KCompRoom2000 wrote:

I'm actually thinking about getting two new "half-AA" Lithium PRAM batteries for my PowerMac G4 and my iMac G3, the only concern is how likely is it for those batteries to leak?

I always pull these when I'm storing the machines but if you buy a brand new one I wouldn't expect it to leak. Just use it while the machine is in regular use & take it out if you put it away for a while. Keep in mind the one in my G4 looks 20 years old but apparently still works (charges right up to 3.6V.) I only have anecdotal evidence to support this but I think the batteries they used in the G4-era are heaps better than the mobo-killers in the old 68k machines.

This machine deserves at least a Radeon 7000. It's already a huge step comparing to the stock Rage 128. The Radeon 7000 is the easiest card to transform to Mac if you come accross a PC version and is also the most trouble-free.

Nice Machine 😀
What a Power Horse 😳

I got today a PowerMac G5 1.8Ghz DP, but one CPU is missing.
And a G3 PowerMac 😳

Unfortunaly Ubuntu 14 ppc won't boot from HDD.
And i have no Leopard Disc around 😀

Maybe a GeForce 6xxx Card will also work inside this Machine ? (With proper Firmware) 😀
Or a Radeon 96xx ?

But as far as i know most PC Cards have a smaller ROM so the EPROM needs to be replaced with a Bigger One to fit PPC Firmware inside.

Glad you guys are enjoying the thread! Thanks for the comments & following along with me. I've got an update on the video card coming, but I'm out of town skiing so it'll have to wait a few days. 😀 Suffice to say I went all out with it because that's what I do. Sneaky tease pic:

Flashed and pin modded PC GeForce 4 Ti4600?

or could it be ... the 7800GS?

I was gifted one of these Macs a while ago. I remember it make a LOT of noise though! Don't remember the content as I was always more a PC guy but it had a graphics card much more modern then a Rage (it was some Radeon).

Neat, although you'll be a little limited by the 100MHz bus.

The early G4 Powermacs are not limited to 128GB disks, they're limited to boot partitions that exist entirely below 128GB. OS X and other Unix based OS will happily work with larger systems.

My Digital Audio 733 has a 500GB IDE disk hosting OS 9/OS X Leopard/Linux/NetBSD/OpenBSD

I love the dual cpu card. Those things are f'n rare. Double so at that clockspeed. But OSX? My personal cutoff is OS9. Imho 10(X) is when Apple disappeared up their own ass.

luckybob wrote:

I love the dual cpu card. Those things are f'n rare. Double so at that clockspeed. But OSX? My personal cutoff is OS9. Imho 10(X) is when Apple disappeared up their own ass.

Heh, I'm pretty much the opposite; don't have much love for OS8/9. I don't like the interface, crash-prone, cooperative multitasking, horrible filesystem, not enough configuration options, etc. 😜 I guess I feel about the same way about them as I do with Win95/98 - useful for running stuff but pretty meh on the whole experience. Earlier versions were cool in the same way AmigaOS was - groundbreaking and revolutionary for the time, but it was getting pretty long-in-tooth by the time they retired it.

OS/X is the business for me though, at least before it all went pear shaped in 10.10+. I guess because I'm mainly a Linux guy & OS/X isn't too far away from that. I kind of wish I could run the OS/X desktop & CoreAudio system on a Linux backend with EXT4, but I doubt Apple and the Linux community will ever cooperate enough to make that happen.

I might end up putting OS9 on a separate HDD and dual-booting this thing though, my copies of Unreal & UT99 need something to run on.

Okay, so, finally, let's update the video card!

...in the next post, because first I wanna do some benchmarks. 😵

I started with iBench which I don't think does anything with the GPU, but it's interesting anyway as it's a true universal binary and can also compare with x86-based systems. That said, it doesn't seem to like my accelerator board much, but it does run:

And, here are the results:

For comparison my dual-G5 2.0 (PCI-X / 4GB DDR) gets a final score of 1.66. My old dual-core 2.3GHz G5 (the second-most powerful G5 ever made, with 16GB DDR2) got 2.01 and my 2012 Macbook Pro (dual-core i5/16GB DDR3) gets 6.99. So pretty much what you'd expect; the G4 is nipping at the heels of a good G5 but can't touch an i5.

The details:

But I'm sure you all were wondering, can it run Quake??

YES IT CAN!

That said, this wasn't the best version of Quake to run, it's a modern port (QuakeSpasm) that is remarkably still distributed as universal binary. The big problem is it only supports 32-bit color mode and the Rage just chokes.

^^ Yeah.

I'll try later with a more period-appropriate version of GLQuake. After all my 450MHz Cube with the same Rage card runs Unreal acceptably, so I'd expect decent playability here too. I just wanted something to try.

Incidentally QuakeSpasm gets 499 FPS on my i5 Macbook. It literally finishes the timedemo before the console finishes retracting. 😜

(Neither UT2004 nor Wipeout 2097 even run on the G4 with the Rage card.)

So with those benchmarks in mind, I got out my stash of hot AGP cards and looked for the hottest ones. Here were the candidates:

From left to right: Quadro FX1000 128MB, eVGA GeForce 7600GT 512MB which I brought back from the dead a while ago, Radeon 9650 Pro 256MB, Leadtek GF4 Ti4600 128MB, Radeon 9600 128MB from a G5 (no ROM flash needed), and a GeForce 6800OC 256MB (not pictured.)

At this point I didn't know which of these could be flashed for PowerMac operation, but that turned out to be moot because I forgot the G4 only has an AGP 2x/4x slot so it needed the 2x key to work. That threw out everything but these two:

The Quadro is an interesting card, I got a stack of these a while ago and have used them in a bunch of stuff. It has a port for 3-pin 3D glasses, which I have no idea if anything on Mac would support.

It also flashes to a GeForce FX5800. You can get PowerMac ROMs for other cards in the FX5xxx series and some forum scuttlebutt seems to say that a 5800 would work. But... that's a lot of equivalency assumptions.

The Ti4600 on the other hand, is known to work & ROMs are readily available. And the FX5800/Q1000 really wouldn't be that much faster. So that settled it.

dr.ido wrote:

Flashed and pin modded PC GeForce 4 Ti4600?

Winnar 😉 You get some Internet Points.

Incidentally you'll notice I'd removed the fan by the time I took the above pic. When I got this card it was absolutely disgusting, with one of the worst fan bodge jobs I've ever seen:

Here it is cleaned up, and with my attempt at making the fan mount look nicer. This is a different fan as the one on there was completely gummed up, this one should be quieter at least. Still overkill. I wish I had the original fans for this card.

^^ Unfortunately it has a couple caps that are gonna need attention; I wanted to see if this would even work before busting out the soldering iron though.

I lugged an old Dell XPS T550 out of the closet. Surprisingly I only seem to have one system kicking around with a suitable AGP slot, and this was it. With it popped open and ready, time for step 1: does the card even work??

Yep.

In order not to have to do this "blind", I stuck the Mach 64 that I found in a dumpster into a PCI slot and made that the primary video in the BIOS. (At this point I didn't know if that card worked either!) I was worried this would be finicky to get set up, but it was no problem. Swapped the monitor cable over and rebooted.

Following the instructions here, I grabbed the suitable ROM (in the 'downloads' section on that site, you want the 'PPC modded' GF4 ROM by Arti) and NVFlashed away:

...Booyah! This totally worked first try & I'm not glossing over anything. Honest.

I am kind of annoyed with how many of my precious PCI slots the GF4 gobbled up though. I was hoping to stick a SCSI controller in this thing. I really need to sort out that cooling.

And finally, we've made it to Step 2. Does it boot??

Incidentally, for anyone else trying to do this who stumbles across this thread, TheMacElite recommend using NVFlash 4.4x on GF4 cards. I found this fairly difficult to track down, so I'm attaching it here (guaranteed working version, same one I used.) Once upon a time this was freely distributed so I don't think I'm violating any licensing arcanity.

I ran a flashed and modded GF4 Ti4600 in my sawtooth for a while (where it was seriously bottlenecked as I didn't have your CPU upgrade) until I moved it into a 1.25GHz MDD. I also used the ROM and guide from TheMacElite. For those that don't know Apple reused some pins on the AGP connector for other signals, so when using a PC card you need to disconnect some pins. The most common suggestion is to put tape over the pins, but I found this wasn't stable and ended up cutting the tracks as I wasn't planning on ever using the card in a PC again. In my case I wanted something that would run in OS9 and OSX and I read somewhere that a Ti4600 was the last card supported by the OS9 drivers. If you don't care about running OS9 there may be later options. As others have already said - most mac ROMS are larger than the the flash chips on most PC cards. If you don't want to solder on a larger ROM chip you will need to use a card that someone has already made a "stripped" ROM for.

Spoiler: hell yeah it boots!

dr.ido wrote:

I ran a flashed and modded GF4 Ti4600 in my sawtooth for a while (where it was seriously bottlenecked as I didn't have your CPU upgrade) until I moved it into a 1.25GHz MDD. I also used the ROM and guide from TheMacElite. For those that don't know Apple reused some pins on the AGP connector for other signals, so when using a PC card you need to disconnect some pins. The most common suggestion is to put tape over the pins, but I found this wasn't stable and ended up cutting the tracks as I wasn't planning on ever using the card in a PC again. In my case I wanted something that would run in OS9 and OSX and I read somewhere that a Ti4600 was the last card supported by the OS9 drivers.

Nice! I bet this card would fly in a MDD. Like I said above, I could actually use an OS9 machine so I don't mind having the option of running it here.

I had zero luck finding a definitive answer whether this card needs the pin mod or not. Note that it is not an AGP8x card despite having the 8x key. NV25 GPU. MacElite's guide (<-- archive.org link so the pictures work) don't list it as one of the cards needing the mod.

In the end I just chucked it in unmodded and it seems to work. It was my understanding the system wouldn't even boot if a card that needed the mod was installed?

I am having a stability issue that I'll go into when the thread's caught up, but I don't think it's related to the pin mod.

In my case the sawtooth would not power up without modifying the card. At first I tapped the pins, but found that sometimes the machine would either not power up or power up, but not boot (fans and hdd spinning, no startup chime, no other signs of life). Once I cut the traces it was stable. I was using a different card to the one in your pictures and there were definitely traces going to those pins.

Odd - I have a modded PC Ti4600 in my Digital Audio PowerMac, and I didn't modify any pins. It works fine, although only single headed for some reason..

xjas wrote:

I had zero luck finding a definitive answer whether this card needs the pin mod or not. Note that it is not an AGP8x card despite having the 8x key. NV25 GPU. MacElite's guide (<-- archive.org link so the pictures work) don't list it as one of the cards needing the mod.

In the end I just chucked it in unmodded and it seems to work. It was my understanding the system wouldn't even boot if a card that needed the mod was installed?

I am having a stability issue that I'll go into when the thread's caught up, but I don't think it's related to the pin mod.

I believe only the models that were equipped with ADC (Apple Display Connector) ports on the video card required pin modding, a flashed card without the mod performed should still work on a Sawtooth, as clearly outlined in the link you posted:

To clarify, the ONLY G4 which doesn't require pin disabling is the AGP 2x, pre-ADC Sawtooth (10/100, not Gigabit Ethernet). If your G4 doesn't have the ADC power tab near AGP slot, you can skip worrying about this. ALL OTHER G4s, Cube included, NEED these pins disabled.

So even if it was an AGP 8x card, pin modding wouldn't be necessary for it to work in your G4.

EDIT: After reading your reply below, I just went back and looked at the pictures on the first page, and it turns out you do have a Gigabit Ethernet (Mystic) G4 (yes, I know you figured it out), the little black connector on the motherboard gave it away. Well this information is still relevant for Sawtooth owners so there's no use in foolishly editing it out. 😮

^^ so the sneaky secret of the thread is that mine is actually a Gigabit & absolutely does have ADC support (the Rage has it.) The previous owner told me explicitly it was a Sawtooth and by the time I figured out otherwise I didn't feel like renaming the thread. 😜