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help with Power Macintosh G3 400 (Blue & White)

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
10.5 won't run out of the box on your G3/G4 configuration, but if you get a G4 CPU, you can trick it. It's not generally worth it, though.
You can "trick" 10.5 onto an AGP G4 that's too slow to be on the supported list pretty easily, but as I recall at least it's *much* harder to get it on a Yikes or upgraded B&W. I believe that actually requires patching in some drivers/kernel extensions from a beta release, or something to that effect. 10.4 is the practical limit for that HW, and probably the optimal release for a lot of other reasons. The only argument for a lesser version of OS X would be if you wanted it to be an Appleshare server, but running 10.2 would actually render it pretty useless for some of the other tasks you want to do because the selection of compatible web browsers, etc, is much poorer.

I still think you're utterly wasting your money on this whole G4 upgrade thing, it's hard to sugar coat it any other way, especially if your only goal for the hardware is a bridge Mac. Adding a G4 won't enable it to do anything it's not already capable of.

 

nglevin

Well-known member
If the ZIFs and boards are cheap, there's some fun in doing minor upgrades on a budget.

Point taken though that I can't really think of much in the OS 9 generation that was accelerated for Altivec, the one significant element that the early G4s added over the G3. And Mac OS X can work on machines less powerful than 1.25 GHz but as for working well... that's the setup I put together for an elderly friend to send e-mails and traverse the Flash-blocked web. You'll be wanting for something stronger with more well known OS X software, and PowerBook G4s are in still pretty decent supply.

This has so little to do with actually using the Mac as a true bridge Mac, but if you're at the point of just entertaining idle interests in seeing what your old Mac can do; Rhapsody (Mac OS X Server 1.2) is less stable, to the point that I don't really recommend running Mac OS 8.6 in Rhapsody's own version of "Classic mode" on it, but it's a more interesting option that other vintage Mac hardware won't give you. It was never really optimized for G4s, so I'm again at kind of a loss as to what a G4 adds. Besides a still-slow, but not as slow, low end Mac OS X experience that mid 2000s hardware does better.

 
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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Just anecdotally: On my B&W with a Yikes board and a 450MHz G3 (the label indicates mine was a 450 originally, IDK what happened to its original motherboard), 10.3 was "fine" back in the day. Stock Rage128, but I had somewhere in the range of 500 to 800 megs of RAM and a slightly newer hard disk.

10.4 was probably about the same, again, back in the day right around when 10.4 was released.

I got 10.5 on a 466MHz digital audio with 256 megs of RAM and that was bad. I never bothered to try other versions on that system.

 

Dog Cow

Well-known member
Point taken though that I can't really think of much in the OS 9 generation that was accelerated for Altivec, the one significant element that the early G4s added over the G3.
Adobe Photoshop is a good example.

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
the label indicates mine was a 450 originally, IDK what happened to its original motherboard
I wonder if it might have had a Rev. A the owner wanted to swap out, and the Yikes board was cheaper than a Rev. B. (It deserves to be, given the lack of ADB.)

The 400mhz Yikes ZIF in my B&W I laid hands on when they were practically worthless. (It's complicated, but I actually got it and a 350mhz one for free.) I have no evidence to back this up, but considering how it seemed for a while that Yikes parts were actually more common than complete PCI G4 machines part of me wonders if Apple overproduced parts for them during that period they were ramping up the AGP G4s, which later ended up getting dumped on the grey market. (This was, of course, before Apple had really started turning the screws on independent Mac shops.)

I'm all for upgrading machines "just 'cause" when the parts just fall into your hands, but my searches on eBay for affordable G4 ZIFs have been coming up snake eyes, and I also know first hand that the resulting machine isn't much of an improvement. When the upgrade costs more than a whole other *much better* machine the choice is easy.

 
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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
When the upgrade costs more than a whole other *much better* machine the choice is easy.
I'm a little biased here because I got my QS"02 G4/800 with a gig of RAM and a solid optical and hard disks for $40 at a local thrift shop, so with that min mind my thought is definitely in favor of using a newer, better machine.

If I were dailying it as my endpoint 9.2.2 box, I might go ahead and drop a fast single upgrade, or one of the faster chip variants like the /733 (with more cache) from the dA or the /933 from the faster stock QS'02 machines, but as a server, the 800MHz is overkill enough as it is. (I reserve the right, however, to update that when I put retrospect on the machine and do some testing and make judgement calls about file compression settings.)

 

nglevin

Well-known member
Adobe Photoshop is a good example.
(Oh no, this is an excuse for me to ramble about Altivec and it’s a bad one. Pardon me for this big huge tangent...)

There was a plugin that made for good Macworld demos in Photoshop 5.5, like the Radius PhotoBooster plugin that leveraged the same AT&T chips as the Quadra AV before it. It benchmarked very well for certain filters. (Myself, I tend to forget most versions of Photoshop after 3.0.5 because that one version was the heyday of fun, gimmicky plugins like KPT and Canvas Tools.)

iMovie and MP3 decoders are also cited as beneficiaries of Altivec. IIRC, Logic 5 was the first version of Logic that was accelerated for Altivec, but that came very late in the OS 9 lifecycle.

In all of the above examples, it’s software where the developers put in the time to write Altivec code in their hot paths instead of push vectorization-friendly work off to the GPU with early OpenGL. There’s significant overlap at the time this was happening with when Carbon and OS X were coming to the fore. This is about where the whole Altivec is “better for OS X” guidance comes from. It took a bit of time for the benefits to be more widely used.

To an extent, SIMD optimizations are easier with modern compilers that can automatically generate vectorization friendly code without requiring developers to manually write Altivec instructions in C functions and assembly. Later, Mac OS X shipped with a cross platform SIMD framework called “Accelerate” that covers Altivec, the many Intel vector extensions, ARM Neon, etc...

Back to OS 9, the consensus was that Altivec was only used by a small handful of apps around the time of 9.1, and the hope was that Mac OS X would have more solutions to take advantage of the G4, and this was before the PowerPC G4 7450 series broke the gigahertz barrier.

By the time you are looking at OS X software that did a better job of using Altivec, you’ll notice the hardware that runs it best will be the very affordable G4e (PPC 7450 series) portables, G5s... and Intel Macs, where rather than have a lone engineer write some Altivec by hand, much of the SIMD work came for free from porting Intel SIMD code direct from a Windows version.

tl;dr, Altivec only benefits very late OS 9 apps that took the time to leverage it. When it comes to B&W upgrades, don’t worry about not having Altivec. There are newer machines better suited for it.

 
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just.in.time

Well-known member
@mraroid, for OS go find that eMac 9.2.2 CD that @Cory5412 mentioned at the garden. Install that. Once done, install 10.4 (and update to 10.4.11) on the same partition. If you are only going with a 128gb disk I’d say stick to one partition. For OS X up to 10.4.11, as long as you have 512mb ram or more you generally got better performance from the same hardware the higher you pushed the OS. Assuming you have a CD burner installed, either OS (10.4 or 9.2) will be fine for writing your CDs. You may need Toast for OS 9 (or certain images in X).

But really, networking will be much more convenient if you can do that.

While booted in 10.4.11, use tenfourfox.

While booted in 9.2.2, use classilla (my preference, some may prefer other vintage browsers but I think your G3 should be plenty fast for classilla).

I agree with others, skip the G4 board swap.  Your board you have now will be great for what you want to accomplish. If you want upgrades, I’d say do the following:

RAM to at least 512mb

PCI SATA card (gets around size limitation and way faster than onboard IDE. Plus you can use modern, aka cheap, disks and ssd... 1TB spinning disks are cheap)

USB 2.0 card (requires at least 10.2.x[8?] to run at 2.0 speed, otherwise works but only at 1.1 speed). Good for transferring data to modern computers using USB sticks. USB floppy drive will likely not see any change in performance from this.

Last, the Radeon 7000 PCI is a decent OS 9 and early X GPU for systems where AGP cards aren’t an option. It’s a good balance of affordability and performance. If buying one that wasn’t originally a Mac version, make sure the seller who flashed it to Mac did it right. I recall there being weird quirks if not done correctly. That said, this is last because what it came with is decent enough and the other upgrades will be more practical.

 

mraroid

Well-known member
 I used the G3's heatsink and it fit fine.
Gorgonops...
 
I believe you are correct about the heat sink.  I did some digging last night and finally found one for sale.
 
I am trying to keep my B&W G3 V 2 motherboard intact with the CPU and heat sink.  I thought someone with a B&W with a V1 motherboard might want to upgrade to mine.  Mine is 400Mhz.  Once I have finished the install of the Yikes! and every thing seems to be running OK, I can post the B&W G3 V2 motherboard for sale.
 
I found a very inexpensive 500Mhz G4 processor (with no heat sink) which I hope to put in the Yikes! motherboard.
 
I am impressed with how cool my B&W case is.  It will be even cooler when i pull that 100 F or more heater that we call a mechanical hard drive and swap it out for a SS drive.  I think the SS drive will draw less current than a mechanical hard drive.  So if I find a PCI expansion card I like, I will worry less about taxing the power supply.
 
mraroid
 

mraroid

Well-known member
10.4 is probably the safest compromise if you absolutely must run OS X on that hardware.
I have no idea which OSX to run, and I am not even sure i need it...

What sites are you browsing? Netscape 4.8, WaMCoM Mozilla 1.3.1 or Classilla [most recent version] will run fine and be good for most sites explicitly offering vintage Mac downloads - (in particular, Macintosh Garden).
My main use will be to go to Macintoshgarden (and other old software sites) to down load software and burn CDs & floppies that I can use in my Color Clasic Mystic.  I am going to use this Yikes! so I can surf slightly faster then my Color Classic using Netscape 4.08.  It works, but it is so darn slow...

6) you can now move the SD card between the scsi2sd in your vintage mac and a USB card reader in your modern one
That is an idea.  I already have a CF2SCSI card in my Color Classic

This kind of hearkens back to a comment I made in the previous thread about not really needing a bridge Mac given that your CC's got an '040 and a bunch of RAM and OS 8 on it, and can load Macintosh Garden in Netscape 4.08.
Yes, that works, but it is jut too slow....

mraroid

 

Mikeyy00

Well-known member
One thing to keep in mind.. you mention your Color Classic is very slow to surf the internet. A <400mhz G3 running Classzilla truthfully isn't going to be "that" much better. It's still a very painful experience. Macintosh Repository probably works fine.. but most othe sites will be dog slow, and (usually) only the mobile version - Classzilla reports itself to be a mobile device to help reduce the processing power required to load the site.

Also keep in mind, the web of today is 100x the size of the web of 1999/2000 (the Heyday of the B+W G3), I mean this in a filesize way.. not in a content way (although probably true there too). Javascript is a real bitch for G3/G4's to process.

 

mraroid

Well-known member
Milkeyy00....

The actual down load speed from Mac gardens on my Color Classic Mystic was fast enought.  But moving between each page in Mac Garden was painfully slow.  Would it be faster if I was using a browser under OSX as opposed to 9.22 in the Yikes!?

Also, I can not burn CDs on my Mystic.  So I would like to down load on the Yikes!, archive/burn to CD (and at times a floppy) and then move that to my Mystic.  Once I built what I thought were correct partitions on the CF2SCSI card in the Mystic.  Then I found out I had to re partition.  I lost all of my software in the Mystic but for CDs and floopy I bought on ebay...  So I need the CD burning ability of the Yikes!

mraroid

 

nglevin

Well-known member
Anecdotally I remember Photoshop CS2 for Mac OS X being really painful to use on a 350 MHz G3 slot loading iMac. iPhoto ('07?) fared better. And Photoshop 5.5/7.0 for the classic Mac OS ran better on older hardware than all of those.

Photoshop gets noticeably slower with each major update. Whether it takes better advantage of GPUs or SIMD extensions for some of its filters doesn't really seem to offset that. It does do a good job of driving hardware upgrades.

I tend to use other photo imaging apps like Gus Mueller's Acorn and the venerable GraphicConverter on old hardware. On the newer hardware, I'm still using anything but Photoshop, Affinity Photo in the case of this Skylake MacBook.

 

mraroid

Well-known member
Anecdotally I remember Photoshop CS2 for Mac OS X being really painful to use on a 350 MHz G3 slot loading iMac. iPhoto ('07?) fared better. And Photoshop 5.5/7.0 for the classic Mac OS ran better on older hardware than all of those.

I tend to use other photo imaging apps like Gus Mueller's Acorn and the venerable GraphicConverter on old hardware. On the newer hardware, I'm still using anything but Photoshop, Affinity Photo in the case of this Skylake MacBook.
Nglevin....  Good to know.  I run Photoshop from CS2 and CS3 on my Windows 10 box.  I guess I will have to see how it runs under 9.22 as opposed to under OSX.  I will keep an eye out for Acorn and others.

I found an inexpensive 500Ghz G4 proessor to drop in the Yikes! motherboard.   It cost $19.95 plus $7.00 for shipping.  I am now trying to read up on the proper setting of the options pins/wires next to the CPU on the motherboard.  Not quite sure of all of that yet....

mraroid

 

nglevin

Well-known member
I'm pretty sure that you can e-mail Gus Mueller about buying a license for an older version of Acorn, he still hosts all the old versions on his site. It's a better app for G4e Macs, so I don't know if it's best for your B&W/Yikes. GraphicConverter is shareware that would be a better fit, I think.

I do feel like Photoshop passed the point of being particularly desirable once the upgrades were focused on pulling in features from other, better focused imaging apps like Fractal Design Painter around Photoshop 5.x. Anything from 3.x runs great on PPC and won't set you back much on eBay, don't spring for anything recent.

I don't think you need to worry about changing the jumper block right away unless you're in danger of running jumper settings higher than what your ZIF is rated for. OWC has a ZIF installation guide that covers most common jumper settings in page 2. There are overclocking guides too but... why do that to your poor old Mac? :)

 
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mraroid

Well-known member
nglevin...

I am all for overclocking when I water cool the CPU and the video card in modern computers.  But with this G3 and G4 stuff, I plan on running them at the speed they were made for. 

I will check out both GraphicConverter and Acorn.  I would enjoy some simple photo editing on the G4 if it can handle it.  

Thanks for the the link to OWC's ZIF guide.  That looks to be what I am looking for.

mraroid

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I have no idea which OSX to run, and I am not even sure i need it...
You don't, but this is probably something where you should just try a few configurations, get yourself a 2TB or smaller USB drive to back up data from your Power Mac, and then just have fun rconfiguring it and trying different things.

At this point, because every single person has a different personal idea on how to do things, you're never going to decide anything if you shift gears after every single post.

I would hold off on buying anything else, except perhaps an under-128GB IDE hard disk and just start trying things out. If I'm reading correctly you already have almost two or three whole machines worth of parts and you have yet to get it to boot into an OS.

It's great to bounce ideas around, but at some point you either have to

1) think about the advice and synthesize what you think might be the best strategy

2) given that you've laid down money and have hardware in your hands, start doing things.

My main use will be to go to Macintoshgarden (and other old software sites) to down load software and burn CDs & floppies that I can use in my Color Clasic Mystic.  I am going to use this Yikes! so I can surf slightly faster then my Color Classic using Netscape 4.08.  It works, but it is so darn slow...
So:

Macintosh Garden will be Fine(TM) on a G3. Like I said, I use it on a beige g3/300 in netscape 4.08 and 4.7 and on my 8600/300 and it's "fine." It will still look ugly in almost any browser on OS 9, but it should run a lot faster.

Hell, given how fast your "CC" is, you could have just bought a SCSI CD burner by now and burned all your software archives using it.

Yes, that works, but it is jut too slow....
That's at least some of the charm! I think that's most of why there's such a huge obsession with web browsing on vintage Macs. It used to be reasonably possible. Hell, a machine like your CC would've been annoying-but-competent into almost 2002 or 2003, depending on your needs. I was using an 840av and Perf578 for all my Internet needs at that time, sometimes either alongside of or instead of my iMac/233 and TiBook. (Later, in around 2005-2006 or so, my 840 I used as an IRC and AIM box alongside the TiBook when it was working on video and photo management work, which consumed all its resources at the time)

A <400mhz G3 running Classzilla truthfully isn't going to be "that" much better.
It will be faster, especially if you use a period browser instead of Classilla, but it will not render the page better.

Also keep in mind, the web of today is 100x the size of the web of 1999/2000 (the Heyday of the B+W G3), I mean this in a filesize way.. not in a content way (although probably true there too). Javascript is a real bitch for G3/G4's to process.


There's a different, larger problem being worked on from a few fronts, such as vtools (discussion) and this member's archive (discussion) along with System 7 Today , which alleviate this specific problem. Because, you're exactly right here - the problem is largely that the place where these files are being stored aren't very compatible with the old machines we want to use the info on. I couldn't get Macintosh Repository to allow Netscape 4.x on my G3 to download anything at all. Macintosh Garden downloads but the modern site relies heavily on technologies that outright do not work in v4 browsers, so it's annoying.

Anecdotally I remember Photoshop CS2 for Mac OS X being really painful to use on a 350 MHz G3 slot loading iMac.
In my experience, and of course I'm imagining that our workloads were different, it was Fine(TM) on my G3/450 (yikes with a G3 CUP) and Pismo/500 -- both of which have 1MB L2 cache.

In particular, because my most intensive tasks at the time (because iphoto and aperture just utterly barfed on my tibook) were building contact sheets out of NEFs and DNGs, I think the bad disk on the stock tibook vs. the faster disks I had in my G3s made a HUGE difference.

Between a better disk (by a little bit) and the much faster Intel CPU and dual cores, (even with the overhead of Rosetta) the first-gen 1.83 MacBook Pro did that task just about as well -- but that hardware was much better at Aperture and iPhoto, negating the reason I ran CS2 in the first place.

Again, my primary benchmark was to point Bridge at a folder of 30 or 36 DNG files and tell it to make a 600dpi contact sheet with some default-for-the-size sharpening filter applied. The G4 would obviously have run a Gaussian Blur faster.

Of course, it's important to note that CS2 is from, like... 2005 or 2006. Photoshop 7 (the carbon version, which is both the last that runs on 9.x and the first that runs on X 10.x) should be faster, and 5 or 6, which are actually contemporary to the B&W, should be faster, to the extent that they've just slimmer programs.

Another shout out to GraphicConverter, by the by - for the things I tend to need to do on my old Macs (converting piles of PICTs to something modern) it does an admirable job and is easily batchable. If you're looking for conversions, crops, and similar basic tasks, GC is great. Last time I tried it, the most modern version still opens PICTs on new Macs, too.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I want to put this in a separate post to double down on these two points:

- You have hardware in your hands, start trying it!

 - Mac OS 9 will never render the Macintosh Garden "correctly" - you can perhaps get to "slightly less bad" if you use Classilla, but that's not the point - and more importantly, it sounds like part of your issue is that you don't want to wait for pages to load on your CC.

There's actually some other potential creative solutions for this, but the real thing you need to do before wasting more money on upgrades for literally the worst Power Mac G4 is to just try it!

Only you can determine whether or not it's fast enough for you.

Like I said earlier -- Macintoshgarden.org is fast enough for my needs on my 8600 and my Beige. I don't have my 840av out at the moment but if it was the only system I had around, I'd deal with it and make do.

If you are side-stepping the advice a few of us have been continuously offering and are still dead-set on using CDs to make backups and load software, your money is probably better spent on a SCSI CD burner for your CC. Especially if you've got data volume on your CC big enough to download 600 megs worth of data, then put it into a disc image file. (So, count on needing around 1.2 gigs to burn a cd, worst case scenario.)

 
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