Pc/Generic equipment that works in an old mac

[ArmorAlley]

There may already be a thread to this but I couldn't find one (it's amazing what you don't find when you don't look hard enough...).

However, the thought has come to mind that a thread devoted to which generic or PC equipment and parts work with old macs.

Many items were made for the mass market and either have mac drivers or software that can make them usable.

Some items, like cards may need to be flashed and require an old PC motherboard to do it.

Other items (like RAM) can be stuck straight in or like hard drives which need to be formatted first.

I going to start the ball rolling with an easy one:

 1. Hard drives: SCSI, IDE & SATA as long as you have the relevant cards and adapters (I'm looking at you SCSI). I'm not exactly sure how backward compatible IDE drives are. I've had a 2.5" IDE drive refuse to be recognised by my Wallstreet. Hard drives from other OSs will usually need to be reformatted first though with something like a modified form of Drive Setup or SilverLining. LVD SCSI drives on a 50-pin bus  (8-bit) must support SE (single-ended mode) connections as well be terminated.

 

[rplacd]

A standard ATX fan case fan works with most compact Macs with a 3/4-pin to 2-pin adapter – although you have to swap the wires, since the pinout's reversed. Replace that with a silent fan (I like SilenX), remove the HD and FDD, and you have a real quite Mac.

 

[NJRoadfan]

-Standard ATX power supplies work with the Beige G3 motherboard provided you set a jumper on the motherboard correctly.

-3Dfx Voodoo 1 and 2 cards work in PCI PowerMacs provided you have the drivers installed. No ROM needed on these cards since they are 3D only.

-A wide variety of ATI video cards can be flashed with an OpenFirmware ROM to work in PCI PowerMacs

-A wide variety of storage (SATA, PATA, and SCSI) PCI cards can be flashed with an Open Firmware ROM too.

-Any printer with a serial or USB interface and available drivers can be used "as-is" on a Mac. Parallel printers can be adapted with something like an Orange Micro Grappler (which also emulates ImageWriters).