Posted 2025-11-17 | Back to blog index
Years ago I came across this IIcx for cheap and picked it up since I wanted a machine that could run System 6, which I haven't used since my childhood family Mac Classic.
It was sold as not working, so I of course recapped the logic board. Unfortunately, this changed nothing, so I put it on a shelf with a note to “recap power supply” in the future.
Well yesterday was the future so I plugged it in and turned it on to check some voltages and… uh… it turned on??
The display output (it has the stock Macintosh Display Card) has this green tint. Not sure what is going on there, there are 68kmla posts blaming it in sync-on-green.
I also have a Duo Dock (that I bought because there was also a Duo on sale for really cheap but by the time I had bought the Dock the Duo was sold and I haven't seen one under $100 since), that has some unidentified NuBus cards in it, so I pulled those out, and one was a graphics card!
The HDD that came with the IIcx was dead (it spins up, clicks once but then nothing), but it turns out the Duo Dock also had a 160 MB Quantum HDD in it and that one works!
It also turns out the graphics card is an Interware GrandVimage 21i populated with 3 MB of VRAM, a really high-end card. It can do 1024x768@millions of colors with some form of acceleration.
The IIcx also appears to have 20 MB of RAM installed.
After a few false starts with HD SC Setup and SCSI Director, I finally partitioned the HDD with FWB HD Toolkit and installed System 6.0.7 off of floppies.
It has no problems getting on GlobalTalk without any fuss!
So that IO-Data NAS from 2005 that claimed it only supported MacOS 8.1+? I can mount it and copy files off it just fine using the AppleShare from System 6! But the disk shows up as locked so I can't copy files *to* it.
Came in super handy to copy Stuffit etc on here!
Right now I have it set down to 800x600 SVGA (hence the blurry screen photos) since my LCD monitor is really not happy trying to sync to the 1024x768 output; 9/10 times it syncs the image all squished and washed out and none of the OSD controls can fix it.
I've tried all kinds of things, switching DE-15 adapters, switching VGA cables, changing the refresh rate to 60 Hz, nothing works.
Dropped by HARD OFF to pick up a different monitor to test, ended up with this Lenovo ThinkVision L1900p for 550 yen. (Also got some PhoneNet cables while I was there)
Came home, hooked it up, pin-sharp 1280x1024! No problems! The old CCFL backlight is turning a bit yellow but I'll just call it a built-in night mode.
Running System 6 at this massive resolution is absolutely decadent!!
