9500 case with new hardware???

[Telly]

First of all, hi.

I picked up a PM 9500/128 for $9.99 the other day, and I'm curious of what other (more modern) motherboards may fit into it snugly.

PS, anyone interested in parts?

Thanks.

 

[Rodus]

I'd suspect that any modern motherboard is going to require a fair bit of tweaking to get into the 9500 case. Frankly why would you want to? The 9500 is pretty evil as cases go and not friendly for upgrades. If you want to go the modding route then I'd suggest a B&W G3 case as I've found them great to work in. You may well find a buyer willing to pay more then $10 for the 9500 as they are nice for high end beige machines and then stick the cash into something a little more modable.

 

[Charlieman]

If you really want to go down the road of constructing a beefy powerful PowerMac, the 9500 is an OK starting point. It'll take loads of RAM, PowerPC upgrade cards, enough PCI cards to come out of your ears. It is a painful road but a useful one if you intend playing with PCI PowerMacs for a few years.

Definitely no quick and sweet logic board swaps for that evil design.

 

[Rodus]

If you really feel the urge and have deep pockets then you could have in the 9500, a G4 1ghz, 1.5 GB of RAM, Radeon 9200, 2X Internal HD's and 6 PCI cards (including the GPU) so you could have USB, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet etc. OS 9 would run pretty sweet on this setup.

 

[Bunsen]

^-- that's using the existing 9500 motherboard with its 50MHz bus - no case hacking required

If one of those PCI cards is an IDE/ATA or SATA controller, you can add cheap drives.

OS X can be installed (sometimes) with a third party hack.

But if you really like the 9500 case and want later hardware to go in it, go nuts. There will be a lot of hacking to do though.

You could always stack the drive bays up with Mac Minis [)] ]'>

 

[Telly]

It sounds like a challenge! I don't care much for having an incredible G3 for the price tag, but I love the design and loads of rooom in the case. I'd really like to build something that I can adapt lot's of software to, so I am thinking PC components with RedHat or a comparable Linux build. I like to learn.

 

[LCGuy]

If you can do it, more power to you, but I think its going to be really difficult to get an ATX board in there. Maybe hunt down a 9600 case or something instead? Probably be a lot easier.

 

[Bunsen]

If you have any old (eg dead) ATX boards laying about, maybe strip down the Mac and have a look at how it might fit in there. It's certainly a decent size case, so the question would really be how you get around (or remove) internal obstacles, route cables, and what rear panel mods would be needed.

If you don't have a dead/disposable ATX board, it should be easy to rustle one up from a nearby retailer/repairer/dumpster.

Now would be a good time to invest in a Dremel >

 

[Vetal]

Hi all! I have purchased PowerMac 9500/132 a few days ago too, but without HDD. Could anyone tell how to boot it without hard drive? It seems like it boots even startup tune sounded, but there is no any response on the display. Was that bound to happen without hard drive or there is other reason?

 

[Rodus]

^^You need a Hard Dive.

 

[Bunsen]

You can boot it from the CD drive, at least to test it out. You'll need a bootable Mac CD, such as an OS install disk. System 7.6.1 was the first on CD I think, and you can go up to Mac OS 9.1. There should be plenty of MacOS 8 and 8.1 on ebay.

And you'll need an operating system to install when you get a hard drive anyway [] ]'>

Hard drives for a 9500 are SCSI 50 pin

Also see here: http://lowendmac.com/ppc/power-macintosh-9500.

You can also boot it from a Disk Tools floppy which you can download from Apple. Making one of these on a PC is tricky but it can be done. Use the search here for details - it's been discussed many times.

 

[Vetal]

I have some 7.0? macintosh boot floppy image. I've already tried to boot from it with no success. Need I have a newer version and on CD?

 

[Charlieman]

You can boot it from the CD drive, at least to test it out. You'll need a bootable Mac CD, such as an OS install disk. System 7.6.1 was the first on CD I think

7.5.2 was the first for the 9500, but I wouldn't recommend it as your day to day OS. Fine for testing and anything later is usable for real use.

 

[Mac SK]

Hi all! I have purchased PowerMac 9500/132 a few days ago too, but without HDD. Could anyone tell how to boot it without hard drive? It seems like it boots even startup tune sounded, but there is no any response on the display. Was that bound to happen without hard drive or there is other reason?

Sounds like you need a battery also. Even with out the HD you should see a flashing question mark.

 

[Bunsen]

I have some 7.0? macintosh boot floppy image. I've already tried to boot from it with no success. Need I have a newer version and on CD?

As Charlieman said, 7.0 won't boot the 9500. You can download Disk Tools PPC from Apple's older software downloads page. For directions to make a Mac bootable floppy disk from an image on a Windows PC, see macwindows.com