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Looking to buy a Power PC , need some advice

twolazy

twolazy

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Joined
May 22, 2011
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Location
Chicago, IL
I own a few apple machines, but no power pc's. Problem is I don't know enough about the models to make an educated guess on which one I would want.

I want to run Marathon 1-3 as well as a few other later games. Needs to have a 486 dos card, or be able to use one. Also needs to be able to be networked to my vintage macs though apple-talk, so needs an apple-talk port. Tower or desktop doesn't matter much to me. Something easy to find parts for be a huge bonus.

Anyone have any advice here on what systems would be best for gaming and would network easily to my classic macs?
 
As far as I know, the last Mac with RS-422 serial ports is the beige Power Mac G3; starting with the Blue & White they're gone. (I don't know if you can get a PCI RS-422 card for newer models or not.) I don't know whether there are PCI DOS cards, though, so even that might not work for you. Beyond those requirements, I'd say get the newest model you can find, but check it out on Low-End Mac first to make sure there are no gotchas; there are a few models like the Performa 5200s that are just inexplicably awful internally (I had one of those once, it was so crappy it couldn't run 68k System 7 games at a playable speed, let alone newer titles.)
 
commodorejohn said:
I'd say get the newest model you can find, but check it out on Low-End Mac first to make sure there are no gotchas; there are a few models like the Performa 5200s that are just inexplicably awful internally (I had one of those once, it was so crappy it couldn't run 68k System 7 games at a playable speed, let alone newer titles.)
Click to expand...

See that is exactly what I am worried about, buying a turd of a system that wont work as intended. Guess I can look at the 6xxx line first, I know most those had support for the dos cards. After that though I am kinda lost which models are good/bad...
 
I'm no expert on the matter, but it's my general observation that the "Power Macintosh" models are usually the top-of-the-line, so I'd go for those. Low-End Mac, as I said, is a great resouce for getting the dirt on any particular machine you're looking at, and clearly marks the crap ones as "Road Apples" so you can avoid them.

Edit: Also, here's a FAQ for DOS cards; looks like there were some PCI cards. I assume that since there's only one that they note is only compatible with select models, the others ought to work in any PCI Mac, but obviously you'd want to double-check that before buying. If that is true, I'd go for a beige Power Mac G3; you can't go wrong giving OS8-OS9 as much horsepower as you can.
 
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Well I do have a dead Dark Blue Imac sitting here I received from another member on the forum. Sadly the CRT is busted. Tried booting it to an external monitor but no go. Looking at the faq you gave me ( many thanks btw!), it seems almost the imac I have be a candidate. It is a G3 after all. Hrmmmmm.... I do have some old 15" lcds... *gears going in head
 
I kinda doubt that; I don't know about the later models, but the Rev. B iMac I have has no PCI slots or serial ports. Decent specs, but not expandable at all.
 
Damn. I have yet to open it up really to check, kinda makes sense though. Guess back to trying to find a machine then... *sigh
 
One of the last macs to have the best of all worlds and not totally suck somewhere (the blue and white G3 has awful IDE speeds and the G4's have crap power supplies and CPU cards) was the 9600 series systems. You have plenty of PCI slots, you could do over a gig of ram, you had fast SCSI plus you could upgrade it as far as a 1ghz G4 through CPU upgrades from companies like Sonnett.

With your blue and white though, you could get an RS-422 port using one of the Stealth Serial adapters which replaced the 56k modem with one serial port.
 
I got a 8500 here that I'm willing to let go of. I just transferred the G4-450/1MB card and RAM out of it and into a 8600 I had. The catch is I don't have a CPU card that works with it. The 300Mhz 604e I took out of the 8600 will only work on the 8600/9600 boards, you will need to find the original 180Mhz 604, or use a G3/G4 upgrade card. It will come with 2x32MB of RAM, but no HD as the Seagate made some nasty noises and passed on (to think that drive had BeOS 5 on it!). Apple and Orange Micro made DOS cards for the PCI bus.

These machines are the most upgradable Macs ever made. 8 DIMM slots (5v FPM or EDO) take up to 1GB of RAM, built in fast SCSI (10MB/sec) in addition to the standard SCSI (5MB/sec) bus, 3 PCI slots. Its capable of running Mac OS X 10.4 with XPostfacto (upgraded of course), MacOS 9.2.2 (via OS9Helper, 9.1 is the latest official supported), and BeOS 5 (need to use MacOS 8.5 as a boot loader). I'm open to trades, just let me know.
 
NeXT said:
One of the last macs to have the best of all worlds and not totally suck somewhere ... was the 9600 series systems. You have plenty of PCI slots, you could do over a gig of ram, you had fast SCSI plus you could upgrade it as far as a 1ghz G4 through CPU upgrades from companies like Sonnett.
Click to expand...
9600 does have a few caveats; namely that Apple stick a few PCI slots behind a PCI to PCI bridge which does cause some grief for some aftermarket add-on hardware. Google is your friend (mostly.) Personally I think the 8600 is a better machine just because there are less hardware compatibility problems than the 9600.
 
Most people don't need 6 slots, so the best PCI Powermac to get would be the 8600. Plenty of room, easy to get into, built in SCSI and basic A/V. The 7500 case is more common and easy to work with but has less space for drives and I prefer towers. The 8500 and 9500 seem to have the worst plastics with respect to brittleness (the CDROM bezel, power button, and the plastic bits that keep PCI cards in are known to just snap with age), plus getting to the RAM and VRAM means taking most of the machine apart.
 
My suggestion would be a Quicksilver G4. You can always add a serial port via the USB port by using a Tripp Lite/Keyspan USB to Serial adapter (do not use any other brand if you want it to work correctly.) Another option, if you get lucky on eBay, is to find a "Stealth G3" serial port upgrade.

I see Dual 1GHz models quite regularly on Craigslist for about $50. It's one of the fastest G4s you can get that'll still run OS 9 natively. It's also plenty fast if you want to experiment with OS X up to version 10.5.

You can add an OrangePC PCI card if you want to add DOS/Windows compatibility.
 
olePigeon said:
My suggestion would be a Quicksilver G4. You can always add a serial port via the USB port by using a Tripp Lite/Keyspan USB to Serial adapter (do not use any other brand if you want it to work correctly.) Another option, if you get lucky on eBay, is to find a "Stealth G3" serial port upgrade.

I see Dual 1GHz models quite regularly on Craigslist for about $50. It's one of the fastest G4s you can get that'll still run OS 9 natively. It's also plenty fast if you want to experiment with OS X up to version 10.5.
Click to expand...

USB to serial adapters won't support Localtalk. The only way to get a serial port that does that in New World machines is the Stealth G3/G4 upgrade.
 
The two desirable PowerPC desktops to me are:

333MHz Minitower or Outrigger (because it has LocalTalk, ADB and a built-in floppy drive: ideal bridge Mac)
1.25GHz MDD of mid-2003, because it can boot OS 9.2.2
 
The easiest way to identify the mid-2003 Mirror Drive Door G4 is that it doesn't have Firewire 800. The FW800 MDD can not run OS 9 natively. So be careful. However, I still suggest the QuickSilver. It's only marginally slower than the MDD, but it also allows you to run 9.2.1. The main reason I suggest this is because for whatever reason, 9.2.2 breaks a few System 7 apps and extensions (most notably forme, the original Civilizations game.) The more important reason, however, is that there never was a 9.2.2 retail disc, only 9.2.1. So unless your MDD comes with the system discs, you're going to need a second Mac just to install and update to 9.2.2 for the MDD.
 
Thanks a bunch so far for all the info! I started calling around today before work and managed to maybe find a mirror tower and a few g3 towers at a Salvation Army around an hour away. I will be headed out there tomorrow to see what shape they are in, etc. I really dislike buying off salvation army, refuse to let you check it out usually, and no guarantee it works, unlike goodwill. Guess I'll find out soon enough. :D
 
Well yeah, any machine with 9.2.2 machine specific disks (like my iBook 900MHz) have to have their discs specifically and won't work with a retail copy (well...sort of)

I'd personally go with the 333MHz machine, although they aren't exactly easy to find. It should run OS X Jaguar just fine with enough memory, and is an excellent handler/bridge Mac for any 68K Mac. (Well, Macs with 400K disks are best supported by something that can handle System 6...)
 
I have a power Mac G4 at 450MHz has AGP graphics, PCI slots, 512k RAM 1 30Gig and 1 60 Gig HD plus a ZIP drive! and a dvd burner in it. It runs OS 9.2.2 or even OSX Tiger. Which I have both os's installed already. One on each HD. If you are interested let me know by PM. Oh Kinda Heavy
 
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