powermac 9600 salvage

The 9600's did not have a ROM SIMM. The 9600's had the ROM soldered onto the motherboard.

The funny thing about the PCI Macs is, most of them had slots for ROM SIMMS, but there were never any ROM SIMMS made for them. The clones had ROM SIMMS.

There's a nice, enlargeable photo of a 9600 motherboard on this page:
http://popcorn.cx/computers/apple/powermac/9600/
The four chips that go vertically down below the processor card, and which are aligned along the innermost RAM slot are the 4 1mb ROM chips. The four smaller, almost square chips that move horizontally in a line to the left of the ROM is the Cache. The first generation 9600's had the Cache also soldered to the motherboard as in that photo. The later 9600's had the cache moved onto the processor daughtercard, which is one way to tell if your motherboard is a first generation or a second generation.

If you have a first generation motherboard with the cache soldered onto it, the best way to make use of a third party processor daughtercard like your Newertech G4 is to disable the motherboard cache so the daughtercard cache can be enabled. Details here:
http://www.geocities.com/pm9600g4/index2.html

More info on the motherboard here:
http://www.macgurus.com/products/motherboards/mbppc9600.php

The only ROM SIMM I've ever seen for a PCI Mac is on this motherboard:
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/mac-powerexpress/
Look close and you can pick it out. It may be a one and only. Wish I had it.

Just for the record. How many watts is your 9600's power supply?

HC,
Thanks. I was kinda hoping you'd weigh in, as I remembered you mentioning your 9600 in past threads.

I was a little confused after reading the service manual for the machine, and seeing the empty slot on my logic board labeled "ROM SIMM" I can't seem to keep track of which machines actually have a SIMM and which don't. Also, in the back of my mind was the magic SIMM that you are supposed to be able to put into an ANS and make it boot MacOS. I realize now that that urban legend was for a PM 9500 ROM, and it didn't work anyway.

So excellent. I just need some more RAM, an older version of OSX, and one of my extra SCSI drives. And, to answer your question, it's running the more petite 390W power supply.

Thanks for the links- I'll have to check out the cache situation.
mike

Alas, the elusive 560w power supply remains elusive.

I saw that in LEM. That would have be a huge power supply for such a machine. 390's not too slouchy either, although I imagine if you utilized all the expandability of the 9600, you'd be pushing it pretty hard. Perhaps I underestimate the power consumption of the 604e.

I'll keep my eyes open. A steady stream of older Mac hardware comes through our university surplus.

mike

hello
any one know if its worth trying to use this in a G4 tower?
or moving the G4 mobo into the 9600 case?

either way, the matching up of power connectors is the question,

on the one hand, I had the 9600 with a usb/firewire card & g4 400, running osx3.9 quite well,
on the other hand, I have a g4 tower with a 200W psu, (now thats just sad).

comments?
suggestions?

Leave the PS in the 9600, and modify an ATX PS to work with your G4. I don't think thats too hard a hack.

See the links I provided here:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/22402#comment-52860