Thursday, August 05, 2004
6200 and SoundJam
I had accumulated 3 of the road-apple 6200 models plus a 4th one that doesn't work, and was wondering what to do with them. A teacher wanted a Mac to run AppleWorks, so I got one out and did some experiments. Since I really like iTunes 2, I put 64M on it and OS 9.1, then iTunes. Bottom line, iTunes really does not work on this hardware. So it is OS 8.6 for this model which really runs well. And doesn't need so much RAM, so I went back to 32M (2x16) and save my 32M SIMMs for other projects.
The 6200 is regarded as a road-apple mainly because of the bizarre I/O architecture, which prevents you from using any modern external modem (no modem control lines). Since I knew the teacher would not be needing a modem, I chose this model for her. I put in an LC slot ethernet card (Farallon) which seems to work fine with the Apple driver. This disables the printer port (but the modem port is still usable). A comm slot ethernet card will disable the modem port.
To see if this model could be a music/tv machine, I grabbed another 6200 and went searching for an alternative to iTunes. The best was SoundJam MP free, which I had to download from some place in Russia. It works really well, except each time you launch it there is a registration reminder. But the company is shut down and you can never register! The audio output is only 22k on these models, so even with speakers, sound is not as hifi as the 44k powermacs.
To finish this project, I plan to put the TV tuner card in (it already has the prerequisite video input card), and have a Mac that doubles as a TV and an MP3 player.
The 6200 is regarded as a road-apple mainly because of the bizarre I/O architecture, which prevents you from using any modern external modem (no modem control lines). Since I knew the teacher would not be needing a modem, I chose this model for her. I put in an LC slot ethernet card (Farallon) which seems to work fine with the Apple driver. This disables the printer port (but the modem port is still usable). A comm slot ethernet card will disable the modem port.
To see if this model could be a music/tv machine, I grabbed another 6200 and went searching for an alternative to iTunes. The best was SoundJam MP free, which I had to download from some place in Russia. It works really well, except each time you launch it there is a registration reminder. But the company is shut down and you can never register! The audio output is only 22k on these models, so even with speakers, sound is not as hifi as the 44k powermacs.
To finish this project, I plan to put the TV tuner card in (it already has the prerequisite video input card), and have a Mac that doubles as a TV and an MP3 player.
