Beige G3 RAM and PSU questions:

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The pinout is compatible with 20 pin ATX. The tower PSU is basically an ATX PSU. The desktop one has the soft power the Mac way instead of the ATX way, so if you want to use a board out of a desktop with ATX you have to swap Jumper J28 over to the other position (it's in the corner near the back of the end PCI slot.

Nice, thanks much for that info. The little 1U compatible 300w PSU arrives today from Amazon. The 500w PSU arrived from eBay and it's a 9" deep freakin' beast of a thing! Wouldn't even fit nicely in the 4U PEx project.

It's only got ten SATA power connectors aside from Molex aarray.

 

[croissantking]

Sounds like a fun little project

Only one way to find out…

 

[croissantking]

Has anyone ever tried to get a PC floppy drive to work with a retail board?

So I have now, and it doesn't work. No sign of life.

Of course I made sure the floppy cable was the right way round and that the drive was plugged into power. I also swapped in a Rev. A ROM and booted Mac OS 8.0 just in case the newer ROM/OS had dropped support for it.

Interestingly theres a short mini-molex cable that hangs off the Beige G3DT PSU that isn't used for anything, but it's the perfect length to reach a PC floppy drive when it's fitted in the floppy bay. I expect it was there just for that.

 

[Trianon]

I'm also working on a beige G3 these days and was wondering about this connector :
- there are to bays in the top plastic for an FDD, but the Apple floppy cable is only single device ? (on my LC there are 2 of those connectors).
- maybe apple was thinking to have a double floppy option and for this added the PC style one but never followed up in SW ?

 

[Phipli]

maybe apple was thinking to have a double floppy option and for this added the PC style one but never followed up in SW ?

They planned to move to PC floppy drives to reduce costs, but ended up not doing it on the G3 (perhaps because it didn't work). In the end they just dropped floppy drives with the iMac.

 

[Durosity]

So I have now, and it doesn't work. No sign of life

Well that’s a bummer! And quick work.. I was gonna go try that out tomorrow when I get back from Glasgow, but you beat me to the punch

 

[CC_333]

Well that’s a bummer! And quick work..

Indeed!

But, @croissantking discovered how to get the beige G3's unimplemented USB circuits working, so this couldn't be that hard?

Perhaps there's some clues in the ROM's floppy driver (is it still referred to as .Sony, as in older 68k ROMs?)

Clearly it works mechanically, and electrically all the circuits seem to be intact, so it not working has to be software related somehow.

c

 

[croissantking]

It might be firmware related.

I don’t quite get how a PC floppy drive would have integrated with Mac OS, though. Normally, when you insert a disk it appears on the desktop - but afaik a PC floppy drive doesn’t have any way to signal to the OS that a disk has been inserted.