Latest posts
- Finding a broken trace on my old Mac with the help of its ROM diagnosticsDec 30, 2025Doug Brown
Yesterday, for the first time in about a year, I tried powering on the Macintosh Performa 450 (LC III) from my past writeup about Apple’s backwards capacitor. It didn’t work. The screen was black, it played the startup sound, and then immediately followed up with the “Chimes of Death”. Nothing else happened from that point […]
- Debugging BeagleBoard USB boot with a sniffer: fixing omap_loader on modern PCsNov 08, 2025Doug Brown
This post is about the original OMAP3530 BeagleBoard from 2008. Yes, the one so old that it doesn’t even show up in the board list on BeagleBoard.org anymore. The BeagleBoard, not the BeagleBone. During my Chumby 8 kernel escapades, at one point I ran into a UART bug that affected multiple drivers, including the omap-serial […]
- An update about the hidden Performa 550 recovery partitionAug 28, 2025Doug Brown
Earlier this year, I wrote about how I rescued a special recovery partition from an old Macintosh Performa 550’s dead hard drive. This partition had been lost to time and it was a race to try to save it before the remaining Performa 550 machines out there with their original hard drives were reformatted or […]
- Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROMJun 24, 2025Doug Brown
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now. This story starts with me on a lazy Sunday using Hex Fiend in conjunction with Eric Harmon’s Mac ROM template (ROM Fiend) to look through the resources stored in the Power […]
- Modifying an HDMI dummy plug’s EDID using a Raspberry PiJun 15, 2025Doug Brown
I recently found myself needing to change the monitor that a cheap HDMI “dummy plug” pretended to be. It was a random one I had bought on Amazon several years ago that acted as a 4K monitor, and I needed it to be something simpler that didn’t support a 4K resolution. The story behind why […]
- Please don’t ship heavy, fragile vintage computers. They will be destroyed.May 25, 2025Doug Brown
As part of my research into the Macintosh Performa 550’s factory recovery partition, I paid a lot of attention to eBay listings for these computers. I came to an interesting discovery that I had already suspected: big CRT-based Macs in this form factor are regularly damaged in shipping after being sold on eBay. Most vintage […]
- How I fixed the infamous Basilisk II Windows “Black Screen” bug in 2013May 15, 2025Doug Brown
I’ve been noticing a lot of fun stories lately about bugs in old software that suddenly showed up in newer Windows versions. For example, here’s an excellent writeup by Silent about a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that laid dormant until Windows 11 24H2 came out. MattKC also recently posted a cool video […]
- Apple’s long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been foundMar 15, 2025Doug Brown
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time, I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of […]
- The gooey rubber that’s slowly ruining old hard drivesMar 02, 2025Doug Brown
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, […]
- The invalid 68030 instruction that accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to successfully boot upJan 25, 2025Doug Brown
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction. I’ve been playing around with MAME a lot lately. […]