https://andrew.weitzel.tech
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Our original machine is long gone now, and since I started hoarding--- er, collecting, classic Macs, this model never seemed to pop up on Marketplace, or even eBay. But finally, I saw this one on eBay for $60 (and another $60 for possibly the worst shipping of all time... it's a miracle it arrived in one peice, but I should have expected that from an eBay seller called "Big-boy's-beer-money"), and I had to grab it. Finally, I am once again a Performa 475 owner!
Here she is: yellow and dirty, like a discarded pizza box. In other words: beautiful and perfect.
The board was moderately dirty, but on the cleaner side with just some dust. Annoyingly, there was no VRAM installed.
As usual in this situation, I popped open my Quicksilver and hooked the Performa's 160 MB SCSI HDD to my trusty flashed Adaptec SCSI card (which I found in some God-forsaken corner of my old office). The drive... beeped. Several times. I didn't know it could do that.
After a reboot and two more beeps, it made a horrendus churning noise... and then mounted! It's a miracle. I immediately fired up DiskCopy and made an image of the disk. I could see Mario Teaches Typing after the Desktop file rebuilt. I don't think our Performa shipped with that, but I've read they did at some point.
After a successful image, I poked around the files. It was nearly stock, but there were a few ClarisWorks files. The only notable one was this doodle. I... yeah.
To see if this thing would actually boot, I swapped in two VRAM sticks (both 256 KB, I think) from the HPV card in my Power Mac 7100. I took a moment to clean the top cover, including scrubbing the accumulated scum from the grooves. Gross.
After a jump-start boot (I was short on 1/2 AA lithium batteries), it booted up to System 7.1P3 on the original HDD, which seems to have benefited from being spun back up for the imaging process. Hooray!
After a lot of futzing around with a BlueSCSI (this Performa is a little picky), I got a 7.6 CD image to boot. So let's install-- oh, nevermind. The paltry built-in 4MB of RAM isn't even enough to launch the installer.
One random stick of RAM I had lying around: installed. Turned out to be 16MB, bumping me up to 20MB total. That should be plenty for this guy. Also, I installed a fresh PRAM battery.
There we go. 7.6 was on the way onto the OG 160MB HDD!
Looking good! Now all it needs is some appropriate software, like Kitten Shaver 2.
The Performa 475 comes with a 68LC040 CPU. The LC stands for "Low Cost", and excludes the FPU. I decided to swap it out for a full fledged 68040 with the FPU.
I picked up a Centris 650 recently as part of a lot that had 68040 in it! We'll just be taking that, thanks.
The CPU and heatsink from the Centris installed in the Performa, with some fresh Corsair TM30 thermal paste. With the heatsink, it fits with just a small amount of room to spare.
Complete success! Time to do some floating-point math!
I am an ape-handed buffon and I bent the heck out of the pins of the 68LC040 when removing it from the Performa. I was planning on sticking it into the Centris I stole the 68040 from, so I had better fix that.
Some tedious work with a spudger and tweezers had it back into shape, mostly.
Phew, close enough. Back into the Centris and working!
Swapping the original system fan with a 15v 60x60x15mm Noctua NF-A6x15 took a grand total of 45 seconds, which will quiet things down a bit and also help keep the new 68040 nice and cool.
Fonts are:
Tiny5, by Stefan Schmidt
Earth Momma, by Mirz123
Unless otherwise noted, all other content is CC BY 4.0M, so feel free to use it so long as it is attributed to Andrew Weitzel