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About to get my first Mac : a Performa 5200

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BogdanV

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Joined
Jan 18, 2010
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42
To be frank, I've never been a fan of Apple's post-PowerPC era products but I've always been fascinated by their earlier computers. It so happens that I stumbled upon someone willing to sell a Performa 5200 together with a batch of documents in the town I'm currently spending my university time.
This would be the first time I've ever bought a non-intel, old computer but common sense should be able to guide me through.

Unfortunately the person selling it has no images of it and seems open on price offers. Now, I can meet him/her directly and see for myself, so that shouldn't be a problem but I'm worried about getting a deal on the price as I'm pretty much low on cash. I can't afford spending more than 20 pounds (~25 euros / ~35 US dollars) on it. If I could get it less, that would be even better.

You folks have a lot more experience on this one, so, what would be a decent price on a supposedly working 5200 Performa Macintosh + documentation ? Would I stand a chance at buying it for <=20 pounds ?
 
20 pounds is on the high side of what the thing is worth. Do not feel bad about walking away if you can't get it for less than that.

In fact, I personally wouldn't buy it at any price... the 5200/6200 series were pretty terrible machines. It was a hacked-together and thoroughly crippled design, and not only were they slow, they were also quite unstable. They may be of interest to avid Apple collectors, but for something to actually use, it is definitely not the sort of machine that would leave a newcomer with a good impression of PPC Macs.
 
Thanks for the links !
I've read some articles complaining about its design but I didn't expect THAT ! Out of curiosity, what kind of memory is used to store the ROM and are there any ROM images out there ? I know this last question might be a tad bit touchy with piracy and such but as far as I can tell, it wouldn't take much to ruin the entire system because of a random bit that got corrupted.

Nonetheless I'll keep talking to the seller and see what else I can find. If nothing else, I can use it for my PS1 as I only have a laptop with me.
 
I'd take it if it were free, but I wouldn't pay money for a 5200. If you only have £20, I'd use it to buy a G3. Heck, you might even be able to get an early model G4.
 
I picked up a Power Macintosh/Performa 5500-225 (also known as the Power Macintosh ONE here in the UK) back in the summer off of fleabay for just 99 pence plus 10 miles worth of petrol. I probably wouldn't have spent much more than that, certainly not £20 anyway.

Mine didn't have a hard drive - soon remedied with a 20gb drive from my scrap box, just need an OS now.
 
Apparently the owner seems to be clueless about the computer. I guess I'll only find out if I see for myself.
As for buying a G3, I was thinking about that but I've got no car to pick stuff up. I'd have to spend 3 times the product's price on shipping haha. Train/coach tickets usually cost me about as much (if not more) than shipping, unless I'm doing something horribly wrong, and they don't seem to travel everywhere.

I'm pretty much stuck with the town I live in and anything that's within reasonable cycling distance.
 
Wouldn't hurt to poke around at the university. Their IT guys might have a few old Macs hanging around. My work still has a few G3s and G4s sitting around (I didn't have the heart to chuck them into recycling.)
 
That's awesome. I remember checking them if they have some old monitors gathering dust (kind of hard to model stuff using a laptop screen) and their answer was negative. Will see if the same holds true for old macs.

Anyway, I've decided to check the Performa out and see it for myself this Sunday / next Monday. Truth be told, this is a unique piece of engineering because its so messed up. I honestly haven't heard of such a bad design ever haha, so yeah, it might just well fit in the "its so bad its good category".

On the other hand, I might just get a Newton off ebay if prices don't get too high. Sadly, its the MP110 model which has no backlight if I'm not mistaken. Maybe some newer gen model pops-up in the meantime.
 
The 5200 (uses the same board as the 6200) was a 603 @ 75mHz. Pretty bad as it was crioppled by the Motherboard design, uses 72 pin SIMMS and is 32 bit addressing (should be 64 bit). Video was crippled as well, displaying only 800x600.
 
i just picked up one of these yesterday for $2. running OS 8.1 it doesnt seem to run to terribly slow. i do get slight stuttering and small graphics issues when playing Full Throttle which is odd since the pc exeeds the requierments.

It seems like the plastic is made of peanut brittle though as is snaps and crumbles when any force or pressure is applied. such as the side grills, taking off the back pannel, even the volume buttons on the front snapped when i tried to adjust the volume.
 
BogdanV said:
To be frank, I've never been a fan of Apple's post-PowerPC era products but I've always been fascinated by their earlier computers. It so happens that I stumbled upon someone willing to sell a Performa 5200 together with a batch of documents in the town I'm currently spending my university time.
This would be the first time I've ever bought a non-intel, old computer but common sense should be able to guide me through.

Unfortunately the person selling it has no images of it and seems open on price offers. Now, I can meet him/her directly and see for myself, so that shouldn't be a problem but I'm worried about getting a deal on the price as I'm pretty much low on cash. I can't afford spending more than 20 pounds (~25 euros / ~35 US dollars) on it. If I could get it less, that would be even better.

You folks have a lot more experience on this one, so, what would be a decent price on a supposedly working 5200 Performa Macintosh + documentation ? Would I stand a chance at buying it for <=20 pounds ?
Click to expand...

Low-end Mac rates them as a "road-apple". I had one that was given to me a few years ago. It is a perfect example of the cynical mindset at Apple. It is intentionally crippled and uses a slightly modified board designed for a 68040 machine. It has an 8 bit IDE controller and only a 32 bit bus for its CPU. The Serial port doesn't support handshaking. Their only use is as parts to fix '040 Performas with bad cases.

Here is a pretty in-depth article on their massive suckage.
 
Turns out the seller actually had a Performa 5320, not a 5200, although, as far as I can tell, the only difference is the processor.
I ended up buying it eventually for 8 pounds together with a ton of original CDs (which include a 7.5.3 System disk, ClarisWorks and Myst amongst other things).

Also managed to grab two 72-pin SIMMs for 2 pounds (almost free really, 2 pounds is the shipping haha) to upgrade the RAM to 32MB as I'd like to install 8.1 on it. Aparently the system hasn't been wiped clean. Seems to have been used exclusively by a small kid since its full of your typical 8+ games.
Oddly enough, it has Photoshop 3 and 4 installed. Photoshop 3 is actually quite a interesting piece of history as it doesn't seem to have layers functionality implemented !

The system itself is quite fast. A bit annoying to work with, though, if you want to do some advanced configuring. Oddly enough, I quite like the sound scheme !

Anyway, here's some pics with it :

P0215_131112.jpg P0216_131112.jpg P0219_141112.jpg

I have to say, the size of the L2 cache literally shocked me. And the thin heatsink above the CPU.
 
BogdanV said:
Turns out the seller actually had a Performa 5320, not a 5200, although, as far as I can tell, the only difference is the processor.
I ended up buying it eventually for 8 pounds together with a ton of original CDs (which include a 7.5.3 System disk, ClarisWorks and Myst amongst other things).
Click to expand...

Yeah, this machine is still the same board as the 5300, so Still a Road apple. But for ~$13 you didn't really get shafted. Don't be terribly surprised if 8.1 slows it down. and 9.1 would bring it to a standstill. You can upgrade it with a 6360 motherboard and power supply and get past the crippled mainboard.
 
So what were the good machines from that era? It seems like there's this period between the end of the 68k macs, and the G3/4/5 era where Apple really sucked. Is there a "classic" pre-G3 powermac?

I have a G4 and an SE/30 (and a IIgs), it's kind of a leap from 16MHz to 800MHz, what should I look for to fill that gap?
 
Hatta said:
So what were the good machines from that era? It seems like there's this period between the end of the 68k macs, and the G3/4/5 era where Apple really sucked. Is there a "classic" pre-G3 powermac?

I have a G4 and an SE/30 (and a IIgs), it's kind of a leap from 16MHz to 800MHz, what should I look for to fill that gap?
Click to expand...


The guys at Low-end Mac have the Tech specs and everything for the PowerPC machines here Give those a look.

Any of the 8XX0 machines are nice. If you are space constrained and not terribly interested in tossing a bunch of cards in, the 61XX machines are small, common and cheap. Some come with DOS cards and 486. I've got a 6100 machine upgraded with a 400 MHz PDS card and 256 mb of RAM that runs OS 9.1 quite well.

And, honestly, an Early G3 iMac might fit well in your collection. As much as I hate them. Most folks are just about giving them away, you can set them up for OSX and OS9, so they make an excellent bridge machine.
 
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The PowerSurge platform machines were the best of the PPC series in terms of speed and expansions. 8 DIMM slots for 1GB of RAM and CPUs on a card, along with 3 or 6 PCI slots (95/9600 only). OS support is System 7.5.3 thru MacOS X 10.4 (with XPostFacto and G3/G4 CPU). They also came with nice features like video capture and video out. Find a 7300/7500/7600/8500/8600/9500/9600 machine, those are the ones to get. Avoid the 7200 with its soldered in CPU.
 
The PowerSurge platform machines were the best of the PPC series in terms of speed and expansions.
Click to expand...

Yep, they are quite versatile machines.

The only problem with them is the strange memory they take. It's a bit tough to find 5V buffered non-ECC FPM DIMMs these days. Not a big deal if you find one that's already well-equipped, but it's a bit more troublesome if you get one that hasn't ever been upgraded.
 
Old Thrashbarg said:
Yep, they are quite versatile machines.

The only problem with them is the strange memory they take. It's a bit tough to find 5V buffered non-ECC FPM DIMMs these days. Not a big deal if you find one that's already well-equipped, but it's a bit more troublesome if you get one that hasn't ever been upgraded.
Click to expand...

OWC still sells the DIMMs at $12.99 a pop for 128MB (max size the machine can take). Availability surprisingly isn't a problem, but like any other vintage memory types, prices can be high.
 
Just got my 32MB of RAM today. Oddly enough, I think installing Internet Explorer 3 (?) just borked Finder. Good news is that the new memory seems to be working fine.

Guys, could you point me to a list of all system/boot/etc keyboard shortcuts the 5320 uses ? I've tried checking other combinations from the net but it seems some of them have changed throughout time. I wouldn't want to brick my computer accidentally.

One other thing, the docs you have linked in this thread don't mention anything about special keyboard shortcuts/commands. I think I managed to trigger a debugger when I pressed COMMAND + POWER. I only entered 'help' thinking it should give me some info but nothing happened so I had to power off the system manually. Booting again it would seem that the system can't find any bootable OS (floppy with blinking question mark).

I'll use the stock recovery tools I've got but I'll probably need to find out the keyboard combination to boot from CD. For what its worth, the optical drive is a AppleCD 600i.
 
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