I tried for several days now to get a working 10 T nic on the 6400/200 I was given as a gift. Just about ready to give up when I said what to hell I'll take the advice from other members here and get a comm II enthernet card. Well this is the first time I have ever used eBay or paypal but I did find the good comm II card and made a bid. So now we'll just set back and see what happens. The card is an Apple original so it should be a winner for this machine. If it works out I'll do some more upgrading and put it in tip top shape. BTW the same person this evening gave me another working Power Mac, an old 1994 6100/60. Now this one works also and has OS 8 running on it but I don't have the system disk. It has enthernet already built in so I only need the adapter for cat to mac . I'm thinking system 8 probably will be a breeze to set up since it is already equipped with hardware. This is a strange duck this 6100 looking at the specs, I look back and compare the intel machine I had in 93 and it was very bare boned compared to this 6100. It had no hard drive and only 1 meg of memory and one 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 drives, I had to buy the math coprocessor. The 6100 already has the math processor on the board and what really is interesting is the fact that you could upgrade this machine today to a 500 MHz machine. If it were possible to put a big hard drive in possibly it might make a good server. AT the very least with the DOS compatible card I could run a lot of old DOS games with it.
Now for a question ? I tried downloading driver files in a zip format and copying them to a PC floppy and transfered it to the 6400. I used the stuffit to expand with and after it is finished I look at the file and the MACOS file has not been expanded. According to the text for the driver files there should be an installer icon there in the sit file. I only get an error saying something to the effect it can't find the program that the file originated from. Does anyone have an idea what might be missing here or what might I be doing wrong. I think I read where the sit file should go to desktop for a program that needs installing is that correct ? Finally has anyone seen a driver from the internet that has the sea ext, seems to me that would be the best way to do this but the driver.com site does not list any for the ENL832-TX+
Thanks
Tom
Tom - I can't help on the driver front. If you transferred the file onto the 6400 via a floppy it could be that the archive was corrupted by the PC. (Remeber that the file system is different to the Mac OS one) It's unlikely but possible. Another possible reason is that file was already corrupted when you downloaded it from the internet. Finally, (and this happens sometimes) stuffit will get fussy if the destination directory for a self-extracting archive is different to the directory the archive is in and there isn't enough room to expand or the disc is locked. Not much help though!
The 6100 was a great machine in it's day (even if it was a bit of a bastard in terms of the system architecture. I seem to remember it borrowed parts of various 040 board designs) . I'd advise against getting the 500 MHZ upgrade though as it's stil going to have problems when you consider the bus speed.
Some macs are great to upgrade for everyday use(such as the later 8600 and 8500 towers and the 7600 series) since they have so much space for extra bays and you can also upgrade the memory to reasonable capacities for modern computing. However...
If you just want the 6100 with a 500 upgrade card just "beacuase" then go for it!
(I'm secretly after a PDS 601 card for the IIsi I have!)
I've never used a 6100 as a server. I'd be more tempted if it was the faster version of the 6100 but as it's the 60 mhz version I think parts of the system run at 30 Mhz...Web serving would be fine - but general file serving (unless it's small like Mp3s...)... :/
I'd go for the Dos Card - it's so much fun to freak with your friends as they see the thing dual boot - with no emulator in sight!
Nikki
Well one way or another I will get the 6400 on-line. I'm committed now and just purchased 128 megs of ram for it. Next I will look for a sys 9.1 and see if I can make the machine come alive. The memory was cheap and from what I read this should really make this machine happy. Still waiting for the results on the comm II card
Tom
You can pick up 200 to 300MHz G3s for that 6100 dirt cheap, like $20. Most of them have a passthrough slot so you can add an HPV or AV video card for a standard Mac monitor port, faster video (HPV) and TV video in/out (AV).
Either a 50 pin to 68 pin SCSI adapter (cheap) or a SCSI-ATA/IDE adapter (expensive) will let you add larger hard drives. You could also remove the CD and drop a second HD in its place. Use an external SCSI CD if and when you need one.
Check out Kan's 6100 pages