What to do with a 7200?

[Quadraman]

It's all down to the Leopard requirement. There is no longer a demand for G3 upgrades now that a fast G4 is the minimum supported by Apple. Probably a lot more G3 upgrades are going to be discontinued soon.

 

[Mike Richardson]

The 7200 upgrade card could not run OS X anyway if I remember correctly. It was more or less doomed from the start, but it was a noble effort anyway. Now they're going for dirt cheap. I just hope Sonnet doesn't do something stupid like write them all off and have them crushed. They're still useful items for 7200 Macs.

 

[Bunsen]

My guess is that manufacture of those upgrades has already stopped, and they're trying to recoup their costs of warehousing all that "junk"

 

[Mike Richardson]

My 7200 G3 card should be in soon. I'm going to try it in a 7300 and some other Macs and see how it works. I could try it in a Beige G3 also. Then it goes into my 7200.

 

[LCGuy]

One thing i've always wondered is how hard it would be to write some software that allows you to put one of those things in a PC, in order to emulate a G3 Mac. [}] ]'>

 

[paws]

One thing i've always wondered is how hard it would be to write some software that allows you to put one of those things in a PC, in order to emulate a G3 Mac. [}] ]'>

More trouble than it's worth..!

 

[coius]

I know some people here are kinda bashing the 7200, but I think it's a damn fine machine. Then again, I might be biased, since it was the first PowerMac in the house (And I owned it!!! it was solely mine!) as well as the the first machine in the house with a CD-ROM, and the first PC too! (mine had a PC Compatability card. 166Mhz Pentium w/ 32MB RAM) and It was also the first G3 (I bit the dust and got the card ) Sadly, it was also the first machine taken when we got broken into :S

I loved that machine to death. I want one just like it, and I think it's a mighty fine machine. I had the cache module and the VRAM maxed out. I even thought of taking a VooDoo and flashing it to work with the mac (my brother had two cards. One was flashable)

And if I ever want a Classic machine that was PCI, i would rather have an upgraded 7200, than any modern PowerPC. It was a trouper. I even figured out how to get the system to 9.2.2!!

Sucks it was stolen though... I really was mad at the person that did that (they got caught like 3 months later, but they trashed the system) and when I got it back and it was a mess. My heart sank that over the 4 years I had it, It was a remarkable machine, and to look at it, with a large gaping hole in the motherboard (someone drove a drill right through it) and my G3 card snapped in half, i was heart broken. I had spent about $1k getting it to my dream machine. And it was a dud. I ended up writing it off on insurance and getting a G3 Clamshell, but I still remember the 7200.

Oh well... Sorry to reminisce, but I think someone needs to speak up about how they liked the machine. It doesn't seem to be getting any love around here :'(

 

[LCGuy]

Oh man...thats disgusting...i'm sorry that that had to happen to you. Either way, you're obviously a much nicer person than me...were that to happen to me, well, lets just say that i would hunt down the that did that, and...well....lets just say that by the time i'd finished with them they'd be in much, much, much worse shape than that 7200................................................................ [}] ]'>

 

[trag]

Back in the day, for not much more than what a 7200 would cost, you could've gotten a 7500, which has a processor mounted on a CPU daughtercard, and twice the RAM slots, and is basically a much better machine.

Well, technically, the 7200's Hardware Developer Notes say that it can take a 256MB DIMM, so having twice as many slots doesn't really give the 7500 a higher RAM capacity in theory.

The fact that no one ever made a compatible DIMM with 256 MB on board is a technicality.

 

[trag]

To the trash heap it goes.
I'll keep the power supply as a spare for my 7300.

The 7300 uses a slightly different connector on the power supply.

The 7200 power supply is compatible with the 7500, 8500 and 9500. The 7500 and 8500 will fit in the 7200 case because it is identical to a 7500 case and the 8500 is built on the same circuit board as the 7500.

 

[trag]

Technically, all he's throwing away is the motherboard, which isn't worth much anyway even as a functioning board. Better to either replace the 7200 motherboard with one of the other 7x00 boards or a G3 board or to recycle whatever parts are salvageable into another Mac.

Okay this one is way out there, but...

The 7200 has a working Bandit chip and PCI arbiter chip on board. With some work (okay, a *lot* of work) you could put the Bandit and arbiter on a board, plug the board into a Umax S900's secondary CPU slot and add three PCI slots to the S900... I have the necessary pinouts figured out...

 

[Bunsen]

Hmm.

Why just a second CPU socket though? Why not any CPU socket, with a pass-through for the CPU?

 

[trag]

Hmm.
Why just a second CPU socket though? Why not any CPU socket, with a pass-through for the CPU?

Because the AMP made CPU socket is no longer available unless you order over 1000 of them so it is worth it to AMP to do another run. And that information is about eight years old, so it may not be available any more period.

So, if you wanted to do a CPU pass-through, you'd have to do something like a ZIF socket and give up the ability to use a pre-G3 CPU.

Ignoring the socket problem, there's still the signal integrity issue of putting more connectors between the motherboard and the CPU.

 

[Bunsen]

How do you intend to plug into the socket then? And once you've solved that, seems like sticking in a ZIF for a G3 wouldn't be such a bad idea.

 

[trag]

How do you intend to plug into the socket then?

The CPU socket soldered to the S900 board accepts a finger-edged circuit board. You don't need a socket in order to plug into an existing socket. You just can't get new sockets to put on new boards, without spending a small fortune.