Getting an iMac G3!

[benjgvps]

I'm buying an iMac off my friend. It is an iMac G3 350 Running Mac OS 9 and 64 MBs of RAM. I'm giving him $30 for it. I will probably put some more RAM in it as I will be looking into putting panther on it. I also want to know if if there is a universal driver for wifi like there is in linux, for Mac OS. I want to use my Datel Wifimax that another friend gave me, It works in Linux. I also want to know how do I remove the front plastic because there is some gunk under the plastic.

Thanks!

 

[Christopher]

Welcome to the Non USB iMac G3 but still fully Tiger Supported mac club. Population, me, you, and all the others that have this iMac that I don't know.

 

[Phreakinus]

I haven't taken one apart in a while, but if I remember correctly, you have to take the shell off before the front plastics will come off.

It will sound like it is breaking when you take it apart too, but it really isn't.

 

[bigD]

Wait a minute - there were iMacs without USB???

 

[Phreakinus]

Wait a minute - there were iMacs without USB???

No. He probably meant Firewire.

 

[benjgvps]

I haven't taken one apart in a while, but if I remember correctly, you have to take the shell off before the front plastics will come off.
It will sound like it is breaking when you take it apart too, but it really isn't.

Hmm, I might just see if I can use a q-tip on it and see if that works. I really don't want to take the case plastics off because of what happened when I put a DVD burner in my family's Dell. One of the plastic tabs on the front panel snapped and now I have to put tape to hold the front of the case together. The only upgrade I will be doing with it for a while would be upgrading the RAM and re-installing Mac OS 9.

I have a question, I want to know if I could go out and buy a USB to serial (With the 9 pin plug) and put my PC to Mac serial cable in there and transfer stuff from my PowerBook 150 to the iMac.

 

[Cory5412]

A better option would actually to get the keyspan dual serial adapter, that one works with localtalk in OS 9, and you could just use an Apple System/8 peripheral cable to connect the two machines via localtalk. (I'm not actually sure if the ones with a single DB9 port work that way.)

 

[paws]

I have a question, I want to know if I could go out and buy a USB to serial (With the 9 pin plug) and put my PC to Mac serial cable in there and transfer stuff from my PowerBook 150 to the iMac.

Quite sure that you can't. The Basilisk II (Mac emulator) documentation says, if my memory serves me, that even though it's possibly to use the serial ports from within it (and I've connected to my Newton with it) it is "physically impossible" to connect an emulated Mac to a LocalTalk network. I'm not sure what part of the chain makes it impossible, but I think it's something about the differences between Mac serial ports and PC serial ports. Not sure, though.

 

[Christopher]

Wait a minute - there were iMacs without USB???

No. He probably meant Firewire.

Yeah, it was late when I posted that.

 

[Mike Richardson]

I have a question, I want to know if I could go out and buy a USB to serial (With the 9 pin plug) and put my PC to Mac serial cable in there and transfer stuff from my PowerBook 150 to the iMac.

Quite sure that you can't. The Basilisk II (Mac emulator) documentation says, if my memory serves me, that even though it's possibly to use the serial ports from within it (and I've connected to my Newton with it) it is "physically impossible" to connect an emulated Mac to a LocalTalk network. I'm not sure what part of the chain makes it impossible, but I think it's something about the differences between Mac serial ports and PC serial ports. Not sure, though.

LocalTalk uses a hardware chip in the Mac that manages the network connection in LocalTalk.

"The port was driven by the Zilog SCC which could serve as either a standard UART or handle the much more complicated HDLC protocol which was a packet oriented protocol which incorporated addressing, bit-stuffing, and packet checksumming in hardware. Coupled together with the RS422 electrical connections, this provided a reasonably high-speed data connection." - Wikipedia

I think that Basilisk does not really emulate the Zilog SCC and just gets away with a cheap serial port emulation.

 

[benjgvps]

Ok, so thats out of the question. I want to know if there are any programs that act like ndis wrapper in linux so I can use my USB Wifi adapter or any way of getting the thing online with wireless for under $50 (A cable long enough to go from my router to my room would be about $60). Is there any good sites that have Wifi to ethernet bridges cheap?