Booting A 1989 Mac With Mario

As a new recruit to the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army, [dougg3] is really showing off his hardware hacking ability. He came up with a replacement ROM SIMM for his Mac IIci and made it play the Mario theme on boot instead of the normal chimes.

Swapping out the ROM in these old macs isn’t an uncommon procedure. On some 68k machines, there’s a SIMM slot to either replace or expand the soldered ROM. In fact, it’s fairly common to take the ROM SIMM out of a IIsi and put it in the king of kings computer to make an SE/30 32-bit clean. We’ve never seen a re-writable ROM SIMM for these old macs, so we’re pretty sure [dougg3] just spared a Mac IIsi from the dumpster.

Now that the entire 68k Liberation Army is clamoring for one of [dougg3]’s re-writable ROMs (we’ve got cash), the question of what to do with it comes up. Of course, SE/30s can now be 32-bit clean without installing MODE32 and new startup chimes can be added. We’d really like to see some hard-core ROM hacking going on, like installing a 68060 in a Quadra 950.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yen0omvBo2Y&w=470]

11 thoughts on “Booting A 1989 Mac With Mario

  1. Have those uberhording nuts (seriously like some of them brag about multiple storage sheds packed with old macs as their collection) gotten over their paranoia and allowed non members to even view their precious resource, let alone join it without submitting an application?

    1. There are lots of adapters out there which convert the Mac’s video output to standard VGA. Wiring diagrams are all over the net too. Most of them are just physical adapters with some jumpers to hard-set the resolution, but there are some which let you set it using the Monitors control panel.

      The next logical step is to replace the Sad Mac chimes with the Mario death sound effect!

      1. Yep — I’m using a Mac to VGA adapter with DIP switches. However, the IIci’s internal video is weird because it is sync on green and is not a standard VGA timing. It just so happens that the monitor I used supports it–I also tried another VGA LCD monitor which did not work with it.

    1. Yeah, it’s an insanely long boot time — I actually only did the long sound to test the expanded ROM capacity the SIMM provides. There are a few other videos on my channel of some shorter custom boot sounds on the IIci, like other Mac startup chimes.

  2. That’s damn cool. I’ve still got a CI stashed in the closet, just in case I think of something neat to do with/to it.

    An SE/30 was my first home system, six years before something in the analog side went south. But in the meantime, enjoyed printing papers with the power to crush the other kids, class code projects, playing with a literally borrowed copy of A/UX 2, and finally learning how to configure NetBSD from scratch.

  3. ah… the vintage loud as hell SCSI hard drives.

    +1 on a shorter boot times… ever run Win 3.1 on a 486 dx4 100? One 4meg stick of ram and that thing is in windows in under 5 seconds after the BIOS posts. (if you don’t have a CD drive or HIMEM.SYS set to test the ram that is… then it’s about 10 seconds) :D

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