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Side channel video: baby AT repair (Patreon)

Published:
2025-01-04 18:25:27
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Hey everyone, Happy New Year. I had some cool fantasies about having a new main channel video out in time for New Year's Day, would have been neat if that worked out but it didn't, that video ended up requiring a bunch more research, will hopefully be soon.However, I did get a fun new computer that I felt deserved to be documented before potentially getting scattered to the four winds, and was so motivated by the end of that process that I actually decided to try to fix it up, and made a lot more progress than I expected. Thought you all might enjoy seeing that, so here it is.This is a side channel video, so as usual I've already released it, just wanted to make sure you didn't miss it. Thanks for watching!

Files

baby at teardown & repair

Comments

Travis Noble

I've never heard the term ATAPI used outside of talking about PowerMac G4s, it was very interesting to hear the history behind it. Thanks Gravis!

J Brandt Buckley

Curious when did it come up WRT the Power Mac G4? I worked for an Apple VAR back in that era, but my memory of the early 00s is getting fuzzy.

cathoderaydude

Well, they did use IDE attached optical drives, which all would have been ATAPI, so it's not uncommon to see that specified in regards to hardware compatibility etc - though by the time the machine hit the market it would have been very very hard to find a drive that wasn't atapi

Travis Noble

@J Brandt Buckley It's been awhile but if I remember correctly the System Profiler lists ATAPI as the bus instead of IDE (or ATA), which is what I expected it to say. I guess I just assumed it was Apple's own name for IDE or something and never really bothered to look in to it. (This, I'm sure, wasn't specific to the G4 line, that's just what I had at the time).

adorfer

ESCOM in Germany was selling all black PCs as their brand identity starting from around 1990 until they went bancrupt, partly due to the ill fated acquisition of Commodore.

adorfer

the early IDE interface Was just buffered ISA bus IO, minus the address decoding (just a few io addresses fixed by jumpers), no RAM access either.

adorfer

ATAPI was a common term on OS/2 too.

adorfer

the vlb combo cards were prone to fail. they kept dying like flies, we swapped them by the dozen back in the days. they probably lacked any ESD protection.

J Brandt Buckley

For shits, giggles, and nostalgia, I fired up an old Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio). [Here's a screenshot of System Profiler and Disk Utility.](https://i.imgur.com/dN7o0xb.png) Sure enough, it mentions ATAPI under the DVD and Zip drives.

Loading_M_

Quick note on whether the CD drive came with adapter cards - I would have assumed they would at the time (although I wouldn't put it past a company in 2025). That being said, from other comments, it sounds like the adapter cards were more of just an adapter, and the drives more or less just spoke ISA, so including the adapter would have been quite cheap. Also, they likely thought people would prefer to plug in via the sound card, since it reduced the number of cards needed total. As a case in point, it looks like the PC you were working in was full, so combining cards would have made a ton of sense.