Brainstorm Accelerator Installation

[lilliputian]

I just purchased an unused (and very reasonably priced!) Brainstorm Accelerator for a Macintosh Plus. However, it's just the accelerator and its various ancillary bits, new and uninstalled. I know there are pictures outlining how it's all supposed to go, but does anyone happen to have the official Brainstorm Plus dealer installation instructions? I actually have a copy of the User Manual, but for installation it simply states that it should only be done by a technician (naturally).

EDIT: I'm good with soldering, so no worries on that.

 

[lilliputian]

PS: I've scanned and uploaded the Brainstorm User's Guide for the Mac Plus to the Garden if anyone's interested:

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/brainstorm-accelerator

 

[JDW]

You know, I've largely forgotten the details about the upgrades I performed on my very first Mac back in the 80's. I only remember it started out as a 128K Mac, then got upgraded to a 512Ke and then a Plus, and I believe I added that very Brainstorm upgrade too. I eventually sold that machine to a co-worker while still in college, and put the proceeds toward the purchase of a Mac IIvx system, which in turn got upgraded a year later via a $1,000 motherboard swap to a Quadra 650. That's why I'm still pretty big on upgrades to this very day.

 

[lilliputian]

Hey, I'm still using a 2010 iMac as my primary machine. Thank goodness for OCLP!

 

[JDW]

2010 iMac running Sonoma? If so, how does it perform?

My wife has been using our late 2009 27" iMac with Intel i7 all these years. I bought the top end model at the time, which is why it's lasted so long, although I did have to bake the video card to keep it going. It's still working, but I've kept macOS High Sierra on it to ensure I don't need to deal with trouble associated with putting a new version of macOS on such old hardware. I really have zero time to spend on that. I needed a "set and forget" solution.

High Sierra still works well on that older Mac hardware, bBut the main disadvantage of using such an old OS is that eventually you don't have good web browsing and modern security options. For that reason, I recently bought an M4 Mac Mini (not Pro) with 24GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD from the Apple Refurb store (and saved a bundle!) and just installed it last night. To make that upgrade fast and easy I connected my SK Hynix 1TB SSD thumbdrive (shockingly fast for non-Thunderbolt) to make a Time Machine backup of the 2009 iMac (did that overnight because it's USB-2.0), then when the M4 Mac Mini arrived last night, I connected the thumbdrive to it and also the old keyboard and mouse. I then connected a 2012 Apple Thunderbolt Display that my wife got FOR FREE from her workplace in the past (a hospital, which sometimes gives away old computers when doctors leave for another hospital). Not Retina, but 1440p is nice, and it has a camera and great speakers too. The Time Machine restore went perfectly, with nearly 1000MB/s speeds, making the 950GB data restore happen in much less than an hour. All said, a fabulous and timely upgrade.

I was laughing to myself thinking I might get 20 years out of that 2009 iMac, but my wife was recently talking to me about security and performance, so I decided to do the Apple Silicon update for her now. But hey, 15 years and 9 months of use isn't bad!

Sorry for mucking up your thread, but it all ties into the "Brainstorm" upgrade theme for me. Sometimes we each need a "brainstorm" to realize when it's time for a major upgrade!

 

[lilliputian]

No worries!

Currently I have it running Ventura, and, with few exceptions, it's been excellent. Mine is a 27" 2010 iMac with the maximum 2.93 GHz quad-core i7 CPU and 32GB RAM installed (double what Apple said was the limit, but people quickly discovered that it could easily accept more), and of course running off an SSD. However, the original GPU is not Metal-compatible, and while it's possible to install later OSes without it using OCLP (they do some kext trickery I think), I decided I wanted the best experience, and so I tracked down a Metal-compatible GPU (currently an AMD Radeon RX 480 4 GB, kindly re-flashed by the seller with the modified firmware), and also installed the larger "3-pipe" GPU heatsink from a 2011 iMac (which requires a little bit of grinding to make it fit properly). So it's perhaps not the "set and forget" job you want, but it is entirely possible.

I don't know what the 2009 iMac would entail specifically, but this is the thread with all the info for installing OCLP on an iMac:

2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade

iMac 2009 to 2011 MXM3 graphics card upgrade (Lastest update 09/22/2024 - this is the official documentation page - you found it finally!) This is the single and only documentation post. During the last years we constantly updated this post to reflect the lastet development of vBIOS and OCLP...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[lilliputian]

My next project is to upgrade the WiFi and Bluetooth, which people have also figured out how to do. People have even managed to add USB 3.0 to it as well!