Hello, I’m Professor omzn (specializing in vintage Mac collecting).
While I’ve made vintage Mac collecting my profession, I’ve been particularly active in the past year.
Recently, I realized that just collecting Apple-related keyboards and mice alone has accumulated quite a collection – and I’ve essentially acquired every type of mouse available.
A Power Macintosh 8500 that was rescued from a junkyard, along with my previously stored Power Macintosh 8100/80AV.
The 8500 booted up, but after opening the case to add memory, it stopped functioning completely 😭. The 8100, on the other hand, displays a cruel error message indicating a logic board failure when powered on.
I’ve acquired a Power Mac G4 with the “Mirrored Driver Doors” design – priced at just ¥3,000 at Hard Off despite being marked as junk. Although the HDD had been removed, it still came with 2GB of memory. When I installed a SATA SSD via ATAPI conversion, it successfully booted. It runs up to Mac OS X 10.5.
The Power Mac G4 has a notorious reputation for being extremely loud – it’s genuinely quite noisy even when just running. At this era of Macs, you either made design choices that compromised performance or performance choices that compromised design.
I couldn’t resist and ended up getting an iMac G4 as well – priced at ¥10,000 on Yahoo Auctions. This bargain price was incredible for a completely functional unit.
The iMac G4 represents Apple’s attempt to rebrand after their failed G4 cube design. It addresses all the shortcomings of the G4 cube and achieves remarkably high levels of perfection as a compact all-in-one system. The adorable daifuku-inspired form factor doesn’t hurt either.
Here’s my own mini Macintosh Classic clone – built from scratch. Inside contains a Raspberry Pi 5 running SheepShaver, a PowerPC emulator, which allows MacOS 9 to boot. The original keyboard can be used through a homemade ADB-USB converter.
At our Soflab, the current hot game to play on these vintage Macs is “Same Game”!
There’s so much more I could mention, but I’ll stop here for now…