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Low End Mac

MaxAppleZoom Boosts Resolution of Some Macintosh Color Displays

Daniel Knight - 2015.02.22

Way back in the Mac II era, someone discovered that certain Mac NuBus video cards could support slightly higher resolutions than the standard 640 x 480 pixels – but only with certain displays. This discovery gave birth to MaxAppleZoom, a $25 shareware control panel by Naoto Horii designed to support those higher resolution.

Although MaxAppleZoom (a.k.a. MAZ) is ancient history – version 1.44 came out in June 1993 and was the final revision – it has a legendary place in the hearts of many longtime Mac users. It allowed a resolution of 704 x 512 pixels, 17.3% more pixels than that stock 640 x 480 setting. In those days, it was a big deal.

This particular hack only works with a handful of Apple branded NuBus video cards. It is not supported with built-in video or any non-Apple card. Based on my research, it is compatible only with the following:

MAZ only supports a limited number of Apple-branded Mac monitors:

MaxAppleZoom is known to be compatible with System 7.5.3 and probably works with 7.5.5 as well.

Incompatabilities

Version 1.3 was incompatible with SuperClock 3.9; I cannot comment on later versions. The same posting says MAZ has problems when you change color depth.

With monochrome displays, you may need to scale back resolution to 672 pixels.

After MAZ

I have found mention of another $25 shareware control panel, Monitor Expander, that does the same thing MaxAppleZoom does – but with a lot more resolution options (see the Read Me). The control panel is copyright 1993-1994, so it was probably meant to replace MAZ, which was no longer being updated.

I find no updates to Monitor Expander after version 1.0.1. It was only tested using System 7, so it may not be compatible with System 6. It also requires a video card with 512 KB of RAM.

Further Reading

Keywords: #maxapplezoom

Short link: http://goo.gl/ZzUnkX

searchword: maxapplezoom