Action Retro

Unboxing new-old-stock sealed 3.5' 1MB double density floppies from some company called KAO, then formatting in my Mac Plus so I can make some Asante network box driver floppies!

Quick look at my Mac Plus, which started life as an early-production original Macintosh before being upgraded with the official Apple Mac Plus upgrade kit in the late 80's.

Check out this sweet grape iMac G3 I scored for $15! It's in awesome condition, but a bit dirty. Well, a bit disgusting. Let's run through the specs and clean it up a bit, and talk about what future crazy things we can do with it.

In this video, we're installing 20 year old Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 on our $15 original iMac G3 from 1999. But a Linux install on an iMac G3 PowerPC ain't easy. Watch me struggle to figure out video settings because I did almost no research ahead of time. It's the ultimate obscure 1990's Linux party.

I finally found my dream vintage computer, a Macintosh SE/30. I've been looking for one of these for years, and I finally found one. In this video, we'll be putting in all the parts I've been hoarding for SE/30s over the years, maxing it out with 128 MB of RAM and a Rominator II pirate ROM. I also maybe kind of destroy it a little bit.

This Hyperdata 486 laptop from the early 90's is really weird, so let's review it! Why is there a number pad in the palm rest? Who thought that was a good idea? This thing has a 486 66Mhz and 4 (yes FOUR) megs of RAM. What can you actually do with that? Well, we're going to run it through a few tests, and then we're going to see if it can Linux! I've got Slackware Linux 1.1.2 on ten floppy disks ready to go.

In this video we're tearing apart the $15 Grape iMac G3 to install a modern SATA SSD! This is a first-gen tray loading iMac revision D released in 1999, so the best fastest version of the original iMac. We're going to make it even faster (and way quieter!) by installing a cheap modern SSD from Amazon, along with a cheap SATA to IDE adapter.

Does the Ultra 486 color laptop computer live up to its name? Weird 90s Laptop Reviews #2 In today's video, we'll take a look at the Ultra 486 laptop, a strange off-brand laptop from the mid 90's that could well have been the best 486 laptop ever released, if not for one small issue. This late 486 DX4 100MHz is special in that it comes with a built-in sound card, very rare on a 486 laptop.

Check out these three latest eBay finds. First is an old retail boxed Linux, new and sealed. Then, we have a Gateway Solo Pentium II with Windows 98. Finally we have a 386 laptop from Hyundai... yes, from the same conglomerate who also makes those nice cars.

In this video we'll take a look at my Apple Titanium PowerBook G4. It's an 867 Mhz upgraded to 1GB of RAM, and I've fitted a mSATA SSD in an IDE enclosure. We'll take it apart, look at the RAM and SSD upgrades, and then put it back together and see how it gets along with the modern internet and a few awesome games. It boots into both Mac OSX Tiger and Mac OS 9.2.2, the last and fastest PowerBook generation able to do so.

I recently picked up this super cool Hyundai LT-6 386 laptop, but it turns out it's not in the best condition. Although it powers on, "rickety" might be an understatement. It won't boot from hard drive or disk, and when we take it apart to try and sort it, a few surprises lurk within. Thanks to Eric from NTICompass Computers for pointing out that the floppy drive isn't broken, it's just upside-down. I always miss that kind of thing! Check out his channel here: / @nticompass

Installation process starts at 3:52. Click "show more" below for handy links if you want to try the install yourself! Today we're installing a modern Linux on a 1999 iMac G3 revision D, the fastest version of the original iMac. We're using Adelie Linux, a relatively new distro that has PowerPC 32 bit as a first-class install target.

Today, I just received this sweet graphite iBook G3 SE, the final version of Apple's clamshell iBook G3. This special edition is even special-er, because aside from having the fastest processor in a clamshell, it's also the only one ever released with a DVD-ROM drive. This means it's the only one that's officially compatible with Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger! Let's check out the original box it came in, with some cool original documentation, max out the RAM, and fire this thing up!

Today we'll see how to install Mac OS X Leopard from a USB flash drive! We'll be using our PowerBook G4 Titanium 867Mhz, which is the minimum officially supported machine for Leopard. It's been upgraded to a SSD and 1GB of RAM, so it should run Leopard pretty well.

Over on the MacRumors forums, user Wicknix has just released an update to his TenFiveTube app, which lets PowerPC Macs running 10.5 Leopard browse and watch YouTube! But how well does it work? To find out, we'll upgrade our 867 Mhz PowerBook G4 Titanium from Tiger to Leopard, and give it a spin. This PowerBook is the oldest and slowest officially supported Mac laptop on Leopard, so will this actually be usable? Let's find out!

In this video we're resurrecting a sick iBook Clamshell Special Edition, which is a very special iBook indeed. It's the last and fastest of all the iBook Clamshells at 466Mhz, and the only one with FireWire and a stock DVD drive. That makes it the only Clamshell iBook to be officially Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger compatible.

In the waning days of the PowerPC to Intel transition, Apple was still developing OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. In this video, we'll walk through how to install the never-released OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for PowerPC beta on your Mac G4 or G5. NOTE: This is unreleased beta software. If you install this, you do it at your own risk.

The original white polycarbonate Macbook, specifically the first few Core 2 Duo revisions of the original model, are an incredible value for vintage and classic Mac enthusiasts. In this video, I'll talk about my history with the PowerPC to Intel transition, why I love my Macbook 4,1, and we'll upgrade the RAM and toss in an SSD.

Amazingly, here in 2020 there are still companies making brand new batteries for the iBook G3 Clamshell, a computer that hasn't seen store shelves in 20 years. So of course I bought one. Let's take it apart, test it, and see if it's worth the $60 on Newegg!

In this video, we're upgrading the 1.5 Ghz final PowerBook G4 12 inch to its maximum 1.25GB of RAM and installing an mSATA SSD using the IDE enclosure we've had so much success with. We'll also see if we can figure out what's wrong with that darn latch. We'll then install 10.5 Leopard over FireWire. I may or may not also ramble a bit about why I like this computer so much.

Today we'll be swapping out the hard drive of a PowerBook 1400c with an 8gb CF card with a super-inexpensive IDE adapter that we'll use as an SSD. Although it has a beautiful active-matrix screen, my 1400c is the very slow and cache-less 117mhz version made even slower by a clunky spinning hard drive and just 32mb of RAM. Does it really make a difference? Let's find out!

Today we're upgrading a 2.0 Ghz Dual Processor Power Mac G5 with an m.2 SSD, and maxing out the RAM at 8 GB. We'll tear it down a bit and check out the internals, replace the battery, and talk a little bit about why this computer is so cool (not literally of course - it runs hot as crap). We may or may not run into a few problems with the m.2 to SATA adapter, or SSDs in general, though in the end I still really love this beautiful but inefficient machine.

Today we're taking a look at my Performa 6200CD. Although some very smart people call this the worst Mac of all time, I love it. Let's max out the RAM, and talk a little bit about why this classic desktop Macintosh is so controversial.

How far can you push a Power Macintosh Beige G3 desktop from 1997? Well, today starts an adventure that I've wanted to take for more than fifteen years. This is the first episode in a series of upgrade videos where we upgrade the Beige G3 as far as it can go, and then some. In this episode, we're combining two Beige G3 desktops into one using the best parts from each, and then we'll upgrade the video card and max out the RAM.

How far can you push a Power Macintosh Beige G3 desktop from 1997? Well, today continues our adventure! In this second episode, we're swapping in the G4 processor from a Power Mac "Yikes!" G4, and overclocking it! That's right, we're trying to build the mythical Beige G4! But will it actually work?

How far can we push our Power Macintosh Beige G3 desktop - now a G4! - from 1997? Well, today continues our adventure! In this third episode, we're putting in a ton of upgrades to compliment our newly-installed G4, which we've also managed to overclock just a bit faster. Honestly I'm even more excited about one of these upgrades that I was about the overclocked G4 - we're putting in a PCI SATA controller card! Oh yes, forget that slow 16.6 MBps IDE, we're going 133 MBps! We'll put a SATA SSD off that card, and we should be able to use that as a boot drive. Boot drive for what you may ask? 10.4 Tiger! By the end of this video, we should have Tiger natively booting from an SSD on real-deal SATA. Paired with the G4, this really should be the fastest possible Beige G3 desktop.

This is a very special episode where I'd like to say thank you... with PowerBook 1400's. For details on the giveaway, please read below.

Today we're doing something I've always dreamed of - we're putting a Sonnet Encore G4 1Ghz ZIF upgrade into the Beige Beast! If all goes well, we should wind up with the fastest possible Beige G3. But can this ancient 1997 Power Macintosh really handle 1Ghz of PURPLE POWER? Let's find out! I found this wonderful upgrade at the Apple Rescue of Denver: http://www.applerescueofdenver.com/

The UMAX SuperMac S900 is a beautiful relic from the very darkest days of Apple, where the foundering company attempted to license Mac OS to other manufacturers in a desperate bid to increase their dwindling market share. Although this backfired and nearly killed Apple for good, the UMAX machine is an amazing alternate-universe Macintosh with some interesting features and a surprise hiding inside... In this series, we'll see how far we can upgrade the SuperMac S900 and maybe even bring it on to the modern internet.

Today we're going to be fixing some of the issues we ran into in the last installment, in our quest to make this G3-upgraded 1996 UMAX SuperMac S900 into a souped-up beast that can maybe even live on the modern internet. We'll also install the special UMAX version of Mac OS 8, and poke around the system to see what cool extra utilities and apps come with that system.

I recently picked up this crazy black compact Mac that looks to be a Macintosh SE with a 1GB Jaz drive instead of a floppy, and a CD ROM hacked into the case!I have no idea what's going on with this machine, so let's crack it open together and find out. I think we shall name him Darth Maccus, and we must fear his cursed drives.

It's time to really crack into Darth Maccus, the modded-up Mac SE that I recently picked up. Let's see if we can get this to boot from it's own drives, instead of just from the ROMinator II's ROM disk image, and see if we can find a SCSI optical drive that works. We shall fix you, oh glorious Darth Maccus, and we shall no longer fear your cursed drives.

Aw man, I made some progress... but have we lifted the curse of this crazy modded Mac SE turned SE/30? Let's figure out all of these drives, and see if we can't get them all working at the same time! And while we're at it, let's upgrade this to a version of Mac OS that many think impossible.

Today we're installing a super-rare Sonnet G4 upgrade card in a PowerBook Wallstreet G3, and upping the MHz from 266 to 500! The PowerBook G3 Wallstreet is one of my favorite PowerBooks, not least because it was the last PowerBook ever with the rainbow Apple logo. This upgrade should bring it in line with PowerBooks and iBooks released years afterwards! But did this upgrade survive being sealed in its original anti-static plastic for 20 years? What was the Sonnet upgrade experience new out of the box like? Let's find out!

Welcome to part three of my UMAX SuperMac S900 series, where we're upgrading our rare 90's Macintosh clone with a ton of cool stuff to make it a more modern machine. Absolutely nothing goes wrong, as per usual for our channel.

This Macintosh G4 Cube was heavily upgraded, but at what cost? I've had this beautiful machine in my collection for some time, but I've only ever turned it on twice because it's kind of scary inside. Will a magical blue board from Japan bring this computer back to life? Let's find out together!

Now that we've sorted the scorched power regulator board, how far can we push this incredible piece of early 2000's computing art? I want to stick an MSATA SSD in this thing, but it involves way too many adapters to be viable... maybe. Also, since we've more than doubled the clock speed to a 1.2GHz G4 and maxed out the RAM to 1.5GB, can this thing do the unthinkable and actually play YouTube? Let's find out together!

How can we take our crazy upgraded Mac G4 cube to the next level? The cube's clear acrylic case has some interesting refractions of light shining through it, so let's harness the extreme speed upgrades that only blinky colors can provide, and see just how cool this thing will look with RGB light shining through! I bet this Cube could even run Crysis when we're done.

Today we're upgrading my favorite machine, a Sonnet G4-upgraded Power Macintosh G3 Desktop, with probably the best possible video card - an ATI Radeon 9200 Mac Edition! Taking the machine from 2mb on the motherboard to 128mb, this should be the best possible PCI graphics card for a vintage Mac. But will it give us more than our current 0.5 FPS on YouTube in Tiger?

Just in time for Halloween, it's the return of the Cursed Macintosh SE/30! Now freshly recapped, is it finally un-cursed? Let's open up the spooky package from Steve at Mac84, wrangle this oddball machine back together, and find out!

My beloved iBook G3 Clamshell Special Edition works great now that we've fixed the power jack, and upgraded to an mSATA SSD. It still has one glaring problem though - it's freaking hideous. The once dignified Graphite colors have degraded into a blotchy mess on the rubberized portions of the case, and the Apple logo is long gone. Let's do the famous transparency mod, and see if we can transform this wrinkly old fella into a looker again!

For the longest time, I really thought the PowerBook G3 Pismo was terrible. From the "unique" color of the transparent keyboard to the gigantic white Apple logo and lack of a rainbow anywhere, this and the Lombard seemed like just throw-away bridge machines before the Titanium PowerBook G4 came out. Friends, I think I was very wrong. Come along for my journey of Pismo discovery, and we'll also throw an mSATA SSD and max RAM in here while we're at it! Oh, and stick around until the end - I have big plans for this machine.

So I found a late-90's PS/2 mouse with a land-line telephone built in to it, new in the box. Let's open this up and try calling people with it! I'm sure it sounds amazing... Check out the Tedium article about why this mouse exists, and so much more: https://tedium.co/2020/11/13/technolo...

Minecraft is one of my favorite games of all time, and there's no way it should ever be able to run on the Apple G4 Cube. Well, not a stock one at least. The fine folks at Macrumors have created finely-tuned versions of Minecraft for PowerPC, and our souped up Cube with upgraded graphics and processor should theoretically be able to run it now. Fun fact - our GeForce 6200 video card has twice as much VRAM as the stock Cube had regular RAM! So let's install the tuned Minecraft on the Cube, and see if we get anything close to a playable experience.

Today we're doing an upgrade I've always been curious about - a processor swap in a Powerbook Pismo to take it from G3 to G4! As you probably know from my last video on the Pismo, I was never a huge fan of these machines - but this one is growing on me. So let's push it to the limit! Maybe even far enough to run the IMPOSSIBLE CAT, the beta version Snow Leopard for PowerPC that was never released? 10.6 on a Pismo!

Today, I'm really excited to tell this quick story about the how Apple's PowerBook became the first line of modern laptops with trackpads! We'll also try out an early external ALPS trackpad from the 90's that's directly linked to Apple's history, still sealed in its original packaging.

With the help of an awesome viewer of the channel, today we're finally de-janking the Cube's fancy upgraded 6200 graphics card!

Today we're getting ready for the PowerPC Challenge, where I'm going to use only PowerPC computers for as much of my daily computering as possible for an entire week! I'm choosing the massively-upgraded G4 Cube, along with a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet. Let's make a checklist of everything I'm going to need to do during a typical week, and see if we can get these machines to cover it! Read more about the PowerPC Challenge at MacYak! http://mac-yak.com/2020/12/10/introducing-the-2021-68k-ppc-challenge/