Downtown Doug Brown

Last year, I bought a Macintosh Performa 410 on eBay. I wasn’t expecting it to be special in any way. The main reason I was interested in it was because I suspected it would have originally come with System 7.1P3, which was a weird Performa-specific OS version that nobody had preserved at the time. If you haven’t figured it out by now after reading my posts, I care a lot about software preservation. History matters!

When it arrived, I anxiously dumped its hard drive contents and booted it up in MAME. Luckily the original Quantum hard drive in this thing still hasn’t succumbed to the sticky rubber of death! I ended up being correct about it having the elusive System 7.1P3 version, and not only that, it was very lightly used. It appeared that the previous owner had mostly just used it for word processing in ClarisWorks and nothing else.

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Last year, I repaired an NZXT Signal 4K30 USB capture device that I bought on eBay for cheap. It was completely dead, and the cause turned out to be a bad solder joint on an inductor, which prevented power from getting to a crucial part of the board.

After I fixed it, I tried using it to capture signals from a bunch of different HDMI source devices to make sure it worked correctly. As I said in my last post about it:

 I did find one 720p60 HDMI source that it doesn’t like — the captured video shows up as pink and green.

In that post, I also pointed to a few Reddit threads (1, 2) where similar issues had been observed on a PS5 and Nintendo Switch, respectively.

Here’s a snapshot of what captured video looked like from the one HDMI source that it didn’t like:

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