Downtowndougbrown

I'm no stranger to pushing hardware past its limits. For example, seven years ago, I tracked down an issue that prevented 16 GB of RAM being used in a motherboard that only supported 8. It ended up being a one-line GRUB hack to fix one of the ACPI tables

Yesterday, for the first time in about a year, I tried powering on the Macintosh Performa 450 (LC III) from my past writeup about Apple's backwards capacitor. It didn't work. The screen was black, it played the startup sound, and then immediately followed

This post is about the original OMAP3530 BeagleBoard from 2008. Yes, the one so old that it doesn't even show up in the board list on BeagleBoard.org anymore. The BeagleBoard, not the BeagleBone. During my Chumby 8 kernel escapades, at one point I ran int

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I rescued a special recovery partition from an old Macintosh Performa 550's dead hard drive. This partition had been lost to time and it was a race to try to save it before the remaining Performa 550 machines out there

I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3's ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now. This story starts with me on a lazy Sunday using Hex Fiend in conjunction with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM

I recently found myself needing to change the monitor that a cheap HDMI "dummy plug" pretended to be. It was a random one I had bought on Amazon several years ago that acted as a 4K monitor, and I needed it to be something simpler that didn't support a 4K

As part of my research into the Macintosh Performa 550's factory recovery partition, I paid a lot of attention to eBay listings for these computers. I came to an interesting discovery that I had already suspected: big CRT-based Macs in this form factor ar

I've been noticing a lot of fun stories lately about bugs in old software that suddenly showed up in newer Windows versions. For example, here's an excellent writeup by Silent about a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that laid dormant until Windows 11

In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time, I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it.