Old School & New World.

[iMac600]

For so long... SO long have I wanted a Power Mac G3 MiniTower. Only this one came with a New World companion, and a few extras to boot.

Power Macintosh G3 MiniTower

266mhz PowerPC G3 Processor

384mb Memory

8GB Internal Hard Disk Drive

Wings AV Personality Card

USB 2.0 PCI Card

Some kind of Video Card, 6MB VRAM... i'm thinking an ATI Rage LT Pro, has standard VGA and Apple's display connector, can drive 2 Apple displays at once.

Some kind of SCSI Internal & External card.

ZIP 100 Drive

Mac OS 9.2 Preinstalled

AppleDesign Keyboard

Honeywell ADB Mouse... not ball or optical, not sure what it is.

External SCSI Tape Drive

External SCSI SyQuest SyJet 1.5GB Tape Drive

External SCSI Hard Disk

Another External SCSI Hard Disk

ANOTHER External SCSI Hard Disk...

and I know one of those HD's is 50 Gigabytes.

All associated stacks of Tapes, ZIP disks

All associated cables, power, SCSI, ADB, Serial, Composite Video

Apple Multiple Scan 720 Display

iMac G3 Lime Tray Loader

333mhz PowerPC G3 Processor

40GB Hard Disk

128mb Memory

Mac OS 9.2 Preinstalled

Apple White Keyboard, Fixed Foot Model

Apple Mouse, White

Apple Puck Mouse, Lime Green

I'm thinking the Power Mac G3 will sing with a G4/400 Processor Card, a better (ATI Rage 128 Pro 16mb) video card, some extra RAM and a bigger and faster internal boot drive. I'd be curious to see how well this can pull video with the Wings AV card, but at the same time the external drives and tape backup drives make this machine such a prime candidate for Mac OS X Server. I'll probably try both, considering I have more than enough drives to install multiple systems on...

Total cost of the haul, $40 AUD ($36 USD or 22 GBP).

 

[LCGuy]

Quite a nice haul, especially that G3...and it has a Wings card! :O Good score on the iMac too - I have that exact same machine (though mine now has 256MB of RAM and a 80GB HDD), and it served as my main Mac for the better part of between 2000 to 2007, when I finally got my MacBook.

As for that Honeywell mouse - if its like the one I remember from primary school, it'll have two pressure sensors on the bottom - one for vertical movement, one for horizontal. I never got to use the one at school myself, but I remember thinking it was quite a neat idea at the time. Never knew they did an ADB version though - the one I remember was serial.

 

[iMac600]

That's the one... two pressure sensors on the base. This one is most certainly ADB, no converters or anything in between.

I'm pretty keen to give the Wings card a whirl, especially once it's running a G4 processor and a faster system bus (these tend to go a few MHz higher with a chip rated for it), it may actually make a decent VHS importing box. I sure as hell hope so anyway, otherwise a Server it is.

Part of me says I shouldn't have bought it, especially since my bank account is now -$255 in the red... :-x Hopefully they'll get my bank account details right this time around and actually pay me, at least that'll put me back in the black and riding smooth for a while. Come on though... G3, with a Wings AV Card! They're hard enough to find around here with a standard Whisper card, let alone a maxed out G3 with a Wings AV.

 

[iMac600]

Of course, the last picture is the obligatory "cat snuck his tail into the shot" photo.

 

[LCGuy]

I have to say, that G3 is a really nice example of a high end Mac setup from the mid to late 1990's, especially with those external SCSI drives.

 

[Bunsen]

Last time I looked, (which was, uh, yesterday?) good ole IC-China on ebay had a couple of G4/500 ZIFs going cheep. Act fast

And nicely scored there btw

 

[Bunsen]

Wings card / may actually make a decent VHS importing box.

Isn't the Wings card restricted to QVGA (320x240)?

On the other hand, save that as MPEG-1 and it should play nicely on older systems.

On the third hand :?: you can pick up old OS 9 compatible PCI video capture cards that'll do 640x480x30fps for next to nothing.

I've got a couple of those Honeywell ADB mice - I always thought they needed some kind of speshul mousepad.

 

[iMac600]

I'll look into the Wings card, but that's something I wish I knew before I dropped $40 on the system, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even thought about it. That said the SCSI tape drives, Syquest drives, ZIP drives... and so on are pretty interesting devices to mess around with.

I'll consider a card, but even then I may as well just run it on one of the machines with a faster FSB and processor.

The Honeywell mouse is nothing more than 2 rollers, on closer inspection. Each one of those discs has a slight tilt to it that allows one edge to contact the tracking surface. It then rolls along, like a ball mouse, but the rollers contact the desk itself instead of the ball.

On the topic of a G4 processor, I don't have an IC China G4/500 ZIF here... but I do have an Apple Computer G4/400 ZIP here from a Yikes G4. Of course it's surrounded by a working Yikes G4... but it has its share of issues and so i'll think about it.

 

[iMac600]

Well, i've found and documented some extensions that can supposedly push the Wings card right over its boundaries into 640x480 territory. The downside is that on a G3 processor it can only record at 5-7 frames per second, and needs the AltiVec Velocity Engine to give the machine the performance it needs to handle the enhanced video capture.

So, when I have some free time, and i've been pretty flat out recently, i'll lift the processor from the Power Mac G4 and boot a spare Power Mac G3 up with it installed and configured as necessary. I'll also add a 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda on the internal ATA bus to feed the imported video to, and obviously additional RAM if the system will take it. Video is pretty well accounted for, but I hear the Wings will not actually display video output unless it's on the internal video controller. I'll explore this further.

So... when i'm not flat out, we'll see what this thing can do.

Cheers

- Michael

Doctor of Forced Induction, Artificial Processing Horsepower and Resident Mad Scientist

 

[iMac600]

3 posts in a row now... but the Power Mac is running perfectly stable with a G4 running at 400mhz (66mhz bus with a multiplier of 6x). I've also stuck an ATI Rage 128 Pro PCI in there to give it a bit more video horsepower to work with.

Of course I had to steal those parts off my Yikes G4... still not feeling entirely good about that, but it's all reversible I suppose. I'm not too worried about giving the Yikes its graphics card back, but i'll need to secure a second G4 processor before I swap the 400 back into the Yikes G4.

The system is about 3x faster in everything it does, not counting video processing operations where the Velocity Engine should really shine. I haven't had a chance to test the Wings AV card yet, funnily enough the OS 9 installation on the drive lacks any of the necessary software to make it work.

I've also been able to determine some of the cards installed in the system.

The video card is an IXMicro Twin Turbo 128 with 8mb of video RAM. From what I understand these were standard equipment on the 300mhz models, but this is a 266, so it would have been added afterward or as an option.

The USB card is most likely USB 1.1 as opposed to USB 2.0. The controller is an OPTI FireLink.

The SCSI card is an AdvanSys Ultra Wide PCI with 50-pin and 68-pin internal connectors, along with a single 68-pin external connector.

 

[LCGuy]

Yep, that'd be right...odds are the chip is probably an 82C861, which is a USB 1.1 controller - exactly the same as the one used on the tray load iMac G3s.

 

[~Coxy]

Well, i've found and documented some extensions that can supposedly push the Wings card right over its boundaries into 640x480 territory. The downside is that on a G3 processor it can only record at 5-7 frames per second, and needs the AltiVec Velocity Engine to give the machine the performance it needs to handle the enhanced video capture.

Would you mind posting this info when you're not too busy? My old computer club has a G3 running a webcam and might benefit from 640x480.

 

[iMac600]

Sure thing, although the key word is "supposedly". The post in question suggests using the 3ivx 4.5.1 Mac OS 9 extensions and codec to make the videos at the higher resolution, although i'd be curious to see if it really is 640x480 or just scaled up 320x240, though he seems to suggest the quality of the video the Wings card is handling is pretty top notch.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7449348#7449348

The file name is 3ivx_d4_451_os9.sit and I downloaded it from Macintosh Garden.

http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/xvid-mac-os-9-v451

I still have yet to determine if this even works, and if so, how to use it. Feel free to take a look though.

 

[iMac600]

Some good news, the Wings AV card will most certainly capture at 640x480 and possibly even higher. I'm pretty sure I just saw it pull video in at 800x600.

The next hurdle to overcome was a limitation with Mac OS 8.6 and Apple's bundled Video Player tool that restricts the recordings to 2GB and fails to split the video after that. As such recordings are limited to 4.6 minutes, 9608 frames which comes out to exactly 2GB of uncompressed video. The solution is to use the Wings AV card with Final Cut Pro, although I hear Avid (Strata) VideoShop 4 or Adobe Premiere 5 works just as well for the task. So far i've been able to pull 12 minutes of video without dropping any frames as a test, and i'm sure the machine would be able to do much better than that still.

The other trick to these third party/professional grade video tools is the ability to use on-the-fly compression, which helps reduce the file sizes during and after importing while using the full power of the G4's Velocity Engine. Even AltiVec has its limitations though, so the best solution so far seems to be to rip the video uncompressed, let it split during import as necessary and use a much more powerful machine to do the compression. I'm hoping the machine can handle the task, I have 8 more minutes of importing to do to break the 2GB limit, and if it passes from here, then it's pretty safe to say it'll do 30 minutes to an hour without flaw, and that's more than enough for a machine of its age.

The next challenge is getting the video out of the Power Mac and onto the iMac Intel for compression and encoding. Considering it only has 10BaseT ethernet, networking probably isn't the best solution, but i'm experimenting with a PCI FireWire card at the moment to see what options that opens up. So far it seems promising.

 

[Byrd]

Realtek 8139 chipset-based 100mbps PCI network cards work fine, just check their site for a Classic OS driver. I might have one spare if you want it too.

JB

 

[iMac600]

I have a Realtek 8139 card here, but I can't seem to find drivers for OS 9 anywhere. I know they exist, but even the links on Realtek's own website are broken.

Just for the record too, the G3 plowed through the video ripping without a problem. 640x480 resolution with no dropped frames, I don't really dare try it any higher (although VHS tops out at 640x480 anyway).

EDIT: I think I managed to find the right ones at http://tcn.se/drivers/os9_8139/.

DOUBLE EDIT: It doesn't look as though the driver works. The card is still detected as "PCI Slot" in System Profiler and despite the Vendor ID, etc matching in the Realtek readme, the driver doesn't seem to do a thing.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Some good news, the Wings AV card will most certainly capture at 640x480 and possibly even higher. I'm pretty sure I just saw it pull video in at 800x600.

While it may claim to import at that, it's not doing anything useful, since the input source is either NTSC, which maxes out at 525 lines, or PAL, which maxes out at 625 lines. And both of those are the maximum for the signal. The actual usable visual signal for NTSC is round about 480 lines. Which is why 640x480 is a good resolution to capture NTSC at. (PAL's effective usable signal is about 576 lines. So I suppose with a very high quality PAL source, 800x600 may be possible; but I don't even know if Wings can do PAL...)

 

[iMac600]

It has to do PAL, otherwise I wouldn't be getting any colour input from my VCR. It was a case of switching to PAL in software and away it went.

If there's one issue still holding me up... I installed the drivers for the USB PCI Card, connected the USB hard disk and now the external HD locks up the system. Can't win.

 

[Byrd]

I should have added that not all 8139 cards work; only certain revisions (which I can't recall sorry)

JB