Supergaming Power Mac G4 card ruined by OrangePC

[ClassicHasClass]

Well, not ruined, but they don't work together. This might save someone a lot of headaches, and is sad to report, but OrangePC does not like the Sonnet G4 upgrade cards. It may work okay with 7450 cards (the OrangePC 3.4.2 change log claims that it has been tweaked for G4s), but the 7455 seems to be right out, which means my gaming Power Mac 7300 is condemned to continue using its "pathetic" 500MHz G3 instead of the 800MHz G4 I got from another user here. A real shame because the G4 rocked! However, I use the OrangePC 620 in this 7300 quite a bit for old Windows 95 games, so that pretty much ruled it out. The symptom is that the OrangePC will pass POST, but will not be able to boot Windows; if you have a second monitor connected, you will see an error 11 on the Mac side. It might work maybe one time out of ten, but the rest of the time it will crash in POST or cause disk corruption in Windows if it does boot. The G3 works fine with it.

For the record, this is with OrangePC 3.4.2 and the last version of the Crescendo extension (whatever comes with 3.1).

Since I'm mentioning it, here's my brag on the gaming 7300. It's not the fastest Mac to run games, but I think you'll like the selection (500MHz/1MB Sonnet G3, 1GB RAM, 18GB SCSI, Rage Orion; OrangePC 620 upgraded with 400MHz K6-2 CPU and 128MB RAM):

Mac side (these are all Mac native): Duke Nukem 3D, Doom I/II, Heretic, Hexen, System Shock, Shogo: MAD, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Shadow Warrior, Dark Forces, Star Trek 25th Anniversary (with voice cast), Descent, Descent II, Virtual Pool, Tomb Raider, Wing Commander III, Mechwarrior II (although I think I uninstalled this for some reason), Star Trek Voyager Elite Force, Wolfenstein 3D, Wingnuts, Oni, Pro Pinball: The Web, Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey, Power Poker, You Don't Know Jack, Rebel Assault II

(I have a lot of SCUMM games also, but I play these in SCUMMVM on the G5: Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max Hit the Road, and {but not Mac native} the Curse of Monkey Island)

Windows side: Outlaws, Scorcher, Dark Forces: Jedi Knight. These play great on the OrangePC.

 

[johnklos]

Have you tried to see if this might be due to timing issues by using a utility to turn off L2 / L3 caches, then starting Windows, then turning caches back on?

 

[Blessed Cheesemaker]

Dunno 'bout you, but using a Sonnet G4 1GHz CPU upgrade wouldn't let my SuperMac S900 boot into my BeOS partition.

Why? Dunno...I just took the card out, and put the wimpy G3 400 back in.

*Sigh*

The 1GHz G4 was pretty fast...

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Actually, that doesn't surprise me. The OS needs to specifically support AltiVec (in particular VRSAVE on context switches), and different G4s have different demands. For example, while 9.2.2 uses a very generic AltiVec OS support routine and works with just about any G4, firmware permitting, 7447s won't work in OS X prior to 10.3.5 or so.

The G3, on the other hand, is just a tuned 603 plus/minus backside cache.

 

[IIfx]

So, you finally got to try out the 800mhz G4 CPU card! How is it?

I know a lot of add in boards that fail with new CPUs. My Radius VideoVision video card/av capture system wont work with anything faster than a PowerPC 601 at 110mhz. Any G3 or G4 upgrade kills it.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

It was really really fast. *sniff* The G3 just seems so inadequate now ...

I'm sure I'll find something else to put it in, but the 7300 needs the OrangePC, since part of its raison d'etre is running old Windows 95/98 games. So the G4 will temporarily await a new home slot.

 

[Bunsen]

With the faster G4, is emulation a viable option?

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Not comparatively speaking. The OrangePC in question has a 400MHz K6-2 on it, which even the G4 can't match.

 

[coius]

You sure you aren't drawing too much power? That can cause an under-current on the CPU causing the CPU to keel over when it tries to start up causing a brown-out in the CPU

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Although possible, I doubt this would manifest as a consistent error 11. I would think either a random error or power down.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Have you tried just using VirtualPC or SoftWindows for the Windows games?

If you really want to go nuts, find a Voodoo2 card, VirtualPC 3.x can directly access it to have fully-accelerated 3D in DOS.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

It has VirtualPC 3.0 on it, which was the last version of VPC that ran games well. It does not perform sufficiently for games like, say, Dark Forces II. It barely qualifies for Outlaws.

I have used VPC to play Shogo MAD in software mode, but that was on my MDD.

SoftWindows, in my experience, was even worse than VPC.

 

[Unknown_K]

Maybe you just need a real old relic PC for gaming! I have a few mac PC cards, but they are just a novelty (mostly Nubus ones).

 

[mcdermd]

There was a Mac version of DFII. Works pretty well on my Pismo.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Maybe you just need a real old relic PC for gaming!

I have one. It's an Am5x86-133 on a VLB/ISA motherboard so it can run some of the old DOS games that aren't happy with PCI controllers (Bio Menace, I'm looking at yooooooou). I really don't want to have two of them sitting around since they're essentially utility machines with no demonstration value other than the software they can run, and I'd rather not install Windows 95 *and* 98 *and* DOS 6 also on it. OrangePC lets me keep lots of disk images for OS combinations in a single computer.

There was a Mac version of DFII. Works pretty well on my Pismo.

Since when? I have Dark Forces for Mac, which runs like a bat out of hell even on the G3 (and behaves very nicely in Classic on the G5), but DF2 was Windows-only. I would love to be proven wrong.

 

[mcdermd]

Quite right - I'm thinking the sequel Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast. Same game, different mission. Mac OS X, not classic.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I was hoping though I liked DF2 a lot, though being a Doom nerd the original DF is still my favourite.

 

[Unknown_K]

I think I have 2 boxed copies of Dark forces for the mac, seems to have been popular with users.

 

[mcdermd]

The Dark Trooper was pretty cool. I had the action figure once upon a time. It was fairly rare.