Apple Macintosh Performa Restoration

Hi there, I’m Joe Tooman – a tech enthusiast who grew up in the 80s playing with TRS-80 and Commodore computers. These days, I’m employed by Dell as an administrator of a customer experience management platform, but I also enjoy volunteering my spare time at the museum. Recently, I’ve been documenting my work for Bill Degnan, who runs the museum. My latest project involves restoring a vintage Macintosh Performa 6300CD, which unfortunately has a faulty power supply. In addition to the computer itself, I’ll also be restoring the accompanying keyboard, mouse, and monitor. And because I can’t resist the urge to optimize, I’ll be maxing out the system to its full potential.

Restored Apple Macintosh Performa 6300CD as exhibited in Kennett Classic Computer Museum on March 4, 2023

The Apple Macintosh 6300CD Restoration

The Macintosh 6300CD, graciously donated by Kent A. Sallee of Kennett Square, PA, was released in January 1996 with a 100Mhz PowerPC 603e processor. It came with 16MB of RAM (max of 64MB), a 1.2GB hard drive, a 1.44MB floppy drive and ran Mac System 7.5.1 OS. Unfortunately, the power supply failed in a dramatic way leaving a scorch mark on the inside of the case. This left me with the option of replacing or repairing the power supply. Since working on high voltage equipment is not my forte, I opted to replace the power supply with a working one.

Macintosh Performa 6300CD – Before restoration. The case was already in beautiful condition, so all that was needed was a thorough cleaning to get it looking like new.

The Apple Macintosh 6360 – Parts donor

Shopping around for replacement power supplies, I found it more economical to just buy a replacement Performa from eBay — sometimes individual parts cost more than a complete system. The model I purchased was a Macintosh Performa 6360. As pictured below, the case was in rough shape but it had a working power supply. Another bonus of the 6360 was that it was the first Performa model to include a new system architecture including a PCI slot and faster DIMM-based memory. Released in October of 1996, it has a PowerPC 603e 160Mhz processor and supported up to 136MB of RAM. 8MB of RAM was included with the system. It also had a Comm Slot II that opened up the possibility of adding an ethernet card to the machine.

6360 purchased on eBay that was listed as “powers up.” That’s all I needed to know. As an added bonus, it was fully operational minus a working hard drive. (Picture from the eBay auction post)

So my plan evolved to use the soon-to-be pristine case from the Performa 6300CD and the more powerful internal components of the Performa 6360.

Below you can visually see the difference between the two motherboards. The first is the 6300CD and the second the 6360. The 6360 wasn’t stored in a temperature controlled environment so it does have some surface rust on the metal parts. This is not surprising considering the shape the case was in. You can also see the the two 64MB 168-pin DIMMs of the 6360 compared to the two 32MB 72-pin SIMMs of the 6300CD. It is important to note that the DIMM’s need to have a 2K refresh rate. Here are the specifications: 64MB Buffered 168-pin FPM DIMM 60ns 5v Parity 2K Refresh Rate. There is also a riser for the PCI slot that will soon be populated with a PCI card with two USB 1.1 ports.

6300CD motherboard. 4.5v clock battery missing. The board is in mint condition compared to the cosmetic surface rust on the 6360 motherboard.

6360 motherboard. PCI slot and Comm Slot II populated with a rare 10Mbps twisted-pair ethernet card (pictured below) and two 64MB DIMMs. Clock battery was dead and was replaced with a 4.5v Alkaline Computer Battery from Parts Express.

Performa 6360 maxed out at 136MB of RAM. Life is good. 🙂

Network Support

It is my desire to have any computer I restore to be able to connect to the network. It took a lot of hunting, but I was able to find an affordable Apple Ethernet CS II Twisted-Pair Card. It uses Comm Slot II which is a glorified PCI slot.

Once the ethernet card is in place, the next step was to plug a WiFi extender into the port so that the Mac didn’t have to be hard wired into the network. I have had good luck with the Pix-Link Wi-Fi Range Extender. It can be found on Amazon and is meant for smart TVs that only have an ethernet port that you want to Wifi enable. I plan to use one of the USB ports I am adding to power it.

Pix-Link Wi-Fi Range Extender — plugs into the Ethernet port on the Performa and gets its power from USB. I have it configured to use a static IP that I add to the Performa’s TCP/IP configuration.

USB Support

One of my goals was to add USB support to the Performa 6360 motherboard via the PCI slot. Many of the posts I read on doing this recommended the Belkin F5U005 PCI USB Card. I found one on eBay for $6.99. When you install the card, remove the PCI riser first, insert the card, and then replace the riser in the PCI slot. The drivers supporting the card are already built into OS 9.1. However, Mac USB drivers aren’t automatically installed if you add the card after the OS installation. To add them after-the-fact, refer to this thread on how to do it. It involves extracting six files from the OS 9.1 CD using a utility called TomeViewer. The files are:

HID Library
Serial ShimLib
USB Device Extension
USB Mass Storage Support
USB Software Locator
USB Support

The extracted files need to be copied to your System Folder/Extensions folder and then the computer needs to be rebooted. If you were successful, the USB card will show up in your system profiler as shown below. To test things out, I inserted a 4GB thumb drive in the USB port and it showed up as a drive on the desktop! Having USB ports also gives me a place to power the USB WiFi extender mentioned above. The extended only uses the USB port for power and nothing else.

Belin F5U005 PCI card inserted into the 6360 Motherboard PCI riser. Remove the riser first and insert the card or you can do damage.

Now the Performa 6360 has two USB ports. OS 9.1 will only give you USB 1.1 speeds however.

If the drivers are installed correctly, you should see “USB card” listed in Slot A1 in the Apple System Profiler.

Operating System Image Downloads

One of the challenges you will encounter is how to get software on the Mac Performa. Luckily, I have a G4 iMac 800mhz that runs both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. In Mac OS X, I download the software I need to use and burn it to a CD-R. This is before I had the USB PCI card installed (see above). With that in place, I could have used a thumb drive instead of burning CDs.

Almost all the software that I have needed I have downloaded from MacRepository.org. To download disk images, you will need to pay a $10 membership fee. The process is to first install 7.5.3, then upgrade to 8.6 and finally upgrade to 9.1. 9.1 was the last compatible version of Mac OS for the 6360.

Macintosh_7.5.3.Performa_6300_6400.iso (Archive.org)

MacOS_86.toast.sit (MacRepository.org)

Mac_OS_9.1.sit (MacRepository.org)

Utilities

To mount toast, iso, dsk images, use Virtual CD/DVD-ROM Utility (MacRepository.org)

In System 7.5.3, to uncompress sit and bin files, use Stuffit Deluxe 5.0 (MacRepository.org)

In System 8.6 and 9.1, to uncompress sit and bin files, use Stuffit Deluxe Standard Edition 7.03 (MacRepository.org)

Cloned Backup Drive

Considering the 20+ year old Quantum Fireball 2GB IDE drive will fail eventually, I prepared a 4GB SSD drive clone that will mount in the same spot as the internal hard drive.

4GB SSD Drive with the tan Macintosh Performa drive rail installed that will slide right in the spot where the internal IDE hard drive currently resides. I surrounded the SSD adapter with the IDE ribbon cable to protect it from shorting out if it makes contact with the metal drive bay. The SSD adapter comes with no cables so I included everything you will need below.

Parts:

StarTech.com 40/44 IDE to Compact Flash SSD Adapter. Model#: IDE2CF (Amazon)
Verbatim 4GB CompactFlash Memory Card, Model#: 95188 Black (Amazon)
Kentek 6 Inch 6″ 4 Pin Molex 5.25 Male to 4 Pin 3.5 Floppy Drive FDD Female M/F IDE DC Internal Computer PC Power Cable Adapter Cord (Amazon)
SABRENT 2.5 Inch to 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Disk Drive Mounting Bracket Kit (BK-HDDH) (Amazon)
ZRM&E 30cm IDE Female to Male Hard Disk Cable 40 Pins IDE Extension Flexible Flat Cable for 3.5 Inch IDE Interface Hard Drive, 5.25 Inch IDE CD and DVD Compatible (Amazon)
Drive Rail — I had an extra one but you can remove the existing one from the internal drive.
A couple motherboard standoffs to mount the Flash SSD Adapter to the Mounting Bracket. I used standoffs with female ends so I could secure them between the mounting bracket and SSD adapter with screws on both sides.

To clone the drive, I used an USB to IDE adapter that I already owned. I just plugged the USB cable into a USB port on the PCI card I installed in the documentation above. When the Macintosh detects the drive, it will prompt you to initialize it. It may be the case that the Macintosh thinks the un-initialized drive is unsupported and won’t initialize it connected to USB. In that case, you will need to plug it into the IDE ribbon cable and initialize it using the OS 9.1 boot CD. After that, just drag the contents of the internal drive to the USB drive to start the copy process. It is important to initialize the drive using the same version of OS as your internal drive so that the correct drivers are added to the drive. Otherwise, it won’t be bootable.

Swapping the drives:

Please refer to the “Taking Apart” section of the Performa 6200/6300 Series Service Manual for detailed instructions on how to remove the front cover, drive security bracket and the drive itself. Below are some pictures of the process.

Shutdown the computer and remove the drive bezel.

Remove the drive security bracket (one screw)

Unplug the cables and slide out the IDE hard drive

Slide in the IDE SSD drive and connect the cables. Power the computer on to verify the OS boots and then shutdown to reassemble the computer. Make a new clone so you have a backup.

The Keyboard and Mouse

Keyboard and mouse before retro-brighting

Keyboard and Mouse after retro-brighting. The process involved disassembling the keyboard and applying Sally Beauty Supply SalonCare 40 peroxide solution, covering with cling wrap and then placing in the sun. Here is an article with the details: https://happymacs.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/yellowing-retr0bright-and-sally-beauty-supply/

Apple M9102LLD Monitor

Monitor front enclosure before its bath. The bath involved placing the monitor enclosure in the utility sink and using Dawn dishsoap, a sponge and a magic eraser to remove the caked on dirt.

Monitor front enclosure after retro-brighting. Much improved but not as good as I hoped for. I think I won’t use plastic wrap on a monitor anymore for retro-brighting because of all the different surfaces and angles that need to be covered. The color is a little blotchy in spots.

Rear monitor enclosure before cleaning, retro-brighting and repair of the cracks

Rear monitor enclosure after cleaning, retro-brighting and gluing. Credit to my neighbor, Michael Cooke for his glue work. I did run into an issue though — I had never retro-brighted something so big and the heat of the lamp I used warped the top middle of the enclosure. Lesson learned — wait until warmer weather to retro-bright large objects outside instead of indoors.

The Restoration is Complete!

After over a month of work, the restoration is now complete! The Performa will now take its place in the Kennett Classic Computer Museum and hopefully others will enjoy it as much as I did. Here are some pictures of the completed restoration.