ScuzzyGraph and ScuzzyGraph II

Online information about ScuzzyGraph is minimal. We do know that it allows old black-and-white Macs with SCSI ports to work with an external display. It supports a 3-bit, 8-color palette (some sources say 4-bit/16-color with some Macs), which is a far cry from the 8-bit/256-color output introduced with the Mac II’s first color video card […]

Control Hard Drive Spindown with Apple’s Free CHUD Tools

There are pros and cons to working with an external hard drive. On the plus side, you can easily move your operating system, applications, and work files from one computer to another. And you can pick as big and fast a drive as fits your budget. And you can avoid having to open up a […]

Applied Engineering AE HD+ Floppy Drive

This article is adapted from a posting by Adam Takessian to the Vintage Macs email list. I would like very much to help other compact Mac users to know more about the AE HD+, because before I bought mine, the information on the Web was extremely limited, scattered across several different pages, sometimes inaccurate, and […]

Apple 8•24GC Video Card

Mike Ford posted the following to Vintage Macs, our group for users of pre-PowerPC Macs. Well, people asked, and people sent me info, and I got curious and went hunting myself. This is a brief collection of what I have found, and what I believe to be accurate, YMMV, corrections and additions welcome. The 8•24GC […]

Micron Xceed for Mac SE/30

Here is the quick scoop on the wonderful internal grayscale video setup from Micron or Xceed. The video card identifies itself as a “Micron Xceed 3MT” in the Monitors control panel (with an external monitor attached so the Monitors control panel sees the card).

Apple Macintosh IIfx

1999 – Most people know by now that the original Mac was not a real success. It was underpowered, had too little RAM, no way to attach a hard drive, and no expansion slots. Steve Jobs wanted the machine to be accepted as a household appliance, not as a computer, and to that end, the […]

The Once and Future Mac286 Page

This page looks at the first MS-DOS coprocessor cards for the Macintosh, the Mac286 and its sibling, the Mac86. I have created this page in response to the lack of information about these cards that is publicly available.

Introduction to FireWire

By now you’ve probably heard of FireWire, the new high speed standard for moving data between devices. Also known as IEEE Standard 1394 or P1394, FireWire was invented by Apple as a faster alternative to SCSI in its many permutations.

SCSI Accelerator 7.0

SCSI Accelerator 7.0 is a set of extensions that work with a Mac Plus running System 7 and allows improved SCSI throughput. As a former Mac Plus owner, I will attest to the fact that they really do work. It’s been a few years, but I believe I had my hard drive interleaved at 2:1 […]

SCSI Accelerator 2.1

SCSI Accelerator 2.1 is a set of INITs that work with a Mac Plus running a Mac OS earlier than System 7 and allows improved SCSI throughput. As a former Mac Plus owner, I will attest to the fact that SCSI Accelerator really does work. It’s been a few years, but I believe I had […]

Dayna MacCharlie

Although PC compatibility isn’t a big deal since Apple’s transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, there is a long history of PC emulation and DOS cards that let Macs run PC operating systems and software. Dayna’s MacCharlie was the first solution to the “problem” of PC compatibility.