• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Company for the lonely Mac

C

clh333

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 22, 2015
Messages
1,443
Location
Cleveland, OH, USA
Just bought a G3: CPU, keyboard and mouse. Has a 32 Mb ATI NuBus video card as well as what appears to be on-board video. Would like to find out what is an age-appropriate monitor for such a rig. Any suggestions?

Thanks for your replies.

-CH-
 
clh333 said:
Has a 32 Mb ATI NuBus video card
Click to expand...

Nubus? I think you mean PCI. There was never a G3 Mac with Nubus slots, those died off back in the PowerPC 601 era.

If you have on-board video, then you probably have the original beige G3 desktop or tower. I think those things had 15-17" CRT displays. The later B&W G3s had CRT studio displays available.
 
Thanks for your observations.

Yes, this is a desktop G3.

I haven't opened the case yet but I will soon because the backup battery needs to be changed.

Here is a photo of the back side. I can recognize most of the ports; the ones I don't have a question mark next to them. The ones I think are video ports are circled. Both of these have 15 pins but neither looks like a conventional (PC) VGA connector. However, you are saying the output is VGA spec and either can be used with the proper adapter?

Are there Apple LCD displays that were suitable to use with this machine? Maybe connect directly to the video card's port? I'm thinking I'd like something thinner and lighter than a CRT and larger than 17-19".

Thanks again.

-CH-

BackSideG3.jpg
 
Thanks again for your input.

Got the case open, have more questions...

Lifting off the top I see a tray (labeled A in the attached picture), two spare power connectors; one for a 3.5 inch drive (B) and a 3.5 inch drive that does not appear to have a power cord attached (C). Is anything supposed to go in the tray? Does the 3.5 need to get its power from the connector, i.e. does it appear to be disconnected?

Moving on inside I removed the PCI card - I'm calling it an "I/O Card" for want of a better term - that is over the battery tray. There are two headers on that card. What are they for?

The hard drive is a 10 Gb Maxtor, and looks to be IDE. Is that correct? I can go larger, up to 100 Gb, from what I have read. True?

The other two cards are the ATI video and a VIA USB / FireWire card. Will any PCI card work in the Mac, or only those with compatible ROMs, or what?

Two of the RAM SIMMs are double-sided, two single-sided, interleaved. If I want to go for more RAM should I replace both the single-sided?

Thanks for your replies.

-CH-

TopView2.jpg Inside1.jpg IOCard.jpg VideoAndUSB.jpg RAM.jpg
 
Ok the ATI is definitely a VGA card as you have figured out.

Those connectors that look like floppy connectors are not used on Mac floppy drives. The floppy drives in MAC's get power through the 20 pin ribbon cable.

The USB/Firewire board should work ok.

Some PCI boards will work but not all. I put in a realtek 8139 in a Blue White Power MAC G3 tower and it worked just fine. However video boards especially need to have an Apple ROM to work.

The other board with all the connectors is a type of video capture card. Wish I had one of those myself! but mine doesn't have one.

As for RAM the double sided most likely is 256Mb the other 2 128Mb. So total memory would be 512k. Replacing the single sided would most definitely increase the RAM amount.

Also don't waste a 100Mb drive on this. It is only capable of recognizing a partition size of 8Gb. So most likely the 10GB is split into an 8 and a 2GB partitions.

And use an LCD monitor it will work! 17 to 19" is a good size.
 
Last edited:
More specifically, if I read the product number correctly (109-85500?), the ATI card is a Radeon 7000. This will give much better performance than motherboard video.

The "I/O card" is what Apple calls a personality card. The A/V personality card line was unique to the beige G3 and allies, and comes in three types. Yours is the more common Wings card which offers standard definition video and audio capture as well as A/V out (the others are "Whisper" and "Bordeaux," the last being particularly desirable since it can decode DVD video in hardware). The upper pin headers are the "DAV slot" (I am not aware of anything that connects to this) and an internal connector for the All-In-One "Molar Mac" G3, which this card can also be found in. The card slot on the card itself looks like a Comm Slot, but isn't; only an optional modem allegedly connects here, though I've never seen it either. In most beige G3 systems, none of these are connected to anything.

In general, any PCI card that has to be available at bootup must have a specific Apple ROM. That primarily means video and SCSI or ATA cards. Things like network cards (assuming you're not netbooting) and FireWire or USB cards don't necessarily need a boot ROM, but they will need drivers. Fortunately the built-in support in Mac OS 8 and especially Mac OS 9 "just works" with many cards of the era.
 
Also don't waste a 100Mb drive on this. It is only capable of recognizing a partition size of 8Gb. So most likely the 10GB is split into an 8 and a 2GB partitions.
Click to expand...

This isn't quite true. The actual limitation is that bootable system files must be within the first 8GB. Mostly this is a problem for OS X, though a pathological OS 9 install could still do it. That said, if you install OS 9 cleanly you shouldn't have a problem, but having a 8GB partition and a 92GB partition (for example) would be perfectly fine and decent insurance.

If you want to run OS X on this, however, you must partition the disk, and OS X must be within the first 8GB partition. This is a big pain for later versions of OS X.

In addition, early ROM versions of the beige G3 do not support slave drives. But a single disk won't be a problem either.
 
Thank you all for your replies.

Reportedly the HD has OS9 on it already. Ability to run OS9 or early OSX was a reason for acquiring this one.

I have yet to fire up the machine but intend to do so today. Wanted to get my ducks aligned first.

A larger HD would be a plus, especially if the machine is used for graphics and / or ADC (video, audio) and I will explore it, but only after getting on a stable footing.

The CD is a 24X Sony CDR. I would like to replace with a CDRW or DVDRW. Any caveats? Drivers? And is the CD on the same (only?) IDE channel with the HD? What is the purpose of the empty header shown in the attached pic? Second channel? SCSI?

I didn't see any socketed chips so I assume the ROMs are soldered in and what-you-got is what you got. Reportedly (here) you find out by running the System Profiler and looking for the ROM revision number.

Are all four RAM SIMMs replaceable? The one in the lowest slot (see previous post) looks different. Seller listing says: "300 MHz CPU, 416 MB memory (with 32, 128, 256 MB simms), 32 MB video memory (ATI Video Card in PCI Slot), Revision 2 motherboard." Replacing one 128 SIMM with a 256 brings memory to 544. Replacing one 32 with 256 brings memory to 768. From that I conclude that the 32 and the 128 both can be replaced with 256s. True?

I won't worry just yet about finding the exotic internal modem or Bordeaux personality card. (If you walked up to the average Joe and asked "Do you have a Bordeaux personality card?" they would have no idea what you were talking about. I find Apple's penchant for nicknaming hardware mystifying -seems like marketing hype).

As always, thanks for your help. It's fun to learn...

-CH-

MysteryHeader.jpg
 
That model uses a ROM Simm. It is next to the RAM chips. Just a bit shorter than the sdram. Sorry for confusion about the hard drive. Yes the empty header is SCSI.
My mini tower has that connector. Mine was actually considered a Server? And yes if you replace all sdram with 256's you will get 768Mb the max it could take. If you have
ROM 2 your in good shape. Mine has ROM 1. So HD is on primary channel master and DVD ROM on secondary master. SCSI not used.
 
Last edited:
Hello.

I too just bought an 1996 Apple Mac Desktop Computer (G3) from eBay ($140); hope that was a good price; it seems reasonable to me and the seller claims it works very well.

The seller isn't computer (or Apple) savvy and doesn't know the OS version. Is OS 9 the best for this unit? Where can I get orphaned Apple OSes?

Can you recommend a site for Apple Mac documentation? Been in IT since DOS 1 and NEVER lived in the Apple world; been wanting to all these years, but they have always been out of my league (money wise) when I was younger.

Thanks
 
Apple does not offer anything from OS 7.6 on for download (the G3 requires at least OS 8 ). Assuming you wish to stay out of grey zones, which the proprietors of this board will likely ask we do, they are not hard to find on eBay. For the G3 9.1 or later would be best; 9.2.2 would be my recommendation if you can find it.

You can run OS X on a beige G3, but it's not very good at it. Natively it will support through 10.2.8; with XPostFacto you can get it to 10.4.11, or 10.5.8 with a G4 upgrade card. You will find various compromises in doing so; you should max out the RAM, you will likely need a PCI video card (I'd select an ATI Radeon for this purpose, and no earlier than a Rage 128 or equivalent), and certain things such as the floppy drive won't function. Even with maximum RAM Tiger and Leopard won't be completely happy on this system, and (speaking as someone typing this on 10.4.11) Tiger is the minimum if you want to use it as a current general purpose computer. If you don't, install OS 9.

Apple didn't lose much sleep on documentation other than user manuals. What are you looking for specifically?
 
stangman517 said:
I too just bought an 1996 Apple Mac Desktop Computer (G3) from eBay ($140); hope that was a good price; it seems reasonable to me and the seller claims it works very well.
Click to expand...

There is no "list" price"; it is worth whatever you are willing to pay. If it pleases you and lasts forever you got a good deal.

stangman517 said:
The seller isn't computer (or Apple) savvy and doesn't know the OS version. Is OS 9 the best for this unit? Where can I get orphaned Apple OSes?
Click to expand...

I am running 9.2 on mine and don't plan to try to install OSX. Apple is careful about protecting future sales and so does not encourage traffic in older versions of their software or support their older versions. You can find titles for sale on eBay periodoically, or sometimes through web sites' forums.


stangman517 said:
Can you recommend a site for Apple Mac documentation?
Click to expand...

Amazon has a lot of second-hand books that you can acquire cheaply that will fill in some of the gaps. This site, and others like it, e.g. Mac Mall, http://oldermac.hardsdisk.net and Low End Mac can often point you to links to more information.

Been in IT since DOS 1 and NEVER lived in the Apple world; been wanting to all these years, but they have always been out of my league (money wise) when I was younger. [/QUOTE]

Same here.

-CH-
 
First awesome information; can't wait to really get into this Apple Mac G3. What's the total RAM capacity?

As far as docs, loved to get a set of original manuals if you know where. I will check eBay.

Thank you!
 
Just found a book on OS9.
I appreciate the link you provided for older Mac stuff. So your post this AM, and it was perfect timing since I should receive mine this coming week.

ClassicHasClass has been very helpful too. Have you seen what the max RAM is for these guys?

Thanks
 
I got the Beige G3 desktop.

Also I just bought "APPLE eMAC SOFTWARE RESTORE INSTALL CD OS Version 10.1.4 & 9.2.2 Disks NEW" from eBay today. Assuming this item I will be able to install OS9.2.2. It's the whole shebang.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top