Digital art on a B&W G3 or eMac

[notcrazy_iminsane]

I just got a 300MHz B&W G3 Power Mac that my recycler friend pulled from a Catholic School. I was thinking of using it for low-end digital art after upgrading it to OS 9 or X. My biggest concern with it are:

A- If my tablet is incompatible. I know it has a disk with Mac drivers, but I don't remember what OS it is for

B- No clue what art program it could tollerate easily. I have a couple RAM cards that came with it, but no clue what size they are since the computer won't boot (needs a new OS install), and a couple 128MB cards I can throw in.

C- The display might die soon. It makes an odd clicking sound and the screen wiggles each time it clicks.

I could probably use my eMac instead. I know it could handle more since it's 800MHz with ATI graphics and running OS X Tiger, but I run into similar problems. Tablet compatibility and a good program to run on it.

I'm not looking for the stuff like I did with my laptop back when I had XP. As soon as I upgraded to Windows 7, Photoshop ran too slow for me to use it. Surely either my eMac or G3 should have enough power to run low-end art programs, right? Any clue which would be best? The requirements for Photoshop CS and CS2 seem to look good, so if anyone has experience with either of these programs on these computers, let me know

 

[kite210]

My B&W came with a bunch of adobe software on it, Illustrator works great, and so does Photoshop.

It also has Flash MX 2004 and Dreamweaver MX 2004 on it as well, and they both work with minimal lag.

It all depends what you want to do. :beige:

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

I would most definately recommend *NOT* running Tiger on a stock B&W. Especially a 300Mhz Rev A like you seem to have (see my thread on this forum as to problems Rev A B&W Macs have). Yeah, you can technically run Tiger on a 300Mhz G3, but you probably won't be happy with it.

Were it me, I would run 9.2.2. That effectively limits you to Photoshop 7. I run Photoshop 5.5 on my iMac, and it serves my needs, but I'm not a professional artist or anything. The sheer number of options PS offers causes my head to spin.

Regardless, RAM is the most important thing. The 64MB that these machines came stock with is okay for light usage in 8, extremely borderline for 9 (the system heap with use up about 40 megs of that, give or take), and right out for X. Go to 256MB at least.

Clearly the eMac is the better machine for running X and more modern incarnations of Photoshop.

I can't help with your tablet unless you're a bit more specific about what it is, and what's on the driver CD.

YMMV.

 

[notcrazy_iminsane]

I decided against using the B&W for art. I ended up giving it to my sister. I took the hard drive that was in it and swapped it for one that came out of an iMac that booted into Panther. I didn't like the lag even after I expanded it to 512MB of RAM, so I guess I'll be using the eMac.

I need a good computer that I can use for both writing and illustrating the manga I've been working on. I don't need anything crazy good, just something great for working with grayscale imaging. My eMac's running Tiger, and it has 9.2 so I can run Classic mode if needed.

I'll be pulling the tablet box out of my closet as soon as I get home and see what driver support it has. Hopefully it's better off than my USB Floppy Drive that only supports OS 8.5 to 9.2 :-/

 

[kite210]

I have a rev. A B&W that's been overclocked to 400Mhz, and it runs tiger just fine, although it might be the 576Mb of ram.

 

[notcrazy_iminsane]

I'm considering overclocking my B&W. Should be a simple jumper switch, right?

 

[Emehr]

Check out the XLR8 website for overclocking your Mac. It's super easy. As far as software, I would recommend running Mac OS 9 and Photoshop 7, which has the improved painting engine (i.e. better brush customizations). You should be able to find a copy cheap on feeBay.

 

[kite210]

It's fairly simple to overclock the B&W, but just make sure to only do it 50Mhz at a time, just make sure that you don't blow your processor, and to keep track of which speeds work.

You can usually bump the speed up about 50-100mhz.

Mine was originally a 350Mhz model, and I bumped it to 400Mhz with no problem, but when I tried 450Mhz, it would just chime and not boot up.

YMMV though, as I might just need to add a fan, and new thermal paste.

 

[notcrazy_iminsane]

I'm thinking about bumping it up to 350MHz. The Radioshack website says the jumpers I need are available in store. I should look into it.

On a more on-topic subject, I found a copy of Mac Photoshop CS. I'm going to try and snag it and install it on my eMac and see how it runs. It should be good since it's only two versions behind what I would normally use.