There are lots to choose from, and many of them are dirt cheap on the used market.īecause the battery is soldered to the motherboard, a dead battery might be a good excuse for replacing your Mac II with a IIfx.
Since you probably have 8 MB or less in your Mac II, the fact that the IIfx uses 64-bit SIMMs instead of 30-pin SIMMs isn’t a big factor. This provides roughly 3x the speed of your old Mac II, a SuperDrive, and usually 8-16 MB RAM and an 80-160 MB hard drive.
In any case, you can easily move your video card and other accessories to the new computer. You can buy a Mac IIx that already includes SuperDrive support for under US$20 these days – and a “wicked fast” 40 MHz IIfx for not much more. Upgrade AdviceĬonsidering the cost of upgrading a Mac II to accept more than 8 MB RAM, you are probably better off completely replacing it. The ray-traced image to the right was created on a Cray supercomputer to show off the Mac II’s impressive color capabilities.
With the upgrade and appropriate software it can work with 3.5” DOS disks in addition to 800K and 1.4 MB Mac disks. The Mac II was introduced before Apple adopted SuperDrive floppies* and was never shipped with them a Mac II must be upgraded to support an FDHD (floppy drive, high density, 1.4 MB) drive and high density floppies. The Mac II was the first Mac that could be turned on using the power key on the keyboard. Running in 32-bit mode requires Mode32 (search the linked page for “mode32″). Although advertised as a 32-bit computer, the Mac II ROMs were “dirty,” containing some 24-bit code. Other video cards supported different resolutions and bit-depths. Using Apple’s video card, the Mac II supported 8-bit/256-color video at 640 x 480 pixels in an era where DOS users felt spoiled with 64-color EGA (640 x 350 pixels). Options include two 800K floppy drives and a hard drive as big as 5.25″. Rolled out in March 1987 along with the compact Mac SE, the Mac II was the first modular Mac – a revolutionary change in the Macintosh line (so revolutionary that it had to be kept secret from Steve Jobs, who loved the simplicity of all-in-one designs).