I just purchased this card for this system: (The 128MB Apple version of the Radion 9200, the fastest card that will go into a G3)

It comes with a driver CD, which supports Mac Classic OS 9.2!!!

Here are the card's details:

Next I'll get one of these SCSI adapters for the machine, as the one it's currently fitted with is crap and with this I could improve the drive performance by up to 8X!!! As The drive that it's fitted with is capable of doing 80MB/s and it's currently only doing 10MB/s!!!

The system's fitted with a Quantum Viking II:

This is what I currently have installed on this machine at this time:

There's loads more to come! (This will make a very cool little gaming machine once its done!)

Hi, that's a sweet Mac! 🙂💙

My first one was a G3, too.

It can do surprisingly a lot, still! 😃

I've got collected a bunch of freeware utilities for G3, Tiger and OS9 over the years..

Interestingly, many emulators work good enough on G3, too.

Say, NoSTalgia(ST), Nestopia (Famicom), Snes9x (Super Famicom), CrabEmu (SMS), Generator (Genesis), DOSBox (PC).

SoftWindows runs, too, of course. As does Virtual PC.

Even that PS1 emulator may work (Connectix Virtual Game Station).

Which all is very cool, because a G3 is what Pear PC supports (I'm using it to test things).

That's all very surprising in a positive way, because my little developer machine (Lazarus etc) is a G4 Dual.

I just purchased this SCSI U320 card for this machine:

Unfortunately it won't run under Mac OS 9.2 as the driver doesn't support it, so I'm going to have to upgrade to Mac OS 10.4.11 Tiger, as Tiger is the latest version of Mac OS which will run on the G3! 🙁

I don't want to destroy the Mac OS 9,2 install, so I plan to install a Pair of these Hitachi 15KRPM U320 SCSI drives. (The same type that are going into my Dual Pentium Pro build)

I intend using a pair of these SCSI cables to wire the drives up and keep everything neat:

I will attempt to go with software RAID 0, but if that fails I'll simply install the OS on one of the drives and use the other to store ISO's

EIther way, this system's going to receive a significant performance upgrade as far as the system drive goes!

This Machine is fitted with the 450MHZ G3 CPU, the fastest that was officially released for this machine:

The G3 400MHz module looked like this:

Notice the difference in the cache chips.

There was an aftermarket chip released running @ 1GHz (PowerLogix PCIGX10001 PowerForce 750GX G3/1GHz (1000MHz)) Which featured on-die cache

It was based on this chip:

PowerPC 750GX
750GX (codenamed Gobi), revealed in 2004, was a 7xx processor from IBM. It has an on-die 1 MB L2 cache, a top frequency of 1.1 GHz, and support for bus speeds up to 200 MHz among other enhancements compared to 750FX. It is manufactured using a 0.13 μm process with copper interconnects, low-K dielectric, and silicon on insulator technology. The 750GX has 44 million transistors, a die size of 52 mm2 and consumes less than 9 W at 1 GHz at typical loads.

I just installed 1GB of RAM into the machine and take note of the fact that there is now no virtual memory usage: (It was initially using 435MB, which was considerable!)

This is how it looked with 256MB of memory installed for comparative purposes:

So this little upgrade within itself should improve system performance!

The system memory upgrade has marginally improved the system drive performance: (This is still the standard SCSI setup that the machine came with)

This was the original drive performance with 256MB of Ram installed:

Jo22 wrote on 2024-02-26, 08:32:

Hi, that's a sweet Mac! 🙂💙 […]
Show full quote

Hi, that's a sweet Mac! 🙂💙

My first one was a G3, too.

It can do surprisingly a lot, still! 😃

I've got collected a bunch of freeware utilities for G3, Tiger and OS9 over the years..

Interestingly, many emulators work good enough on G3, too.

Say, NoSTalgia(ST), Nestopia (Famicom), Snes9x (Super Famicom), CrabEmu (SMS), Generator (Genesis), DOSBox (PC).

SoftWindows runs, too, of course. As does Virtual PC.

Even that PS1 emulator may work (Connectix Virtual Game Station).

Which all is very cool, because a G3 is what Pear PC supports (I'm using it to test things).

That's all very surprising in a positive way, because my little developer machine (Lazarus etc) is a G4 Dual.

Thanks!

Thanks for the links! 😀

Irinikus wrote on 2024-02-29, 19:17:

Thanks!

Thanks for the links! 😀

You're welcome! ^^

The 90s on Macintosh weren't too different to the Windows 3.1/95 days, I think.

A lot of small programs, games and utilities by hobbyists had been written.
There also were video clips, pictures and sound files.

Those shareware CDs should contain them, they're like little time capsules/treasure chests, I'd say. 🙂

You can have a look for Macworld magazine or those Macintosh Mania and MacFormat CDs, for example.
In my place, Mac&i and MacUp magazines were around also.

There's a lot to explore. It's a bit like browsing vintage websites.

PS: There also were early attempts at Virtual Reality (VR) or 360° pictures.
QuickTime once did support this. There should be CD-ROMs about it from 1997 or something.

Hi and thanks for sharing this build. I have a similar machine and your post entused me to maybe get it up and running again. However, I have close to no experience with these more recent Mac "PC's" so I hope you dont mind a few questions. At first the machine would not post at all, so I replaced the battery . Now I get an on screen question mark alternating with an imac logo so I guess I will need a new HDD ( currently non onboard). Since the on board connectors seem to be normal IDE, could I simply pair a Sata SSD with and SATA to ide adapter and be done? Or is SCSI a better solution? The machine got an on board SCSI adapter but I wonder how easy it is nowaydays to find a appropriate drive ( I have neither any machanical drives left)

Also, in terms of OS could you share some insights what are the pros and cons of using the period correct one (which one would that be ? Would it play the original Prince of Persia still?) or a more modern one?

Some images attached and thanks for any support already in advance.

You appear to also have the 450MHz CPU, judging by the cache chips sticking out from underneath the heatsink!

You may just want to take a look at the label on this chip to confirm you have the second revision of the motherboard, as the first revision had issues with its IDE controller:

I'd personally go with a SCSI setup or a SONNET SATA expansion card.

However the SCSI card that you have installed won't cut it for a system drive!

I just stuck one of these into my machine to control a secondary SATA drive: (a 750GB Seagate)

The machine sees this card as a SCSI controller!!!

Here are the speed test results from this secondary drive:

Here are the results from the system disk: (SCSI Ultra 2 Wide on a crappy controller)

You can see that this drive is significantly slower! (I've transferred all my games to the faster secondary drive!)

This is the current drive and card configuration:

At this point, I'm not sure if I want to keep Mac OS 9.2 with a fast secondary drive setup.

The ATTO card that I ordered is actually from the G5 era, so it would maybe be a very interesting upgrade for one of my G4's running Mac OS X (As besides this machine, I still have 3 G4's to upgrade and make interesting in their own ways!)

Irinikus wrote on 2024-03-01, 18:33:

I just stuck one of these into my machine to control a secondary SATA drive: (a 750GB Seagate)

s-l1600-23 copy.jpg

The machine sees this card as a SCSI controller!!!

IIRC, older versions of WinNT sees even UDMA-66 RAID cards as SCSI controllers as well, it's probably something about what was known at build time?

To keep things interesting, rather than go the SSD route, I'll look at plugging one of these drives into the SONNET SATA "SCSI" card:

Either of these drives will saturate this card and give you the best drive performance possible in this system , speed-wise anyway. (I am aware that the seek time on an SSD would be far superior.)

Mechanical drives such as these are just more fun in my opinion!

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-03-02, 08:44:

Irinikus wrote on 2024-03-01, 18:33:

I just stuck one of these into my machine to control a secondary SATA drive: (a 750GB Seagate)

s-l1600-23 copy.jpg

The machine sees this card as a SCSI controller!!!

IIRC, older versions of WinNT sees even UDMA-66 RAID cards as SCSI controllers as well, it's probably something about what was known at build time?

Agreed, but maybe they're actually built around SCSI controllers?

My i7 PC sees the OCZ Revodrive 3 x2 as a SCSI drive as well!!!

I had one of these machines for a short while about a year ago. I was really interesting to me as I was never a Mac guy prior to OSX. It was given to me with all the bits and pieces that originally came in the box including the Apple flat panel display which was still amazingly good. I passed it on though as it is rather large and I don’t have the space to keep it. I wrote an article about it in Pixel Addict magazine and I am definitely going to explore the classic Macs more.

This is what the inside of this machine looks like at present:

And yes, that FUGLY Foxconn SCSI cable's got to GO!!!

It will look and perform much better once the Raion 9200LE is installed!!!

fxgogo wrote on 2024-03-02, 09:17:

I had one of these machines for a short while about a year ago. I was really interesting to me as I was never a Mac guy prior to OSX. It was given to me with all the bits and pieces that originally came in the box including the Apple flat panel display which was still amazingly good. I passed it on though as it is rather large and I don’t have the space to keep it. I wrote an article about it in Pixel Addict magazine and I am definitely going to explore the classic Macs more.

Cool! 😀

They're indeed pretty interesting machines once you get into them! (There are quite a few upgrades available for these systems, making them extremely interesting projects!!! 😀 )

stop showing me this... makes me itch... not for this one but I've begun eyeing the G4 Cube 😀

Dominus wrote on 2024-03-02, 09:29:

stop showing me this... makes me itch... not for this one but I've begun eyeing the G4 Cube 😀

Don't let me stop you!!! The G4 Cube's a really cool machine 😀