Power Macintosh 7200/120

#1 Fri, 19 Jun 2015 - 05:46

I recently picked up a few Macs from a recycling center. This is one of the ones I setup in my office. I needed a new hard drive and a good cleaning but other than that it works well. I have 3 others just like it that I will end up selling to a good home. Plays Diablo very well

Had to hook up the Floppy Emulator to the internal Floppy Drive cable to get 7.5.5 installed on it.

Is there a trick to burning CDs that work on this thing? Can I use my modern Mac?

#2 Sat, 20 Jun 2015 - 23:23

Burn the CD's at very low speeds, burn them at the slowest speed your drive supports (and even then, support is hit and miss at best)

#3 Mon, 22 Jun 2015 - 19:08

There's an accelerator card for this model on sale in the Trading Post.

#4 Mon, 22 Jun 2015 - 23:43

Also, if you use Toast, enable Legacy Formats in Prefs and then use Mac OS Standard for the disc format.

#5 Fri, 26 Jun 2015 - 17:53

If you want the G3 accelerator card for your new 7200, let me know. Its small so shipping to Canada should not be too horrible.

I really liked my 7200 until the plastics started crumbling around it. When I merged my collection into one home I had to let it go.

#6 Sat, 27 Jun 2015 - 16:21

Use CD-Rs, preferably 650MB.

#7 Sat, 27 Jun 2015 - 23:54

I like to check a flaky or unknown drive with a commercial (pressed, not burned) audio CD. If it won't play without skipping, the drive may be toasted or require thorough cleaning.

#8 Sun, 28 Jun 2015 - 01:06

I haven't found speed to affect burning. However, TransMac (with good images) tends to be very effective (via Windows). That's not always true. I've had really weird burn failures also; I've never been able to systematically track why.

I think the Toast option mentioned may only be relevant to pre-10.5; and if you have a modern Mac with 10.4 or below that'll probably be a flawless method (I don't think I've had problems using the Superdrive on my G4).

#9 Mon, 29 Jun 2015 - 00:04

CD-RWs won't work!

#10 Mon, 29 Jun 2015 - 02:04

Speed affects older drives. The SegaCD won't read discs not burned at 2x or slower, for example.