Docs needed

[clh333]

Greetings all,

In addition to SE Mac variants and a Quadra 650 I have a G3 beige desktop machine that I know little about: It has the 300MHz CPU, 760 MB memory, ATI video card, CDR, ATAPI ZIP drive and a 9+ GB HD. I believe the "personality" card is the "wings" variant; it has RCA and S-Video in and out; more than just audio capture. The Ethernet port is attached to a Cisco Linksys and through a wireless router to a networked Dell 1720dn printer. A 17 inch CTX monitor is running at 75 MHz, displaying 24-bit-depth at 832x624.

I have upgraded from OS 8 to OS 9.2.2, partitioning the HD as I did so, and upgraded the memory to the limit, but that's about all I have done, mainly because I don't know much about the hardware that is on the machine or what can be done with it. Some of the icons on the back are familiar, many are not, and there seem to be a lot of "if this then not that" inter-relations to the hardware config.

I'd like to add a FireWire PCI card but don't know if just ANY PCI firewire card will work. I have 2 MB video RAM but I read that can be upgraded to 6 MB. There is a CDR but I'd like to upgrade to a CDRW or DVD RW but again I read that not all CDRWs are compatible and of those, not all are bootable. And DVD RWs seem to need the "bordeaux" personality card. The networked printer is masquerading as a Laser Writer 8; seems to work but maybe there's a better option. The ATAPI ZIP drive is fussy about the disks it is asked to read and sometimes will refuse to recognize a disk until it has been "blessed" by another SCSI ZIP. The HD is getting full; I think I read that OS 9 can only handle a 10 GB drive but I also have read that larger drives can be used. Maybe with partitions?

I have a Mac Secrets book but a lot of what I need to know is specific to this machine and I'd welcome a reference to more particular documentation. Thanks for your suggestions.

-CH-

 

[jeremywork]

I haven't messed with the onboard video comprehensively yet, though I did once write up a quick overview of some of the more desirable PERCH cards:

Got a Power Macintosh G3 Desktop, what is it???

I recently got a PM G3 desktop and I was wondering about upgrades for it and also how to get an OS installed on it most effectively. It currently has a 1GB HDD, but it doesn't boot and according to everymac it isn't the original, so I'm wanting to replace it, but what is the best replacement for...

68kmla.org

Perhaps the rest of the thread will be more helpful for your other questions too.

As far as I know, the Bordeaux card is only useful for DVD video playback in conjuction with the onboard video. DVDs should mount fine and probably burn fine (look into a third-party software called PatchBurn, which used to be a mainstay of Mac upgraders back when Apple only allowed their OEM drives to function as burners; http://patchburn.de/)

You should also be able to play DVD video with a capable PCI video card, such as an ATI Rage 128 or Radeon.
The Beige G3 was shipped with three different onboard ATI chips at different manufacture dates. The first was 3D Rage II+DVD, then 3D Rage Pro, and finally 3D Rage Pro Turbo (turbo may be a simple marketing rebrand in-line with a more optimized software driver.) The "+DVD" monkier was used to denote the chip's bandwidth exceeding the requirement for being passed decoded MPEG-2 video, though the decoder itself was not onboard (hence Bordeaux.) The Pro/Pro Turbo may have actually included MPEG-2 decoding onboard, though I'm not sure based on Wikipedia's vague mention of "DVD support." All three models had 2MB onboard VRAM and could accept a 4MB upgrade for 6MB total.

I have a couple 300MHz models with the Pro Turbo, so I should really just pop in a DVD drive and try it out.