• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

First post, snagged an S900 in great cosmetic shape, but with problems

macuserman

Well-known member
Ok well, I tried switching to the first PCI slot. No luck. It does the exact same thing.

Can I just stick any old PCI video card in there?
If you have another PCI based mac to borrow the card from it should work fine, but you can't take one from a PC, it has to be a mac versioned card.
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Holding down “C” starting off the Mac OS installer, hold down shift for Extentions Off. Can you send a pic of the existing card - we’ve asked a few times! 😃 Sadly a generic PCI x86 video card doesn’t have a Mac compatible ROM, so nothing will happen. A Mac Rage 128, ATI Nexus or ATI Xclaim card would be the cheapest and most appropriate card to source.
 

kruuth

Active member
Ok. I think I found the issue. I have an older Apple Studio display that I was saving for a project. Plugged it in, and although blurry it worked. The problem was that while it was doing 1024x768, it was doing it at 100mhz, which the LCD didn't like. Is there some way to get this to never offer resolutions with that refresh rate?
 

kruuth

Active member
Video card is the standard twin card. I can post a pic, but there's nothing special.

As for the box, ask and ye shall receive:


20211119_071745.jpg20211119_071755.jpg20211119_071807.jpg20211119_071820.jpg

Now I need some ram. Any advice? It has something like 96mb of ram, and ebay's pickings are slim. I did a search for 70 ns 168 pin DIMM but if there's something else I can use I'll take it.
 
Last edited:

macuserman

Well-known member
Video card is the standard twin card. I can post a pic, but there's nothing special.
Now I need some ram. Any advice? It has something like 96mb of ram, and ebay's pickings are slim. I did a search for 70 ns 168 pin DIMM but if there's something else I can use I'll take it.
Those pictures are awesome. On the video card front the easiest way to fix your resolution issues is just to get another card a cheap rage or something like that which has already been suggested.

Memory shouldn’t be anything special I think it’s the same as all the other pci Powermacs so any of it should work I don’t think it matters fpm or edo. You have 8 slots so you should be able to pack it pretty full.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
So any of the 168-pin memory? What about adding USB or a pata controller?
Yep as long as it’s 5v it will work. There are also a lot of usb cards and pats card options. I’ve got some extra of those actually at the moment if you want one message me and we can work something out.
 

CircuitBored

Well-known member
Looks harder to find. I can't find any 5v stuff on eBay, just 3.3v

It is tremendously hard to find RAM for these machines, particularly 64 and 128MB sticks. I've been hunting for four 64MB sticks for almost a year now and have found nothing good.
What about adding USB or a pata controller?

For USB the Belkin F5U220 and F5U212 cards are the best, IMO. They work on any PCI Mac with USB enabled in the system software (it is enabled by default on OS 9 and above, I can't vouch for earlier versions).

PATA controllers are another particularly hard-to-find item for old Macs and another thing that I have been searching for for a while to no avail. I'll let you know if/when I find a good card that works with the S900.
That's another mess Does this CD-rom even read cd-rw?

Probably not, no. I've had no luck at all reading CD-RWs or even CD-Rs in my stock S900 CD drive. One of the reasons I want a PATA card is so I can remove the SCSI devices from the S900 entirely. I have a lovely CD-RW drive and a UHD floppy drive waiting in the wings for the day a PATA card shows up.

If you want a more modern storage interface on your S900 then the easiest route to take is flashing a SIL3112 SATA card with the Seritek firmware. It's a tricky process that involves replacing a flash ROM chip on the card but it's well worth it because it means you can boot from modern SATA disks.

I recommend you do a universal install of OS 9.1 on another machine (if you can) and then move the disk over to the S900. It's far, far, easier to get started that way. If you happen to know someone with a G3 Desktop, which has both PATA and SCSI, you can use their machine to handle the SCSI disk from the S900. That said, the original hard drives are ancient, noisy, and painfully slow. I really recommend you try to get yourself a flashed SIL3112.
 
Last edited:

Byrd

Well-known member
Your graphics card - ixMicro Twin Turbo 128M2 - is a snappy 2D only accelerator and probably very dependant on monitor sense timing as found on CRT displays of the era, I suspect your resolution issues are due to a timing detection issues in later LCD displays. A good card for the machine, only you'd need a Mac Radeon if keen to game on it.

There are some additional drivers for the card here:

 

kruuth

Active member
Your graphics card - ixMicro Twin Turbo 128M2 - is a snappy 2D only accelerator and probably very dependant on monitor sense timing as found on CRT displays of the era, I suspect your resolution issues are due to a timing detection issues in later LCD displays. A good card for the machine, only you'd need a Mac Radeon if keen to game on it.

There are some additional drivers for the card here:

Thanks, but are there any real exclusive 3d graves on the Mac? I am thinking of what I played(maelstrom, loom, Kung Fu chivalry) and I think my existence predates 3d for the most part
 
Top