Wednesday, June 14, 2006

The $1 PowerMac 9500/132

I have not done anything interesting on the software front recently, but I have recently obtained an old Power Macintosh 9500/132. Here is an excerpt form a posting I placed on a good website for older Macintoshes that are still running System 7.6.1 called System 7 Today:

My company was getting rid of a bunch of old equipment recently and I was able to acquire an old Power Macintosh 9500/132 they had for a $1 (I was the high bidder).

I had to replace the PRAM Battery (about $10). It came with System 7.5.3 so I upgraded to 7.5.5. I found a website called System 7 Today and read its recommendation to run System 7.6.1 and I also discovered that a lot of the Mac software for older machines requires System 7.6.1. So I bought a copy of System 7.6 on eBay for $15 (including shipping and handling). Then I upgraded that to System 7.6.1.

So I currently have a $26 PowerMac 9500/132 with the following:
48 MB of RAM
2 GB Hard drive
PowerPC 604 - 132 MHz

When I got it up and running, I searched through my old CDs for anything that might run on a Macintosh (I have never had one up to this point). To my surprise I discovered the following applications that would run on my “new” Mac:

Warcraft
Warcraft II (including the expansion set)
Tribond

I was pleased to see Warcraft II would run, because the version I have would not run properly on Windows XP (you need the Battle Net edition for that).