Upgrading my Power Macintosh 5400/180.

In July of 2002, I was given a Power Macintosh 5400/180 computer and an Apple LaserWriter 4/600 PS printer. (Thanks, Merle and the RICM!)

The 5400/180 and LaserWriter replaced the Performa 6200 CD and StyleWriter II printer I had been using. This was a major step up for me. A few months later, I bought a 64 MB RAM module for the "new" computer.

In March of 2003, I found a Power Macintosh 5400/200 on the curbside, awaiting the trash collection. I instantly abandoned my errands for the day and gutted the computer, coming away with the motherboard with a 16 MB RAM module and L2 cache card, floppy drive, hard drive and CD ROM drive, the rear panel and the escutcheon panel on the front..

I brought all these bits & pieces home and changed out the old 180 MHz motherboard with the "new" 200 MHz motherboard. I plugged in the keyboard and mouse and pressed the Power key on the keyboard.

It started up just fine. I then shut it down, pulled the motherboard and installed the 64 MB RAM module alongside the 16 MB module. I reinstalled the motherboard, snapped the "new" rear panel in place, replacing the damaged original panel, plugged in all the other peripherals and replaced the old front escutcheon with the "new" 5400/200 one.

August, 2003, I decided that I needed an optical mouse. I had been lusting after a mouse made by the Japanese company Elecom for some time This mouse was designed by Shirow Masamune, the artist behind the Ghost in the Shell manga. But as this mouse needs to be plugged into a USB port, this could be a problem. The 5400/200 does not have a USB port. It does, however, have a single PCI slot. And there are numerous USB port cards that plug into a PCI slot.

At the time, my Macintosh was running OS 8.6. In order to use a USB mouse, I needed to install some software. In this instance, the Apple USB Card Support version 1.4.1, Apple GameSprockets version 1.7.5 and USB Overdrive version 1.4.

The first two packages are needed for the computer to recognize the PCI card is in the slot and to use the USB ports on the card and any input devices plugged into the card. USB Overdrive is a superb shareware application that fully implements the diverse buttons and wheels that are found on some optical mice. In fact, it even implements features such as the scrollwheel in applications that don't usually support such features. Another very useful feature in USB Overdrive is that it can be customized for individual applications.

So, now that all the pieces are in hand, putting them all together was simplicity itself. I installed all the applications to the hard drive, plugged the card into the USB slot, plugged the mouse into one of the USB ports on the card and started the computer.

Nothing. The mouse didn't work. It didn't even light up. Turns out that the card I used, an older Belkin card, wasn't compatible with the Macintosh firmware. In order for a USB card to work in the Mac, it needs to OHCI compatible.

Shortly thereafter, I was able to buy a used USB card that was OHCI compatible. The mouse worked the first time with the new USB card. In the first few weeks I had this mouse, I tweaked the settings in USB Overdrive for the diverse applications I use.

The original Macintosh mouse was a technological breakthrough in 1984, but these days, one button on a mouse is too limiting, in my opinion. And of course, one of the virtues of the optical mouse is that it has no mouse ball that needs cleaning. The optical mouse beats the opto/mechanical mouse. No moving parts, no ball and rollers to clean. It's great!

In October of 2003, I bought a "new" used motherboard for the computer. It's a Power Mac 5500/225 logic board. Not so much for the somewhat faster speed, but for the 2 MB of video RAM. This gives me a display of 1024 X 786 pixels at a color depth of 16 bits. Cheaper than buying new glasses! A week later, I bought another 64 MB RAM module, bringing the total RAM to the maximum supported of 128 MB.

Also, that October, I was lucky enough to win an auction on eBay and got a Sonnet Crescendo 400 Mhz G3 upgrade card. After installing it in the Macintosh, I have a MUCH faster computer. Still not as fast as an equivalent iMac, due to internal logic board architecture, but still and all, it's quite peppy.

In May of 2004, I purchased a couple of used hard drives, one for the Macintosh and one to replace the hard drive in an external enclosure. Both drives had significantly more storage than the drives they were replacing.

I decided it was time to upgrade the operating system to OS 9.2.2.

Thanks to a friend with a connection to a really big pipe and a CD burner on the computer at the end of that pipe, I had all the updaters I needed from Apple. I also had OS 9 Helper, an application that patches the updater installers to work with older, non-supported Macs.

Once OS 9.2.2 had been installed, the drivers for the onboard hardware video accelerator kicked in. The scrolling in long text documents or web pages is now very smooth, unlike the jerky "move a window of pixels at a time" effect seen under OS 8.6.

Due to the modest, gradual and relatively inexpensive upgrades to the original computer, I now have a machine that not only surpasses the original iMac in many respects, it is also fully the equal to the second and third generation iMacs, as well as the first generation of G3 desktop Macs.

This past May of 2004, I bought a used Apple Color OneScanner 600/27 via eBay. It's smaller, lighter and faster than the original Color OneScanner I'd been using for a few years. It also has a higher scan resolution.

I was also able to find a Power Macintosh 5500/225 front panel, to replace the 5400/200 panel. I also peeled off the serial number sticker on the back of the computer. It had gotten damaged at some point in the past, and frankly, this really is no longer the same computer that the serial number was applied to at the factory back in 1996.

Yesterday, the 22nd of June, 2004, I found an Apple Extended Keyboard II at the local Goodwill, along with an ADB keyboard cable. Total cost was US$2.10.

This is one of the best keyboards Apple ever made. As it was made to Apple's specifications, despite its age, it worked perfectly when I plugged it in.

July 1st, I ordered the Griffin Technology PowerMate rotary controller. It arrived the 8th of July.

I installed the driver and save for having to reboot the Mac after changing the PowerMate setting in it's control panel, it works fine as a controller for my web browsers and MP3 players.

I'd really prefer it if USB Overdrive could act as a PowerMate driver. One less driver to install at startup means that much more RAM available for applications to use.

I also ordered the IceMate acrylic base for the PowerMate. It raises the PowerMate up off the desktop enough to make it easier to use, and the base, frosted, in my case, "amplifies" the light from the blue LED in the base of the PowerMate. It makes for a great night light!

This past November I bought a 2nd generation iPod via eBay. Once again, I needed to buy a new PCI card to provide the needed ports, this time, FireWire. After some research, it turns out that the only card that provides both USB and FireWire ports for my particular Mac is the " Tango" card from Sonnet Technologies.I ordered it from Newegg.com December 1st and it arrived December 6th.

Installation involved plugging in the new card, running a small program to patch the PRAM and installing an extension. Rebooting activated the FireWire and USB ports.

Unfortunately, the Tango card does not play well with my current logic board/applications. Application freezes and systemwide crashes are common. The card does work, though. I am able to use it with iTunes and my iPod.

I suspect that this has something to do with the needed patch program that the card needs to work with the 5500 logic board.

Curiously, the Tango card works flawlessly with almost all of my applications when it's installed in my 5400/200 logic board. Except that my MP3 players don't work. The file will play, but every few seconds, the playback will pause for a fraction of a second. Also, any player animation will also freeze for that fraction of a second.

There may be a fix, however. An extension that fixes a USB timing problem exists. Although only for the Power Computing line of Macintosh clones, it apparently works on some Apple logic boards when used with the Tango card. I have downloaded the extension and will reinstall the Tango card on my 5500 logic board first, to see if that will solve the systemic problems I've been having. If not, I'll try it on the 5400/200 logic board with the Tango installed.

The timing fix extension works does seem to work well on the 5400/220 logic board/Tango combination.

Sometime in March, I will be buying a 6500 series logic board. This board will work in this computer chassis, as well as working with my RAM, Sonnet G3 card and diverse video cards. I'm hoping that this "new" logic board, coupled with the Tango card and timing extension, will result in a stable combination of hardware and software.

Well, that didn't work. The 6500/250 logic board has the same problems as the 5500 board. Until then, I'll continue to use the 5500/G3 card combo for ripping CDs and then changing out the 5500 board for the 5400 board and Tango card for transferring files to the iPod. As it's the modest work of a few moments to change out the logic boards, it's no great bother for me.

It may be that I need a 6400 series logic board in order to eliminate the Tango and Crescendo conflicts.

Today, December 12 2004, the used Apple TV/FM Tuner card I ordered arrived. Once I installed the needed Apple FM Tuner player and extension, the card worked perfectly. I can now listen to local FM stations while working at the computer.

This past Thursday, March 10th, 2005, I picked up a used Kensington Turbo Mouse trackball, a two button version, at the Davis Square Goodwill. Cost me all of a dollar and included the short ADB connector cord.

I got it home, plugged it in and it worked. However, it would work a lot better, once I got the Control Panel downloaded and installed.

I hit the Kensington site and discover that the current Control Panel for OS 8/OS9 does not support my "new" trackball. No way, no how will it work with my trackball, says the webpage at kensington.com.

I then spent 8 hours or so over the next two days searching for a website with the appropriate driver. No luck at all.

So, on a whim, I go and download the driver that Kensington says won't work with my trackball. Perhaps I can decompile it and hack it to work with the trackball.

Well, no. It does work. It works just fine, it works so well, it instantly displayed a graphic of the trackball, in all its two button glory, as well as presenting a text screen describing the trackball. Click Here for screenshots of the Kensington site and the two screens from the trackball control panel.

So now the trackball is programmed for diverse applications, much like my USB mouse and PowerMate controller. The trackball is on my left, to be used when the arthritis in my right hand gets to be a problem when using my mouse.

April 1st, 2005, I just won an eBay auction for a used Wacom "ArtzII" digital graphic tablet.

With shipping, it cost me US$30.00. The current new equivalent from Wacom is almost US$200.00. The tablet arrived a week or so after I won the auction and is in stunningly good condition. According to the seller, he barely used it.

This is not your father's KoalaPad! It's a lot more powerful and versatile than I expected. So much so, I'll have to get a newer version of Photoshop in order to take advantage of all the options the pad offers.

April 4th, 2005: SCORE! I found an original Apple Extended keyboard at the local Goodwill! US$2.00, and filthy beyond belief.

For the first time in many years, I had to pull the keys off a keyboard to clean them. A few hours in a bucket of hot water with a hefty slug of Spic & Span cleaned them all up perfectly. Brownian Motion is your friend... particularly if you're a lazy sod, as I am. The plastic shell of the keyboard also needed cleaning, Plenty of room in the bucket!

As to why finding this keyboard was such a score, the Apple Extended Keyboard is the Best. Keyboard. Ever. manufactured for Apple. The Extended II Keyboard I've been using for almost a year is pretty good, but the Extended is better, due to the keyswitches. The difference between the two is quite noticeable.

(At some point in the near future, I need to take a picture of my current setup and use it to replace the generic 5400/180 at the top of the page.)

The one remaining add on/upgrade I need to get is an internal SCSI CD-RW drive, capable of burning CD-R and CD-RW disks. This will give me the option of creating Audio CDs, as well as data CDs. If I can find the right drive, I can even burn mini-CDs.

Saturday, July 9th, Verizon DSL went live on my phone line. It wasn't until the following Tuesday that I finally got this PowerMac to work with it. Too many legacy and USB/PCI/NuBus(?!?) Ethernet Extensions in the Extension folder was the problem. Once I trashed them, all was well. I had almost no trouble getting my Bondi iMac online that Saturday via DSL, after a very helpful conversation with a lady in India.

I had been contemplating getting a separate phone line, just for the computer. However, considering that DSL costs about as much as a second phone line, it provides high speed access, and doesn't tie up my voice line, it was an easy choice to go with DSL.

(As I felt the nead to update this page in some fashion, here's a bit of info about a minor upgrade to my Bondi Blue iMac.)

July 19th, the lightly used Logitech USB mouse I ordered via one of my Mac mailing lists arrived. (Thanks Stephen! It works perfectly!) Two buttons, scrollwheel and it uses a ball, not an optical sensor! Who knew such existed?

Some details about the mouse can be found Here. Although my mouse is translucent clear and blue/green plastic, obviously intended for use with the original Bondi Blue iMac, it is the same as the mouse shown on this page.

It's now the iMac mouse, and I have retired the awful iMac "hockey puck" mouse to the junk box. With this "new" mouse, and of course, USB Overdrive, the iMac is a joy to use. Now to get a decent keyboard for it. Whoever thought skinny white characters on black keys was a good idea, human interface-wise, was obviously smoking crack! Of course, as a user of the Apple Extended Keyboard (Best. Keyboard. EVER!) I am, naturally, biased in this matter.

October 24, 2005. The used Orange Micro USB/FireWire PCI card I ordered a few weeks ago arrived. It took me a while to find the needed patch to make it work with the 5500 logic board.

So, it appears that the card works, and there are multiple reports that it works well with the Sonnet G3 upgrade card and does not show the same problems that plague the Sonnet Tango USB/FireWire card. I'll need to test this for a few days to make sure.

Sure I could, but it would be a bland, dull mouse with no personality whatsoever. This mouse is a work of art. It is beautiful. It is a sculpture for my desktop. It is worthy of being plugged into a Macintosh, a computer known for it's style and personality. From a technical standpoint, it is fully the equal of any three button mouse on the market, and from an esthetic standpoint, it surpasses any of the "twenty buck" mice on the market.

In order to get USB running on it under OS 8.6, I needed to install some software.

The first was the Apple USB Card Support 1.4.1

The second is GameSprockets 1.7.5, also from Apple.

Both can be found HERE.

Installing OS 9.2.2 installs newer versions of the above.

OS 9 Helper can be found HERE.

USB Overdrive can be found HERE.