a Completely Scatterbrained Thread About the Beige G3/266

[aphetica]

I recently took my G3/266 Rev1 down from storage hoping that I might be able to turn it into a semi-competent web browser with Tiger (possibly panther), and also add a partition for OS9, for scsi and older games.

[edit: nevermind. I'm working on installing 10.4 with xpostfacto.]

Also, OS8's system profiler says that the video is from "ATY,mach64_3DU GT-B". What in the world is that? Is it some kind of specific video card? I searched Google, but I could only come up with people asking the same question.

I upped the ram to 768mb, btw... will probably swap out the HDD and video card for whatever I have lying around that might improve performance. I'm aware that X needs to be within the first 8gb partition.

 

[LCGuy]

ATY,mach64 = ATI Mach64, the chip that the Rage IIc, that is, the chip in the Rev. A Beige G3 is based off.

 

[Temetka]

You will need to source a PCI video card for your machine.

The last OS to support the Rage chip was 10.2.

I would suggest sourcing a cheap Rage128 or better card.

If you get a PCI Radeon you can try enabling Quartz Extreme by using the PCI Extreme program (not available from Apple). This will make the machine much faster.

If you don't want to spend any money, then I don't know what your options are other than Linux. You can try Jaguar, but I think the newer browsers require 10.3 and up.

 

[Unknown_K]

Rev 1 beige g3 machines are not the greatest for OSX, stick with OS 9.2.

 

[aphetica]

Rev 1 beige g3 machines are not the greatest for OSX, stick with OS 9.2.

If I did that, I wouldn't be able to access most of the sites I frequent.

This is not going to be my main machine. I have a MDD G4 that is more than happy to devour any task I offer it. I just need something with a modern browser for seeking out information online in the rare case that my G4 is in pieces or otherwise rendered temporarily inoperable.

I actually had 10.2 on this beige machine for awhile when it had only 256mb of ram... It was slow, but tolerable.

 

[aphetica]

ATY,mach64 = ATI Mach64, the chip that the Rage IIc, that is, the chip in the Rev. A Beige G3 is based off.

Thanks.

 

[Unknown_K]

There is a new version of icab for OS 9 out.

 

[aphetica]

I didn't care much for the older versions of iCab... but I will give the new one a try.

Does anyone know what video card this is / how many mb?

It has a chip on it labeled "Velocity 1.1", and I believe it is from STB. It was installed in the PCI slot of my Performa 6400/200 and uses a standard VGA connector. 6400 is in pieces, otherwise I would just check system profiler.

http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h149/aphetica/DSCF0055copy.jpg

Right now, I am installing OS 9.0 and partitioning the disk... zeroing the data is taking forever. I'm using a 30gb Samsung and I believe the cache is 2mb... that should be a bit better than the Fireball that was in there before. I think it only had a 512k cache.

I have 3 partitions in it... is there any reason for leaving any free space outside the partitions? I thought I remembered reading something about a disk needing free, unpartitioned space for something, but I'm not sure.

Sorry I am full of dumb questions tonight. I'm feeling kind of manic.

 

[aphetica]

Oh wait... I finally found it... on page 9 of a google image search there was a tiny, blurry pic of the card... the page is in russian, but it says the card is 4mb.

I probably need more for 10.3+, right?

 

[Temetka]

You should be ok with 4MB.

I bet the onbard Rage IIc is faster though. They can be upgraded to 4MB or 6MB. Look at the motherboard. Next to the video chip should be a small SODIMM looking slot. Stick the VRAM in there.

 

[aphetica]

Onboard is already 6mb... I wasn't sure if a video card would up the total to 10mb or just replace it.

 

[aphetica]

I'm having trouble using xpostfacto... first of all, 9.0.4 won't open a .dmg file... so I mounted it on my G4 and then emailed the xpostfacto application to myself and loaded it on the 266, but 9.0.4 says it can't be opened because the application that created it cannot be found.

I am searching for answers on Google, but have not found anything yet.

This is probably something that is really easy to fix...

The first Mac OS I ever used was 10.2, so I'm still learning when it comes to classic stuff.

 

[aphetica]

Tried mounting the xpostfacto dmg with disk copy, but it says the option did not complete because xpostfacto.dmg does not have a recognized file type.

So... 10.4 recognizes it as a classic application...

but 9.0.4 doesn't recognize it as anything at all.

 

[aphetica]

Nevermind again. Once I found a .sit copy of xpostfacto to DL, everything was okay. Starts fine now.

 

[Temetka]

Onboard is already 6mb... I wasn't sure if a video card would up the total to 10mb or just replace it.

No, it is not cumulative.

Though with a 2nd card you can run a 2nd monitor.

 

[aphetica]

Hooray! Thanks to everyone who helped / provided information.

It's 6:35am and it took me most of the night to get this done, with all the research I had to do to get over a few snags... but it honestly wasn't as hard as I was expecting it to be. Had no problems booting with the lack of a video card. Installation hung on the first try (on disc 2), but rebooted and everything went smoothly.

Safari 3, Adium, and iStat pro... it's like a home away from home.

It is quite slow when booting up, (a couple minutes?) but once that's done, everything runs well... infact, quite a bit better than I expected it to.

I even played a youtube video... it was quite choppy, but I'm thinking if I could upgrade to a 32mb video card, it would be okay. I was surprised it loaded at all, considering the aneurisms that OS9 had while trying to load javascripts.

I'm really happy with the way things turned out.

Next thing I'm considering is maybe overclocking from 266 to 300mhz... has anyone here done that?

I have lots of pages on how to do it, but I think it would make me feel better to hear some success stories first.

 

[aphetica]

There is a new version of icab for OS 9 out.

Oh, and thanks to you, I found out that I really like the PPC version of iCab.

I used it on 68k before and didn't have very good luck with it, but the PPC version is very nice.. I don't think there are any browsers that can compare to it on OS9.

 

[Unknown_K]

icab lets me use gmail when IE5 will not.

 

[aphetica]

icab lets me use gmail when IE5 will not.

Yeah, that's why I liked it... I didn't find a whole lot of limitations to it... I was surprised how well it handled a lot of scripts, plus the fact that even if it did find something it couldn't handle, it wouldn't take the entire machine down with it like netscape or IE.