Tom and Lisa's Weird Web Page

Sometimes I am consumed by the need to make something without that much value.  I think "44 Special" falls into that category.

First, here is the victim, with most of his parts spread out.  Can you name this victim ?

When I get a new computer I always take it apart, heck that is half the fun to being a mad scientist.

So what is 44 Special ?

One day, I was struck by the idea of taking an old Quadra 800 and souping it up to make something interesting.  I wanted to increase the CPU speed to 40 MHz, and add a 486 DOS card to it.  Then, I would paint the whole thing and figure out what to do with it, at some later point.  The 44 Special name comes from having a 68040 CPU at 40 MHz with a 486 DOS card in it.  Cheesy, huh ?  It just happens to have 40 Megs of RAM on the mac side, go figure.

So, I bought a used Quadra 800, a Quadra 840 AV motherboard with the 40 MHz CPU, and took a DOS card from a Powermac 6100 DOS compatible.

If you see on one my other pages (Dos Card), I found out you can replace the 486 on the card with a better CPU, like a Cyrix GP100 I bought on ebay at a later date.  You might ask, "how does a DOS card from a 6100 work in a Quadra 800 ?"  Well, the DOS card fits into the PDS slot, and the 6100 uses an angle adapter to make it fit.  For a Quadra machine, the card goes right into the slot directly.

I also had to find a video extender as the card wasn't long enough to have the video socket match up to the back slot exit.  I was able to find a card that snaps onto the rear of the DOS card to get it long enough.  In the picture above, the bottom card is what you use in a 610/6100 chassis (without the CPU).  The top card has the Cyrix CPU on it and the extender card.  If you don't have the extender card you could probably just make an extension cable yourself from parts.  Or you could just run the cable into the case.

For some reason I had a hell of a time getting the DOS card set up.  Every time I boot, it gives me three beeps, which I cant figure out is good or bad.  I also found out, that if you don't select "fade out" when switching between DOS to mac, the screen gets video artifacts.  Odd, but now I just keep the "fade" on.  I finally got it set up and I have one drive for the mac and one drive for the PC.  I loaded DOS then Windoze 95 on to it.  Its no speed demon, buts its not a total slug, either.  Windows is funny.  Every now and then the PC side doesn't start up properly.  I know this isn't s hardware thing as I swapped around different parts.

For the Quadra 800 motherboard, I removed the stock 33 MHz CPU and replaced it with a 40 MHz part I removed from a Quadra 840 AV motherboard (why not use the Q840 AV motherboard ? - it doesn't have a PDS slot).  I then replaced the oscillator that controls the CPU speed with one that would run the CPU at its rated 40 MHz speed.

The case, I decided to paint 2 colors, using Rust-Oleum spray primer.  Forest Green and Grey Primer were the 2 colors I chose.  I pained the bottom, the back and the front case green, and the sides and top grey.

I made sure to put masking tape over the spots I didn't want painted, like the Apple logo.  Although I am no Picasso, I think it came out OK.

It took me a while to get everything painted OK, but finally I got everything done.  It took a while to put back together (let's face it, the Q800/8100/8500 case has to be the worst case Apple ever designed).

Now that its done, I am not sure what to do with it.  It was fun to put together though.