Finally found time to get my network card up and running in my 286. Installed the DOS packet driver for the 3Com 3C509B card and then setup mTCP and configured it's FTP Server. So much more fun and not to mention easier transferring stuff to the 286 over the LAN now. I was getting sick of relying solely on floppy disks. 😎

Transferred over a few games and some old DOS programs that I used to use on my 8088 back in the day.

I cleaned up one of my other computer desks and brought the iMac down.
https://postimg.org/image/5khpz42wb/

Yeah, it's way too crowded, and not having an ADB KVM switch is not helping one bit. Still, they all work, and the IIcx's SCSI HDD continues to play nice, even if the extra RAM doesn't.

If I did have an ADB KVM switch, I could have a much tidier IIcx/6500 setup, since I generally don't run the 6500 above 640x480 anyway.

Also, it turns out that slot-loading iMac G3 350 is actually surprisingly competent at 3D gaming with its built-in Rage 128 Pro. 640x480 isn't a completely solid 60 FPS or anything, but SiN and Heretic II look quite playable in terms of framerate overall. The real tests will be Q3A and UT, though.

I recorded the OST of Epic Pinball with my GUS ^^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwZhR_ZEvg4

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I cleaned up one of my other computer desks and brought the iMac down. https://postimg.org/image/5khpz42wb/ […]
Show full quote

I cleaned up one of my other computer desks and brought the iMac down.
https://postimg.org/image/5khpz42wb/

Yeah, it's way too crowded, and not having an ADB KVM switch is not helping one bit. Still, they all work, and the IIcx's SCSI HDD continues to play nice, even if the extra RAM doesn't.

If I did have an ADB KVM switch, I could have a much tidier IIcx/6500 setup, since I generally don't run the 6500 above 640x480 anyway.

Also, it turns out that slot-loading iMac G3 350 is actually surprisingly competent at 3D gaming with its built-in Rage 128 Pro. 640x480 isn't a completely solid 60 FPS or anything, but SiN and Heretic II look quite playable in terms of framerate overall. The real tests will be Q3A and UT, though.

UT and Q3 won't even run on my G3 233 Bondi with the 4MB Rage Pro Turbo

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Also, it turns out that slot-loading iMac G3 350 is actually surprisingly competent at 3D gaming with its built-in Rage 128 Pro. 640x480 isn't a completely solid 60 FPS or anything, but SiN and Heretic II look quite playable in terms of framerate overall. The real tests will be Q3A and UT, though.

UT and Q3 won't even run on my G3 233 Bondi with the 4MB Rage Pro Turbo

I thought there was a pretty significant difference between the Rage 128 and any prior ATI GPU where 3D gaming in particular is concerned, such that it's actually viable for a change. However, that's also a bit disheartening to hear since that machine should be a good step up over the ol' Power Mac 6500, which can't run UT worth a crap even with a Voodoo2.

Your iMac sounds like a Revision B tray-loader, and here's the good news: you have that mezzanine slot for some much-needed upgrade capabilities, one of which is actually a custom 3dfx Voodoo accelerator. The bad news is that you'll be hard-pressed to find one of those for sale anywhere, and probably at a hefty price if you do due to rarity of iMac mezzanine slot upgrades in general.

Right now, I'm just trying to get an overall gauge for what is and isn't playable on bitten fruit hardware of various generations, particularly relative to commodity PC hardware. There's a major performance gap between my G3 350 MHz/Rage 128 Pro 8 MB iMac and my dual G4 1.42 GHz/Radeon 9250 MDD Power Mac, the latter of which I know will chew through both Q3A and UT without skipping a beat. Heck, there's a chance that the MDD will do even better with Q3A under OS X if I can just find a 1 Mbit ROM that'll work on a GeForce 6600 AGP for flashing purposes (all the ones listed on TheMacElite are out of production and unavailable from the likes of Mouser and DigiKey).

Speaking of iMacs, I got around to updating the OS 9 install on my iMac G3 400/DV. I had to download and install 4 different update archives (9.0.4, 9.1, 9.2.1, and 9.2.2) to get it fully updated, was much easier to do now compared to the last time because I've managed to find them all on as single MacBinary archives for each update while the previous method involved multi-part archives for the final set of updates (they were all downloaded from a Macintosh preservation site found on a Google search).

I've also installed OS X 10.1 Puma on that iMac, that's working fine also, but the OS X 10.1 updates are considerably harder to find without jumping through the hoop of having to download them onto a flash drive using a newer computer. At least I won't have to deal with the resource fork issues there thanks to OS X being UNIX-based.

As far as gaming is concerned: ATM I'm not too keen on trying any games on that iMac due to the fact that its' DVD drive is broken and sometimes the manual eject trick can take a long time to properly eject discs. I'm thinking of trying an external FireWire drive but OS 9 might not like it that much and some games have disk protection that can interfere with it depending on how strict it is on the drive interface type. I have much better Macs for that purpose though.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I thought there was a pretty significant difference between the Rage 128 and any prior ATI GPU where 3D gaming in particular is […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Also, it turns out that slot-loading iMac G3 350 is actually surprisingly competent at 3D gaming with its built-in Rage 128 Pro. 640x480 isn't a completely solid 60 FPS or anything, but SiN and Heretic II look quite playable in terms of framerate overall. The real tests will be Q3A and UT, though.

UT and Q3 won't even run on my G3 233 Bondi with the 4MB Rage Pro Turbo

I thought there was a pretty significant difference between the Rage 128 and any prior ATI GPU where 3D gaming in particular is concerned, such that it's actually viable for a change. However, that's also a bit disheartening to hear since that machine should be a good step up over the ol' Power Mac 6500, which can't run UT worth a crap even with a Voodoo2.

Your iMac sounds like a Revision B tray-loader, and here's the good news: you have that mezzanine slot for some much-needed upgrade capabilities, one of which is actually a custom 3dfx Voodoo accelerator. The bad news is that you'll be hard-pressed to find one of those for sale anywhere, and probably at a hefty price if you do due to rarity of iMac mezzanine slot upgrades in general.

Right now, I'm just trying to get an overall gauge for what is and isn't playable on bitten fruit hardware of various generations, particularly relative to commodity PC hardware. There's a major performance gap between my G3 350 MHz/Rage 128 Pro 8 MB iMac and my dual G4 1.42 GHz/Radeon 9250 MDD Power Mac, the latter of which I know will chew through both Q3A and UT without skipping a beat. Heck, there's a chance that the MDD will do even better with Q3A under OS X if I can just find a 1 Mbit ROM that'll work on a GeForce 6600 AGP for flashing purposes (all the ones listed on TheMacElite are out of production and unavailable from the likes of Mouser and DigiKey).

You're absolutely correct. Its a G3 233 Bondi Gen1 Rev B tray loader upgraded to 384MB Main Memory. I bought it that way about a year ago and got it running correctly several months ago and I've messed with it and vintage Macintosh software infrequently since then. The only annoying thing is that games like to switch the internal CRT to resolutions it doesn't support. I've noticed the internal CRT only supports certain resolutions at various odd refresh rates. If a game (For example: Quake) switchs it to something else you have to restart the machine while holding a specific key combo to reset the screen resolution otherwise it will start to a black screen due to the incompatible resolution being set and not being unset when the application is closed out. An example is Quake switching to 60hz full screen when the CRT only supports said resolution (the Mac 640x480 equivalent) at 85 hertz or 800x600 at 75. It's odd in that it won't accept refresh rates lower than its maximum for a given resolution.

Fun fact: When I got this machine it had 10.4 Tiger on it. It took the machine 20 minutes just to boot up. I bought it from some old lady who said she wasn't the original owner for 25 dollars. I have no clue what whoever did that was thinking when they installed OSX 10.4 on a Macintosh that old. Even upgraded 128MB beyond the apple recommend on RAM that isn't going to work well. It's like running Windows 7 on a Willamette P4. It was an absolute nightmare. Anywho I'm much more of a fan of my late 2005 eMac. It's the last consumer model with the 1.42GHZ G4 and the Radeon 9600 Pro. Sadly it's CRT brightness is too low and I need to open it up and turn the brightness knob up a bit. The sad thing is even a late eMac with the relatively powerful 9600 Pro can't run Halo for Macintosh worth a damn. It lags at any resolution at any setting.

My current experience with Macs has been frustrating. PPC machine are just a completely different ball game than X86 PCs.

Started building a 3D polygon city on my 1995 Gateway 2000, using tiling! 😀

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Fun fact: When I got this machine it had 10.4 Tiger on it. It took the machine 20 minutes just to boot up. I bought it from some old lady who said she wasn't the original owner for 25 dollars. I have no clue what whoever did that was thinking when they installed OSX 10.4 on a Macintosh that old. Even upgraded 128MB beyond the apple recommend on RAM that isn't going to work well. It's like running Windows 7 on a Willamette P4. It was an absolute nightmare. Anywho I'm much more of a fan of my late 2005 eMac. It's the last consumer model with the 1.42GHZ G4 and the Radeon 9600 Pro. Sadly it's CRT brightness is too low and I need to open it up and turn the brightness knob up a bit. The sad thing is even a late eMac with the relatively powerful 9600 Pro can't run Halo for Macintosh worth a damn. It lags at any resolution at any setting.

My current experience with Macs has been frustrating. PPC machine are just a completely different ball game than X86 PCs.

How much RAM was installed in that iMac when it had 10.4 Tiger? I've ran OS X 10.4 on my iMac DV 400MHz with 512MB RAM. It wasn't lightning fast, but it was certainly useable and I was even able to run iMovie HD and import some DV camcorder footage with ease, as well as some light Adobe Photoshop work.

I did also run OS X 10.3 Panther on a tray loader iMac Rev. D - 333MHz G3, 128MB RAM. Now that was painful! 🤣 Even after upgrading the RAM to 320MB, I still prefer OS 9 on there instead and generally wouldn't run OS X on anything less than 512MB RAM.

Borrowed two memory chips from my Gravis Ultrasound and put them in my new baby: Tandy 1000 RL HD. That enabled it to run games like hot rod 1 and 2, gods, xenon2, magic pockets in Tandy 16 color video mode. I chuckled when I realized that now Tandy and GUS both have 768KB of memory.

bjwil1991 wrote:

badmojo wrote:

Sheesh the same giant pics in 2 threads?

Imgur is weird. Had to add the letter b after the last character of the URL (before the .jpg file extension)

Here's my writeup of how to handle Imgur embeds:
Making clickable embedded images using Imgur image hosting service

Working on my 286 again. Finally got around to fitting a 5.25" Floppy Drive, as well as an IDE 24x CD-ROM drive. The CD-ROM is handy, as I have some discs with DOS games on them that run nicely on the 286. The old floppy drive, setup as Drive B, will do largely for archiving purposes.

Also decided to switch OS from MS-DOS 5.0 to PC DOS 7.0, mostly just to experiment with it. I've set up a menu in config.sys to allow for some memory optimisation for gaming.

I'll probably play around some more with 286 era games, before retiring the PC back into storage for a while. 🤣

The Tecnoware 500W PSU I had in my Ferrari Coppermine (now Ferrari-T since it's been upgraded to a pin-modded Tualatin) died suddenly: it made the computer freeze randomly and when it was put under load, the optical drive started seeking for discs out of the blue.

I have replaced it first with a 350W Bestec, as a stopgap solution, then I replaced it with a 450W Tecnoware that is running well so far. I also scored a 700W "Feuer" PSU that has two 12V rails and it's quite heavy, surely it must be at least good to run an ATI Radeon HD 3850, a graphics card I'd like to put in my PC in the future. I tested it, and works properly; since I got it for free can't complain much.

I've also replaced the floppy data cable with a longer one, allowing me to put the 5.25" drive on top. It also seems that lowering the AGP aperture size from 256MB to 64 improved performance both in games and in GDI, unless it's just an impression of mine...

EDIT: And my third 512MB module got corrupted half an hour ago. So I've swapped it with my old 256MB stick and I'm running at 1,2GB. I think it's the 512MB PC142 stick I got in that causes these corruptions. Strangely enough, it only corrupts the third newest 512MB module -regardless of the slot-, while the other ones (and even the 256MB one) are untouched. I will look to buy three identical modules in order to replace the existing ones, so at least I can have three sticks with the same timings.

Dragged out my AcerAcross 486DX2/66 to give it a run. It's been a while. Tried to run ircjr but it kept timing out the connect to slashnet. It was pinging the address ok so it wasn't the hardware. On a hunch I decided to visit Mikes site and download the latest version. Well I'll be damned copied ircjr over the top of the old one and everything worked as it should. Needless to say I was very happy with the outcome. I'll leave the system running over night before I put her back on the shelf.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

You're absolutely correct. Its a G3 233 Bondi Gen1 Rev B tray loader upgraded to 384MB Main Memory. I bought it that way about a year ago and got it running correctly several months ago and I've messed with it and vintage Macintosh software infrequently since then. The only annoying thing is that games like to switch the internal CRT to resolutions it doesn't support. I've noticed the internal CRT only supports certain resolutions at various odd refresh rates. If a game (For example: Quake) switchs it to something else you have to restart the machine while holding a specific key combo to reset the screen resolution otherwise it will start to a black screen due to the incompatible resolution being set and not being unset when the application is closed out. An example is Quake switching to 60hz full screen when the CRT only supports said resolution (the Mac 640x480 equivalent) at 85 hertz or 800x600 at 75. It's odd in that it won't accept refresh rates lower than its maximum for a given resolution.

Fun fact: When I got this machine it had 10.4 Tiger on it. It took the machine 20 minutes just to boot up. I bought it from some old lady who said she wasn't the original owner for 25 dollars. I have no clue what whoever did that was thinking when they installed OSX 10.4 on a Macintosh that old. Even upgraded 128MB beyond the apple recommend on RAM that isn't going to work well. It's like running Windows 7 on a Willamette P4. It was an absolute nightmare. Anywho I'm much more of a fan of my late 2005 eMac. It's the last consumer model with the 1.42GHZ G4 and the Radeon 9600 Pro. Sadly it's CRT brightness is too low and I need to open it up and turn the brightness knob up a bit. The sad thing is even a late eMac with the relatively powerful 9600 Pro can't run Halo for Macintosh worth a damn. It lags at any resolution at any setting.

My current experience with Macs has been frustrating. PPC machine are just a completely different ball game than X86 PCs.

Hmmm, still some room for RAM expansion (swap your 128 MB stick for a 256 MB one for 512 MB max), but I doubt it would be worth it unless you really want to run OS X on it. Tiger wants at least 512 MB to feel comfortable, even better if you can go up to 1 GB or beyond, but only slot-loader G3s can hit the 1 GB mark. Even then, from my memories with a 400 MHz Pismo, it's hardly ideal when the Rage 128 isn't exactly Quartz Extreme-compatible and there's no AltiVec like a G4.

320 MB in my own iMac feels like plenty for OS 9.2.2. Maybe not the greatest for leaving Classilla open in the background and then running a game afterward (without virtual memory, I should emphasize), but I don't actually have to worry about RAM limits like I do on my IIcx and its "I can only get 4 MB of RAM to come up in this thing!" predicament. I can't even run Wolfenstein 3D with sound on that thing when booting from System 7.5 on the HDD; I have to use a System 6 boot floppy just for the lower RAM footprint!

I've never run into the out-of-range sync problem on the internal CRT for said iMac, though, but I haven't tested a whole lot of games yet, certainly not Quake.

As for OS X gaming, that's where I run into one hell of a wake-up call with my MDD G4 and iBook G4 1.42 GHz: neither can run Battlefield 1942 worth a crap. The old Athlon XP 1800+/512 MB DDR-266/Radeon 9600 XT box I had to use for most of last decade didn't run it flawlessly either, but it certainly ran BF1942 a hell of a lot more smoothly overall, as well as Halo! It's pretty clear to me that Mac gaming was clearly second-class going into the new millenium, as even late-'90s titles on the Classic Mac OS still lose out on A3D/EAX support (without use of SoundSprocket in their place) despite being on par in other respects (even boasting InputSprocket support fairly frequently), and enhanced Mac versions like Wolf3D, X-Wing/TIE Fighter and maybe System Shock were a thing of the past.

Also, Unreal Tournament's OS X port is kinda lackluster. No music, for starters, and UT without those UMX tunes is just wrong! Quake III Arena fares better on OS X because it's open-source, but then you get to deal with recent builds of ioquake3 no longer supporting PowerPC. Meanwhile, you can still run the original UT'99 release on modern versions of Windows, with the OldUnreal OpenAL patch and the Direct3D10/11 renderer for good measure, and still get the definitive experience (aside from lack of mouse button 4/5 support, something that the Mac version could do through InputSprocket).

With all that in mind, I'm wondering if it's best to limit my scope of a Mac vs. PC Gaming Showdown sorta series to '90s Classic Mac OS sorta stuff, as that's the one period where's it's not clear-cut one way or the other.

'80s stuff wouldn't even be a contest because both Macs and PCs were thoroughly outclassed by Amigas and X68000s to the point that you might as well go for those versions if possible. Like, imagine if DOS MechWarrior looked and sounded like this instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI8-Oq3G9CI

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

I've also installed OS X 10.1 Puma on that iMac, that's working fine also, but the OS X 10.1 updates are considerably harder to find without jumping through the hoop of having to download them onto a flash drive using a newer computer.

I have both the latest combo update and security update for 10.1. Let me know if you need them.

After hunting around I was able to get a Vortex2 based card installed and working on my Windows 98 PC.

A3D really is something special. Half Life sounds incredible with it, and playing with the audio demos is fun too.

Another one desoldered.. This one was in nick of time - trace on opposite side of mainboard started to corrode.

By the way, if you put one of these batteries next to your ear, you can hear those words - "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of motherboards".

It is my first pcb, which corrosion isn't removed by isopropanol plus little scrubbing. It is okay to use baking soda?

Burned the midiman mm401 v1.15 rom into a new old stock NEC 2764 eprom.

Currently I have the v1.10 rom in the card, so I'll do the swap on the weekend

kazeobi wrote:

It is my first pcb, which corrosion isn't removed by isopropanol plus little scrubbing. It is okay to use baking soda?

Yup. Use a toothbrush or something sized similarly to apply it, then rinse using distilled water or IPA.