Picked up a QS'02, and other updates.

[Cory5412]

Was in the Savers today looking for a VHS-C cam I saw a few weeks ago and for which a need has developed. Nothing on that front, darn.

Looking around, wander a bit.

Look up, boom:

PowerMac G4. Reasonably nice condition, $15.

ok well I'll look at it.

Has RAM, incl. unmatched extra sticks, and hard disk. Looks intact, dusty but clean.

Take it home.

It's a QS'02 single 800/256k, 1GB, 32-meg Radeon, 40GB, DVD-RW, Zip250. Ideal OS 9 machine.

Clean and vacuum it out. Turn it on, boots right into a clean install of 10.3.5. Feels fast-ish, but al clean OS installs do. Reformat with eMac/800 CD, runs fine, but I'm downloading the QS'02 CD now, that should be a bit better overall.

Not totally sure what I'll do with it, really, but I know something I'm Very(TM) looking forward to poking around some of my old DVDs.

In other news: I finally had the chance to pull the Multiple Scan 20 from @just.in.time out of its box and put it on a shelf. Works beautifully with my Beige G3. I'll probably move this machine to where the beige is and move the beige and the 16"MCD to my bedroom.

For the sake of organizing things, I might pop the 2-port SATA card I picked up at Re-PC in Seattle into this machine and use that to collect data while I either re-organize it and burn it back out onto new CDs and DVDs or put it on a file server. The other thing I can and intend to do is put some stuff on external USB hard disks.

Positive impressions of the hardware, it feels like the ultimate OS 9 machine. Faster hardware isn't particularly practical or worthwhile until you start doing things you should really just consider doing in OS X for stability and (further) performance reasons. 3d and technical computing stuff in particular, but also HDV would be possible on this machine under OS X, but probably not possible or easy under 9.

I've been posting pictures to fedi: https://cronk.stenoweb.net/@coryw/100053532769827705 -

 

[CC_333]

Nice find!

I have a spare single CPU card, but I can't remember if it's 733 or 933 MHz.

If it's the latter, would you be interested? It's not much of an improvement over your 800 MHz, but it might give you an extra few percent of oomph under OS 9?

c

 

[Bolle]

The 933MHz one should have L3 cache as well. Should be a nice boost even though the clock rate is not much higher.

 

[Cory5412]

I haven't gotten to the point of thinking about upgrades on here. I need to move it to a location with networking and see if the QS'02 9.2.2 CD I downloaded worked and it can get on the network. If so, then I can presume the rest of its behavior is as-intended.

So far this is one of the fastest OS 9 experiences I've had, I suppose other than the two TiBooks, which did similar things.

Ultimately, the foibles of the Classic Mac OS make themselves *really* apparent when you're flying along doing something and files are moving fast and you're switching between programs and there's no problems at all and then boom it takes a few seconds to redraw a finder window (or: all of them) for no apparently good reason.

I'll have to go back and look but IME the issue is a lot less obvious on the G3 hardware I have (not "not there" just "not as obvious"), probably because those have slower everything.

Anyway, getting a different CPU couldn't hurt. My understanding is the 733MHz CPU from the digital Audio is a good one, possibly a speed-up over the 800MHz from the QS'02 because it used an older process/microarch from before Motorola essentially had to start Netbursting the G4 to get anything more out of it. The 933 is, as my understanding goes, also very good. It's not strictly speaking my intention to max out this machine, per se, but it's also most of the way there already.

A duallie wouldn't hurt other than my soul, but I'll be a little tiny bit real and admit I was already preparing to run a Windows Server 2003 VM on my main server for vintage Mac file purposes. Plus, I'm planning on picking up a G5 of some description later on this summer.

Anyway, let me know which CPU(s) you have @CC_333, and how much you want. Nothing firm yet - after the initial frenzy of getting the machine in and cleaning it up and reformatting it, it'll probably calm down a bit over the next few weeks as I keep organizing everything else.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Nice! QS'02/Dual 1GHz/9.2.2 is my daily driver for anything offline, you'll love it. Got linkage to that 9.2.2 image? You might wanna check out the universal 9.2.2 image at Mac OS9 lives, gotta join up to get it.

 

[EvieSigma]

My QS'02/933 is quite a swift machine, though I'd like to max the RAM and add a SATA card.

 

[Cory5412]

I have an 800MHz eMac 9.2.2 image which is nearly as universal as it gets for OS 9 CDs. I ended up going to Macintosh Garden to get the QS'02-specific DVD, without having tested whether ethernet works on the eMac CD.

The gotcha is the one I clicked on first is n EN-International cD, so it asks if you're in Australia, England, or "Elsewhere" - I picked elsewhere and just used the US keyboard layout and it's fine.

I'm specifically pleased to have the single CPU version, because even though I'm more likely than some to do tasks that will use dual CPUs in 9, I'd much rather do those things on newer hardware anyway.

A dual would be important if I were using OS X. In testing and IIRC anecdotal reports, duals at low frequencies often win out over singles of higher frequencies because (simplified) an entire CPU can basically be dedicated to background stuff while the other one runs your actual application, vs. OS 9 which leaves the second CPU completely idle unless an app wants both - something relatively few ever did.

 

[Cory5412]

This is probably known, but here goes:

So, I reformatted with the 2003 eMac 9.2.2 CD because I thought the international QS'02 image I installed was bad. I found out my problem was Ethernet wasn't plugged in. Anyway, networking works fine with that CD.

Found a neat image on MG: QS'02/Edu 9.2.2+ASIP6.3.3 Restore CD. I burned it (just change .toast to .iso and it'll burn on win/mac, if you don't have Toast) and it booted and it works just as well.

I keep looking for something that has like a control strip option to eject the CD drive, but I think that may actually have been functionality iTunes had, not functionality built into any version of the OS.

I downloaded the "Universal" disc but I have yet to burn and try it, but ultimately what I'll do next is look for iTunes and just install that. Since I'm not using the actual original restore of a client machine, I'm not surprised I don't already have iTunes. The other thing that occurs to me is the QS'02 would have shipped with an Apple Pro keyboard, which had a CD eject button on it in lieu of a power button.

I still haven't really decided what to do with it, other than probably browse through old DVDs and CDs and image/reorganize the data.

I keep thinking about setting up either a netatalk2 server or a server'03 Server, but the QS'02 would handily make the best server among my older machines, even with desktop duties, so it could go either way.

 

[MOS8_030]

I vaguely recall that the control strip eject module was in a folder called "Apple extras" or something like that on the install disk.

I guess it depends on what OS 9.2.2 disk you're using.

There's also utility called Ejectmenu 2.5 or something like that.

 

[Cory5412]

Hm! I looked in the installed Apple Extras but not in the one on the install CD, I'll look.

At worst, I'm around 90% sure iTunes has it, so I can install that and get it from there.

Having iTunes on the machine would be good, too, since apparently on these 9.2.2 installs, the CD Audio Player is gone, and CDs just start playing automatically, with no controls I could find.

 

[CC_333]

It's on the installer CD under CD Extras:Eject Extras, at least on the 1st gen eMac disk set (of which I happen to have a copy). There's an application and a control strip module in there. What to do with the CSM is obvious. but I haven't figured out exactly what the app's good for. Invoke it via function key? But then, pretty much any Apple keyboard made since 2001 or so has an eject key, and I think it functions as it should, even under OS 9, so that would be redundant. Don't remember for sure, though.

c

 

[Cory5412]

The app would probably be good for exactly what you described. In Mac OS 9, the function keys can be made to launch programs, and you can also leave aliases to it wherever might be relevant - Apple menu, root level of your disk, desktop next to where the CD icon would show up, whatever you prefer.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Eject Extras 1.0

Created Tue, June 26, 2001

Version: 1.0, Copyright Apple Computer, Inc. 2001

So no Installer from before that date will have it.

Looks to me like Apple developed and provided it to address the remarkably inept decision that the QS front bezel design would suffer from implementing a near universal I/O convention. Form over function within the Infinite Loopiness  .  .  .  naw! :lol:

 

[just.in.time]

@Cory5412 I’m glad to hear the 20” survived the trip.  That plastic felt so brittle, but the image on that Trinitron was still so impressive.  From what I understand, that model was sold along side the x100 series of Powermacs, but it really does look great alongside the Beige G3 models.  And they actually have enough GPU grunt to push the display at a respectable resolution (with the VRAM maxed out or a PCI graphics card) in Mac OS 8/9.