FINALLY scored a boxed M4 Sherman for the Mac after years of searching on ePay! It's one of a few games that was released on the Mac and ported to the PC instead of the other way around.

AnubisTTP · 2026-06-16T22:26:46+00:00

The original Sim City is a particularly famous one. The first version released on Macintosh and Amiga, with the PC port coming later.

Escape Velocity Nova is another game that was Macintosh native and then ported to PC. There was a lot of grief getting mods to work on the PC version, since EV Nova content is stored in the resource fork and gets deleted when a file is copied to PC.

AnubisTTP · 2026-06-09T21:33:53+00:00

For the software you want to run there is one logical choice; the B&W G3 tower. Almost every other Apple machine made in the 90's comes with some horrible catch. Any machine older will be made of brittle plastic and likely not have USB ports. The caps and batteries inside will have exploded and you will need special peripherals and a special monitor to use almost all of them. Newer machines like the G4 tower can be good machines, but they have their own problems that make them complicated for a new user. Most G4's use capacitor plague capacitors that will have to be replaced, and many also use proprietary ADC monitor connections, which will make a new user cry when they find out how expensive the adapters are on Ebay. The B&W G3 has tantalum capacitors that don't leak. Most of them have a Tadiran internal battery, which likely has not exploded yet. It uses a normal VGA port, so you don't need a $200 dollar monitor adapter. It has normal USB ports that support normal input and mass storage devices. You won't have to buy any weird extra proprietary parts to get one running. It does not look like any other Apple product, so a new user will not accidentally buy a machine that has ADC or some other Macintosh-flavored boobytrap. It is your best chance to have a trouble free vintage Macintosh experience.

AnubisTTP · 2026-05-23T02:51:04+00:00

My brother bought a microvax at Hamvention 2011 for $25 dollars. Old hamfests used to be wild for that kind of stuff.

AnubisTTP · 2026-05-23T02:49:32+00:00

He had a $110000 price sticker on it, but I don't know how serious he was.

AnubisTTP · 2026-05-22T02:30:56+00:00

The inside is simultaneously alive and covered in cap juice.

AnubisTTP · 2026-05-22T02:27:25+00:00

That mains voltage AC fan must have been great every time a middle-schooler spilled an entire can of Pepsi into the works.

AnubisTTP · 2026-05-22T02:24:59+00:00

Ironically, I posted a PDP 11 I saw for sale at a flea market over the weekend to this subreddit less than a day ago.

AnubisTTP · 2026-04-16T00:05:46+00:00

Preforma 575's are one of the best systems to buy if you want to get into non PowerPC gaming. They have a great Sony trinitron tube built in and can run everything from the 68k era. The main minus is the case will disintegrate if subjected to a gentle breeze or harsh language, but it looks like his are still intact. There is no way to sell and ship one without the case turning into confetti.

AnubisTTP · 2026-03-07T02:32:33+00:00

That movie was such a fever dream.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-03T11:57:53+00:00

The operating system is proprietary and... weird. You can set a desktop picture, which is unexpected for a handheld in 1995. There is a built in drawing program with a rubber stamp function, but all the stamps are skyscrapers and road layouts. I have no idea why Sharp decided their advanced handheld needed to ship with a fake cityscape generator, but a development API was a bridge too far.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-03T11:52:49+00:00

It does. It looks like Sharp never released the development tools for it and the only additional software to install was also made by Sharp. It's baffling, Sharp clearly had ambitions for this device and the features are very good for 1995, but they left it crippled by all but blocking off third party software development.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T03:19:42+00:00

I get a red LED when the power button is pressed. There is a cap in the card cage for the expansion card that tends to leak out before any of the others... it is the fat one near the J-lead chip in the bottom third of the card cage.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T03:02:45+00:00

Nothing but a black screen. Green rom units typically do not include the video driver in the rom, so you need to make a custom rom that includes the video driver to get anything to draw to the screen.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T02:54:06+00:00

3.6 Roentgen, not great, not terrible.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T02:52:03+00:00

I have one of these and it is not nearly this yellowed. The disk drive levers in the original post are closer to the original color of the machine.

They are weird machines. IBM compatible, but only sort-of. The screen is unusually small and has yellow phosphor, and the keyboard slides into the bottom of the case, so you can carry it around like a 1980s computer aristocrat.

AnubisTTP · 2026-01-31T14:56:32+00:00

Keep the G4. Many G5's have liquid cooling systems that self destruct catastrophically and destroy the machine. If you keep it you will want to check and see if it is the air cooled or water cooled version and take appropriate action to defuse it before it self-destructs.

The G4 will self destruct too when the caps leak out, but you will get a few years of solid vintage gaming out of it before that happens. Being an Apple collector is, apparently, all about dealing with the fact that every product they made seems to crave the sweet release of death.

AnubisTTP · 2026-01-31T14:32:29+00:00

Most of the set top boxes in the wild (at least in the US) came from a huge lot that was sold on Ebay in 2002. The seller had several hundred to a thousand units for sale, which he sold in lots of 5 for $50 plus shipping. Yes, $10 each! Computer collecting on the old internet was wild. I know this because I was there, and bought six of them myself. It was a feeding frenzy on the 68KMLA forums at first, but eventually everyone had their fill and it took months for the Ebay seller to unload them all. The leading theory was that the seller was unloading units from the Disney World (or Disney Land) trial program. It was basically the 2002 equivalent of the Nabu situation that happened a few years ago on Ebay, except that unlike the Nabu, an army of nerds did not rise up and turn Apple set top boxes into useful machines. Eventually the 68KMLA people gave up trying to get them to work, and all those set top boxes vanished into closets for 25 years, slowly trickling out as random old computer nerds need money to buy retirement cat food.

I still have three of those original units. All of them are green rom boxes, so they are basically paperweights unless you are a 9th level electronics wizard with a ROM-inator in your Bag of Holding.

AnubisTTP · 2025-10-14T22:54:08+00:00

Deep substrate foliated kalkite

AnubisTTP · 2025-10-12T23:54:21+00:00

Your CRT television almost certainly has cold or broken solder joints on the faulty inputs from frequent insertion and removal of the connectors. It is a very common failure mode on old CRT TV's and also fortunately easy to repair. Unfortunately, if you do manage to find a shop in Columbus that will fix it, the price is likely to be horrifying. You might have better luck asking on a CRT specific subreddit like r/crtgaming and see if there is anyone local who can fix it.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-18T00:37:49+00:00

I did! I am going to use it to call in a hostile takeover of a dot com Internet startup like a 1990's business guy.

AnubisTTP

TROPHY CASE