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Company for the lonely Mac

ClassicHasClass said:
with a G4 upgrade card.
Click to expand...

The Beige G3 has a socketed CPU and most if not all upgrades for it are also socketed parts.

But I'd not recommend tossing a G4 upgrade in it. The Beige G3 officially only supports a 66 MHz bus speed which really slows down the extreme few G4 upgrades that support the native 100 MHz G4 bus. Most G3 to G4 upgrades are limited to 66 MHz bus speeds because of a bug in the Motorola chipset present on B&W G3s (I have a 733 MHz Sonnettech G4 upgrade and know all about it.)

The other issue is that the G4 doesn't offer more value for the majority of users. It only adds an Altivec unit which would only help in media encoding and some of the very last MacOS X PowerPC applications.

Here's a chart of how to use the jumper block on the Beige G3 if you want to change the clocks:
http://www.wmld.com/tech/jumperchart2.html

You can try overclocking your G3 if you want to get some extra speed. Generally they're pretty intolerant to overclocking, but you can usually get at least one multiplier up and sometimes two for a minor boost. I managed to get my 266 to 300 without much effort. 333 was a bit unstable unless I put a fan on the heatsink so that's as high as I wanted to push it.
 
The other issue is that the G4 doesn't offer more value for the majority of users. It only adds an Altivec unit which would only help in media encoding and some of the very last MacOS X PowerPC applications.
Click to expand...

No argument, but you'll still need it if you want to coerce the G3 to run Leopard (as per my original post). I have an 800MHz Sonnet G4 in my 7300 and it's mostly the clock speed that benefits apps, though a few can make use of the SIMD support even in OS 9.
 
I replaced the parameter backup battery last weekend. I pulled a 19" Viewsonic LCD VGA monitor from another setup and got the machine running today and found the following:

Machine ID: 510
Model: Power Macintosh G3 Series
Apple Extended Keyboard
Audio / Video Card (attribute, slot F?)
RAM: 416 MB
J3 - 32 MB
J4 - 128 MB
J5 - 256 MB
ROM Revision: $77D.45F1 (Rev. 2)
System: 9.2.2 US
QuickTime: 6.0.2
Carbon Lib: 1.6

Also recognized the 32 MB ATI PCI card and the USB / Firewire card, although it did not recognize the mfr or know much about its abilities.

Local Talk, AppleTalk, OpenTransport and TCP/IP are all installed.

The Profiler only finds two devices: The 10 GB HD (two partitions; system and data) and the floppy drive, which is empty at the moment.

The CD ROM, which is a Sony 24X, does not seem to be listed, and it does not respond to my pushing the tray-release button. The tray does not come out and the activity light does not light. This seems to be a problem, but I don't know much more than that.

I put an Iomega ZIP disk - one that I had formatted on the Quadra 650 - in the ZIP drive. There was no indication that the system recognized this disk. It did not appear as an icon on the desktop and when I shut down the machine it did not eject the disk. I don't know how Macs are supposed to behave but the Quadra always ejects disks before shutdown: floppy, CD or ZIP. I think this is a problem also. However, after shutdown I restarted from a cold boot and the machine booted once again, so at least the ZIP disk isn't inhibiting anything.

I don't know whether my replacing the parameter battery killed some setting necessary to recognize the ZIP or CD drives, but I would guess that would be unlikely. The Help files suggested using Sherlock 2 to see if all of the requisite CD drivers were present in the Extensions folder, and they were. A Sherlock search for ATAPI, IOMEGA and ZIP turned up nothing.

It looks like a hardware problem. Is there another diagnostic that I could use to troubleshoot these two drives? I can of course remove them and test them in another system, but maybe there is another shortcut?

Thanks again for your assistance.

-CH-
 
Yes, it sounds like the CD and the ZIP are not working. Obvious things to check: power and IDE connections. If the CD-ROM has power but there's an issue with the IDE bus it's on, it should still respond to the button.

Does the CD-ROM have Apple firmware or is it aftermarket? Apple OEM devices will have an Apple logo on the sticker.

Try disconnecting one and seeing if the other works (you may need to rejumper them for master/slave). You could also try moving one or the other (but not both) to the same bus as the hard disk. Since you clearly have a later G3 ROM, you shouldn't have the slave drive limitation.
 
Found it:

I pulled all the drives. The CD and ZIP are ATAPI, so I tested them with another machine, a PC (horrors!) They were fine, except for being dirty, so after a little cleaning I stuck them back in the G3. While they were out I tested the Mac's drives' power supply connectors and verified each had 12V and 5V. But when I put the ATAPI drives back in the machine and powered up they would not recognize a disk. The CD also would not respond to the open/close button, although both were indicating power on startup.

Finally I opened the case and found that the IDE connector was askew. The HD connector was covering it and masked this fact. After fully inserting the connector the machine now recognizes all drives. The 3.5 floppy also works as expected.

I ordered three 256MB RAM chips and will install those when they arrive. I am still running with the 10 GB drive that came with the machine. I want to get a CD copy of OS 9.2 before changing it out. I haven't tried networking anything yet, either.

Next up: I want to get an LCD screen in the 20-23" range, beige or light-colored to match the CPU. What Apple display could I use with this machine?

Thanks for your replies.

-CH-
 
Since you have a decent ATI video card installed, you can use any display you like (don't bother with motherboard video unless you want to run it dual-headed or don't want to use the ATI card for some reason).

If you specifically want an Apple display, Apple's largest CRT of the day was 20". The AppleVision or Apple Multiple Scan series will work fine and look "period correct." These use a DB-15 connector which mates with the motherboard video connector, but there are passive converters to allow Apple monitors to connect to VGA ports (in fact, one probably came with the Radeon card, at least originally). These are a little harder to find than ones that convert motherboard video to VGA, but shouldn't be expensive.

There are of course Apple LCD panels, but these date from the "translucent" era and will definitely not match the G3 in appearance. You might as well just get an off-the-shelf one.

EveryMac has a list: http://www.everymac.com/monitors/apple/applevision_colorsync/ (and see other product lines on the left)
 
Update:

Got the memory replaced with three 256 MB DRAM and found a local craigslist seller who sold me a 15.5" and a 19" CRT for $15 total. We are now operating on all cylinders; next the HD upgrade.

Thanks again,

-CH-
 
If it hasn't been suggested already, I would suggest a lowcost IDE to Compact Flash adapter, then get yourself a CF card that'll do at least ATA 133 speed. Or does the G3 have ATA 66? I don't remember.
 
Both IDE controllers in the Beige G3 are ATA-2 and have a maximum PIO speed of 16.7 MB/s and the same in DMA mode. I assume they use DMA since PIO would cripple the CPU. The maximum drive size is 137 GB.

The first revision of the Beige G3 motherboard (for both the tower and the desktop) does not support slave devices so you can only have one device connected to each IDE port on the motherboard.

I wouldn't really recommend a CF-IDE adapter, you won't get any higher throughput and the cost per gigabyte is way higher. You can get huge mechanical drives, more than the G3 will ever be able to use for next to nothing. An example is that an average 8 GB CF card is nearly $40 when an 80 GB IDE drive is almost half that at $25 or so, and even cheaper when salvaged from old machines.
 
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