO before they found a replacement, he didn't really initially want to take over Apple he thought they were beyond saving) but none of the clone manufacturers agreed, and hence the clones died. In the various retellings of this timeline it gets shortened to "Steve Jobs came back and released MacOS 8 to kill the clones" but it actually started with Gil Amelio just wanting a bigger cut.

@3rdalbum

Ай бұрын

​@@KarlBaronAmelio believes that Steve Jobs wanted to be the CEO, and eventually convinced the board to make him CEO. Makes sense, since Jobs had been ousted before and obviously wasn't averse to coming back.

That Mac does not support *SDRAM* ... Only *3.3V EDO DIMM* (unbuffered, non-parity) modules. Please be aware that this mainboard is very picky about the DRAM speed. 60ns or faster while 50ns do not always work ... so 60ns it is.

@chillinfartdotcc

Ай бұрын

it explains the shape

The issue with CF cards is that they report themselves as removable instead of fixed drives, so some computers just won't work well with them. For certain brands you can download a MS-DOS tool that will flip that bit and make them look as fixed. You can check the state of this bit with the HWINFO utility, also for MSDOS. Some "industrial" CF cards are also reported as fixed drives.

@ActionRetro

Ай бұрын

Thanks for this!!

@RossComputerGuy

Ай бұрын

Btw, not every CF card reports as removable. Check with the manufacturer or the drive properties in Windows before using it.

@KarlBaron

Ай бұрын

That _shouldn't_ be a problem with Macs, even on old Macs with PCMCIA slots they supported naively installing MacOS to a standard removable CF card in the PCMCIA slot and booting off of it. But with a weird clone like this, who knows!

@InfernosReaper

Ай бұрын

Yeah, I'd have just used a IDE to SD or even IDE to SATA m.2(which I have in my ibook)

@eDoc2020

Ай бұрын

I think that's only a Windows issue. I don't know why it didn't work here. But I do know why it only shows up as 8 gigs: it's a limit when using common CHS values, IIRC real Macs also don't like booting from larger drives.

I worked at Motorola when they launched these. They seemed very proud of them. I remember one day they had them all set up in a room at the Motorola Campus and employees were allowed to buy them at a discount. I didn't buy one.

@Great-Documentaries

Ай бұрын

Motorola barely noticed them. That company had much bigger projects and products than a shitty PowerMac clone. A union would not have allowed Motorola to abuse their employees in this way (encouraging them to buy a Mac in a Windows-dominated world).

I worked in the IT dept of a newspaper in the 90's and we experimented with all the clones. The Power Computing ones were the only ones we bought more of. Most of them, we had more issues than the regular Apple computers. I didn't have a copy of BeOS, but I did get Yellow Dog Linux onto them without any difficulty. Cheers!

He mentions a bad startup sound but it's never shown in the whole video! I have to hear this

@charliesretrocomputing

Ай бұрын

SAME

@themaritimegirl

Ай бұрын

It's the same chime as used in the Power Macintosh 4400, which in turn is almost identical to the chime used in the Power Macintosh G3 series.

@3rdalbum

Ай бұрын

If I remember correctly, it's just slightly shorter than actual Macs. It stops before the chime has completely faded out. Perhaps to save a small amount of space in the ROM and get away with using a smaller capacity chip, maybe. I dunno.

@pum6454

Ай бұрын

it probably goes "hello moto"

@egbront1506

Ай бұрын

Yeah, it's annoying that Mactracker doesn't have the clones, athough Apple was involved in every one of those to some extent. There were fewer iterations of the chime than you might think.

I kinda forgot Motorola made clones. My family had a power computing power center 150. Ran beOS off a Zip drive, it was kinda incredible

Ahhh Motorola, maker of my formative CPU (6809) then my favourite (68000). Happy days...

@jessepatterson8897

Ай бұрын

68k is the goat, responsible for more 8bit machines and consoles than anything but maybe the 8080?

@fnjesusfreak

Ай бұрын

@@jessepatterson8897 ...the 68000 was 32-bit from the beginning...

@lexacutable

Ай бұрын

​@@jessepatterson8897 are you thinking of the 6502?

@Lixxide

Ай бұрын

6809

@MechanicaMenace

Ай бұрын

​@@fnjesusfreakit had 32bit instructions and registers but all the ALUs and internal databuses were 16bit. 32bit from the beginning is a bit strong. Definitely preparing for the 32bit successors though.

The only remnant of OG Motorola these days is Motorola Solutions. in 2011 they split into two companies (Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions) but the mobility company was sold to Google then Lenovo. Motorola Solutions makes communication equipment for fire, ambulance and police services, as well as for many Western and NATO military.

There’s a Motorola engineer shedding a tear right now you meanie 😂

@0x0fffff

Ай бұрын

The sad part is this was not engineered by Motorola, it was made by Apple themselves...

We know what can Be But we really want to know Will he run Haiku?

Who would have guessed that Apple would have designed a criminally compromised motherboard in the late '90s?

@MaxOakland

Ай бұрын

I'm surprised! That seems more like a mid-90s Apple thing

@Ragnar8504

20 күн бұрын

@@MaxOakland Well, 1996 is more like mid-90s I'd say. The late 90s were well into G3 and even G4 territory, I think my school bought a first-gen G4 (PCI) for the arts lab in 1999. Only one year after the flawed 4400 Apple introduced the beige G3, which was an absolute workhorse.

The one thing Motorola got right.... a standard form factor Macintosh 3.5" drive with integrated face plate you can drop in any PC case. As far as I know, the StarMax was the only machine with those. The whole PS/2 port thing on the Tanzania platform boards was an attempt at Motorola and Apple to conform to the stillborn Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) for PowerPC. That was "round two" of the AIM alliance to create a standard PowerPC ISA, the first being the PReP standard that IBM released and Windows NT PPC utilized. In the end, the most popular desktop PowerPC platform landed up being Apple's PowerMacs, but they never saw alternative OSes outside of BeOS and Linux. Memory on these is VERY WEIRD, as they use an "in between" standard. They used 3.3v EDO or FPM DIMMs, not the more common 5v versions used on the PowerSurge/TNT machines. 3.3v DIMMs are almost always PC66/100 SDRAM.

Motorola, the same company that made the 68k processors the Macintosh series of computers used initially, made a Mac clone. This somehow seems very fitting

@amberisvibin

Ай бұрын

they co developed the powerpc chip too

Can't argue with anything you said, but I happily used that machine for 4 years for writing school papers, email, 90s-era web browsing, and some games. For basic computing needs, it was fine. Plus it was a lot cheaper than the Apple equivalents, which were out of reach for my student budget.

Since Apple designed and created the logic board, it should not be "Motorola Sucks" but instead "Apple Sucks".

@Jossandoval

Ай бұрын

This is silly. Apple sucks, yes, but not for this, since the one to commission and put the thing in production was Motorola, and thus Motorola was in charge of giving the parameters of the design, the production itself and the quality control. This is like saying that the one responsible for the bad quality of a line of cotton-sugar fabric umbrellas failing is the one that spun the sugar, not the genius who ordered the fabric to build their umbrellas.

@georgeh6856

Ай бұрын

@@Jossandoval If that "logic" follows, then it is not Motorola to blame for buying shitty Apple boards, but the customers who bought the Motorolas with shitty Apple logic boards. I mean, the customers were the last in the chain to buy the computers with Apple's shitty logic boards. Apple fandom twisting itself in knots again. That "logic" is just as flawed as Apple's shitty logic boards.

@Bruhmoment69

Ай бұрын

​@@Jossandovalthe sugar spinner could refuse to sell to them, and not put their name on a bad product

@vojtechtomes6231

Ай бұрын

Did you even watch the video dude?

@Jossandoval

Ай бұрын

@@Bruhmoment69 And this is why you argue than Motorola doesn't sucks? Your argument is still bad. The mistake of one is sell themselves out to make a bad part, the mistake of the other was ordering said bad part to use in the design of a bad product and then purposely sell it. Motorola was the villain this time, deal with it.

hello moto moment indeed

quit hating on the Tanzania. It was a perfectly adequate computer just in the same way a Yugo was a perfectly adequate car. Sure, its missing some "features" but at least it still computes!

@chadlawson9346

Ай бұрын

Sir what was the apple model shown that used the same logic board. Just curious about it. I run rabbit holes on EveryMac looking up various models to see how he’s how much ram can this one take or what bus speed was this one.

@MichaelAStanhope

Ай бұрын

@@chadlawson9346 Thats the Powermac 4400, that is the Apple equivelent to this machine.

oh, and you wouldn't want an internal SCSI hard drive on this thing, the SCSI on here was SLOW AS HELL!!

Motorola was a huge part of PowerPC though...

It looks like this inherited the RAM weirdness of the PowerMac 4400 as well. With those, the earlier 160MHz logic boards had a limit of 96MiB since they didn't support 64MiB and larger modules, while the 1997/200MHz updated boards could do 160MiB with 64MiB modules installed in slots 2 and 3. Perhaps the Tanzania logic board was designed for some soldered RAM, but it wasn't populated on the StarMax 3000 and PM 4400 versions. That would explain the weirdness of the first slot only accepting single banked modules and limited capacity. Back in the PPC era, I encountered the odd 4400 and the fact it needed 3.3v EDO DIMMs was a PITA, since 5v DIMMs were far more common in Macs.

I'm also an Albuquerque native like Bill, I love that mugshot. I'm sure APD has it in a hall of fame somewhere.

Just became a channel member! Been here since you started, so it's amazing to see how you've grown as a channel. Here's to many more years of Action Retro!

@ActionRetro

Ай бұрын

Thank you so much!!

@Gamerbay2017

Ай бұрын

No problem! I love your channel and videos :D@@ActionRetro

"We'll call this one Mototola Sux, and this one Motorola Sucks"

@KarlBaron

Ай бұрын

And then later it's called Motorola Suxxxxx

Really enjoyable video, I had heard they where not great, liked getting to see BeOS running on it aswell.

When I was a software tester for a company in the late 90s, we had several of these in the lab for doing tests on PPC Macs.

My first PowerPC was a clone, the Power Computing Power 100 desktop case. It was pretty great for only $1700, cheaper than an Apple 7100 or 8100, and I upgraded it a lot. I played Marathon and software mode Quake on it.

I had a Power Mac 4400 back in the early 2Ks - this a pseudo trip down memory lane. The Tanzania/LPX-40 based units were pretty darn quirky.

"His Royal Highness Motorola" - encapsulates why Motorola left the computing market fairly quickly.

I had a starmax 4000/200 MT and I loved it! I used it as a network print and file server for a long time.

your channel is great. a good mixture of funny and interesting.

Also worth noting Be was founded by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple-boss

For someone who worked for the local distributor of Umax Mac clones, those clones were way better than Apple's own hardware. While Apple were hell bent on using SCSI the Umax could use any IDE drives. Only downside is you had to have the included MacOS CD for it toi boot as it needed an extension to see the drive, so you have to copy that extension over to the newly installed OS, some people forgot so most of our returns were for that, easy fix 😂

Anytime you say, "terrible" I get all excited. There was no question what to click next on KZread!

when i was a student there was a class that was basically a company that had to pay for it's own gear etc, it was cheesy called "cut paste and copy" but they did like Desktop publishing and layout (for esteemed clients such as the local diners placemats!) and i was in the class for about 2 years. I was also the IT guy (guess what i do now) and we had a starmax, this brought me back with several waves of nostalgia and mediocrity. (our server was a quadra 900 which you've covered as well. loved that key.)

I worked in the design department for a local printing company which had 2 of the SuperMac PowerPcs in the late 90s. They worked great.

love your channel, great videos. is there a video for ide to cf card? I want to put that in my old g4 400. I think the ide drives will die soon.

I have one of those SuperMac towers with dual processors that I installed BeOS on. Worked really well! I even have the matching SuperMac monitor with its special video cable.

I heard the Mac clone licenses were only for System 7 so Apple incremented the Mac OS to System 8 and refused to issue any clone licenses, hence killing the clone program.

@3rdalbum

Ай бұрын

They did issue a license for Mac OS 8 - to Power Computing, I think?

@WilliamHaisch

Ай бұрын

@@3rdalbum If so, it could be one reason why Power Computing was acquired by Apple in late 1997.

@redstone0234

Ай бұрын

@@3rdalbum UMAX got a licence for making clones with Mac OS 8 because they have some products targeting the sub 1000$ market and Mac OS 8 was given for free to all Registed Power Computing Customers when they got aquired by apple

All I know about Mac systems of the 90s is that you are legally required to run teapots.

That 3D "Flight" game vaguely reminded me of "ChaosVR" which was a MacOS 3DGM game, no real purpose to the demos that were released, but I remember spending hours just flying around shooting enemies with no real purpose. Too bad that never really turned into anything but a tech demo.

now THIS is the action retro I love.

I used to have a PowerComputing PowerCenter 132 as a young teen that was given to me from a family friend who worked for NOAA. I think they ditched it pretty fast when Jobs killed the clones but at that age and for free it was a heck of a lot of computer to me. Ironically one of my strongest memories was if I powered it up and hit the interrupt button right away It had it did not do the sad mac face and chimes but instead a sad mac and car crash soundbite. For some reason teenage me loved that I guess lol.

I once bought a SuperMac C500 for a friend to do some graphics work and it was a pretty nice little machine and a decent value at the time, nearing the end of the clone era.

I love how you just nonchalantly announce how you made computer hardware from the late 90s run Mac OS 10.

@tookitogo

Ай бұрын

Lots of late 90s Macs can run Mac OS X.

@johncate9541

Ай бұрын

@@tookitogo Any of them with a PCI architecture can, even if is isn't supported.

I had a StarMax 3000 and it served me well. I even upgraded it with a Sonnet G3 upgrade card. That setup worked fine for Photoshop work until I finally bought a G4 Digital Audio in 2001. To be honest, that jump in power was quite amazing, though.

A motherboard only a mother could -board- love...

“Unthinkable today” but we forget how many people were demanding Apple do cloning because Microsoft succeeded. If KZread was around in the 1990s, there’d be dozens of videos explaining why Apple should do Macintosh clones and why avoiding clones was a dumb move that no other company would do.

@OldAussieAds

Ай бұрын

I think the issue is that Apple's history doesn't really follow the same path as any other home / office computer company. So prior the second Steve Jobs era, people just had history to go off which was that the MS model of business was the only one that was viable long term and if you didn't follow this, you would disappear. Following this logic, Apple was about to die and allowing clones was the best thing they could do to save themselves. Of course now we see how things panned out, we know it's possible (though still hard) to not follow the pack and still succeed. But in the late 90s? Only the most optimistic were assuming Apple would survive.

I remember everyone being very excited about the Motorola Mac OS motherboards, though I can't remember exactly why. We owned a couple Power Computing machines. I've got a Umax C500 in my collection. Fun little machine.

For a while the company i was working for had the mobile repair contract for these things. I fixed a grand total of 2 of them.

My favorite Mac Clone had to be PowerComputing. I grew up with PowerComputing machines during that era, so there's a ton of nostalgia!

Is there a version of BeOS or Haiku for PowerPC? I might do a live install at VCF East... ;)

@notajp

Ай бұрын

BeOS was designed to run on PowerPC hardware. Don’t know if they ever ported it to Intel, but I’m not aware of it if they did. In fact, Be’s own computer the BeBox was a dual PPC machine. I owned one once. As far as Haiku, pretty sure it’s Intel only.

@charliesretrocomputing

Ай бұрын

@@notajp cool, does that mean I could install it on my Power Mac G4 MDD?

it was my first Mac in 97, and I loved it! You had to remember Macs were very expensive back then, so that was my "cheap" entry into the Mac world. Mine worked great it was equivalent to a Power Mac 4400, I used it for music production and never had any problems with it! i used to run Digital Performer, Photoshop, Rebirth with no problem!

I have the Motorola StarMax 4000 MT, and of course, I also installed BeOS on it. 😉 In spite of the turdiness mentioned in the video, I still love mine. I consider it to be better than the Performa 6220CD I used to have in my 20s, though, since that PowerPC Mac couldn't even load other OSes. I even had Debian Linux running on the StarMax 4000 for a long time in the mid-2000s and loved it.

my first computer was an apple that ran DOS and mac os, not at the same time, it was a 386 and a clone in one case, and you had to choose what side you wanted to power up and use at a time.

It's usually a good idea to find out what type and size of RAM modules any computer will accept BEFORE throwing a few random ones in and complaing they don't work. You could also check what sized HDD the OS supports out of the box, and maybe even pre-partition beforehand if necessary. Things tend to go much better that way. Sorry, I forgot... this is Action Retro we're talking about. 😂

@normbrown3435

Ай бұрын

😆

Unrelated question, where'd you get the shirt from?

I worked for Motorola in the early/mid 90s. The radio division in the IT department and bought some of these. They were perfectly fine for most users who were doing nothing more than writing documents or spreadsheets. Anything more would have been expensive overkill. Plus, PCs were taking over (oddly needing more support than the macs ever did).

As someone who was stuck with a 6200 series Performa when this system was on the market, I would have been very happy with one, I think. It sucked realizing that the technically older Power Mac 6100/60s at my school were faster than my 75 MHz Performa. I used to drool over the StarMax in the catalogues, especially the 5000 model. I kind of liked the case design too.

No one: Absolutely no one: Retro computer enthusiasts: so I replaced the HDD with a compact flash drive

I am weirdly disappointed that you didn't give the PC a "thonk" when you were gesturing towards it.

Love it. These came out when I was 12. My stepfather was a Mac fanatic but even he admitted late 90s macs were garbage.

I would love one of these! I had one long ago and it was thrown away after I moved out from my parent's house

I have the StarMax 5000/300. Yeah, ram is very specific, Fetch earlier than v3 doesn’t work, and you need the Ethernet driver and CD driver from the install disk for Mac OS 8 and 9 (a 10MBit card), but it otherwise operates wonderfully.

finding the best software for each machine is the key...I always do this for every machine!

That starmax reminds me of the Sun Microsystem Sparcstation 10 pizza box Unix machine I used to have with Solaris 9. Has that kind of vibe. But I think the Sun was slower.. much much slower

Isn't that thing 68k based? Do you by chance actually have any versions of AmigaOS? You could look into it and see how these perform on this Mac clone.

I had a Starmax clone and I absolutely loved it. It saved me from having to go back to Windows after discovering Mac in college. It was affordable and lasted me well into the early 2000s when I upgraded to iMac.

I think when this came out, the seller in the store responded: "Yep, it's the only "Mac" we have in store today. But we have some typing machines if you aren't interested..." :)

It took me a long time but I found out a way to get a SSD recognized on my StarMax. I use a StarTech SATA to IDE adapter and Lexar SSD. The only way I could get Disk Setup to recognize the drive was by booting with a OS 8 Disk Tools floppy. I easily spent a week trying different configurations, adapter, etc. I just started doing anything I could think of when I stumbled across that solution. I formatted the SSD into several partitions and successfully installed 7.6, 8.5, and 9.1. The only issue with the SSD is the cdrom drive is no longer recognized when I use it. If I swap the original HHD back then the cdrom drive works. I tried every extension I could think of. I changed jumper settings. You name it. I haven’t been able to figure out a way to get the cdrom drive to work.

I had a dual cpu UMAX & it was fantastic....

6:53 - I LOL'ed at this... "16gb on an adapter, on another adapter... as is tradition" LOL - oh the joys of retro computing mixed with newer technology.

Aw, the Motorola Starmax was the first Macintosh computer I was able to afford to buy on my own!

i love the fact that the only reason why 3rd party failed was because the clones were objectively better then apple, proving that even back then apple had no idea what they were doing

@harisalic2568

Ай бұрын

Tbh if apple today would license macos to 3rd parties, their whole macbook and mac Market would die instantly

@jessepatterson8897

Ай бұрын

@@harisalic2568lmao, the laptop space is honestly their strong hold, no. My M1 Max has about 3080 performance. I know because I play my windows steam library on it via proton. I’ll never understand irrational hate of Apple, when there’s so much to actually rationally hate!

@will_it_work

Ай бұрын

The pre-return of Steve Jobs Apple did not, indeed, know what they were doing. Licensing was one of their bonehead decisions that Jobs had to fix.

@TerminalHeatSink

Ай бұрын

​@@jessepatterson8897proton on macos? 3080 performance? 😂😂 Go back to sleep big boi.

@a1batross_

Ай бұрын

​@@jessepatterson8897 I wish there were Apple Silicon machines that aren't Macs and something more repairable. And probably something that comes without OS X.

the umax is just like how quark from the bar feels it.. if you catch my drift xd

Well, I guess a redeeming quality of this laptop is that if you had a much older mac and used this (by a friend's computer or you not knowing that a cheaper machine was faster), you'll still think it was an upgrade. And having a more standard PS2 is quite cool actually.

My dad has a StarTac but I did have a Motorola flip phone myself, a V710.

I bought my Umax right in front of Apple's Headquarters. With the money I saved, I decked it up and got a 17" "almost" flat Sony CRT monitor. Great machine, traveled the world around with me.

You should try to install one of the Copland builds on one of your macs just for science

Comparing that Umax to the Starmax is a bit unfair. The Umax was a high-end 604e machine, while the Starmax was a low-end 603e machine (with a major price difference between the two as well), and the limitations of that Starmax were shared by most 603e machines of the era. That doesn't mean the Starmax didn't suck in plenty of other ways, but that's like comparing a Powermac 6400 to a Powermac 9600.

I'd say this video is a grsat showcase of BeOS. Amazing how everything cjanged from being choppy to fluent. You wouldn't guess is the same computer.

I had a star max with a cache card g3 upgrade at 233 mhz it was the first g3 I ever had

I think these systems have a valued place in the retro community. They may not be good, or fast but they still run vintage Mac OS on real hardware so you get the benefits and drawbacks.

That's a Sony Ericsson flip phone.

@ActionRetro

Ай бұрын

I was waiting for someone to catch that

@painreliever83

Ай бұрын

I worked in a phone shop for 15 years. Ain't slipping that past me 😄

how I would love to have a recycling centre or similar in my country to go and pick up old computers and mess with them

Possibly since the machine could only see 8 gig of the 16 gig card maybe a smaller card would have been able to work. Something up to or under 8 gb? Or maybe pre-partition the 16 gig card down to 8 or less gigs before putting it in the machine?

The price was lower on StarMax if I remember correctly, that's why some bought this machines

When I was young and still lived with my parents so had an Atari ST still as my only system but was a graphic designer using Macs at work. The Mac clones were very tempting at the time, then Steve Jobs returned to Apple, killed the clones and brought out the iMac and G3 systems. My first Mac was a 300Mhz G3 desktop

Well, now I want to pull my old Power Macintosh 4400 off the shelf and see if I can revive it.

took longer than I thought for you to install BeOS haha

Weren't those logic boards from the PowerMac 4400? Had a UMAX S900 that was a lot of fun. Oh, man, Now Software!

@jessepatterson8897

Ай бұрын

I too comment before watching the entire video

Fun stuff.

I too was very surprised by how bad the StarMax machines were. Just awful.

I thought for sure you'd pop a PCI-based CPU upgrade! :D

I need that shirt.

Apple's own machines sucked back in the mid 90s. You either paid a fortune for a Quadra/Centris or you lived with a slow-ass 68LC040 or even a 68030, a chip that was almost 10 years old when Apple stopped using it. The early PowerPC Macs weren't a whole lot better. Yeah, they could outperform a 68040 when they ran native PPC code, but when they had to run 68k software, (which a majority of Mac software was at the time) they were actually slower.

If I remember correctly you need 3.3v EDO (not PC100 or PC133!) 168pin ram sticks - 5v EDO sticks probably won't work either