Well...it's been a productive few days. I've been working on two different G' series machines, but have a total of three.
The G4 Cube has been working fine for a while. With the luck I had with an IDE-CF adapter in the beige G3, I'm thinking about trying the same thing in the Cube. I was never able to get an IDE-SATA adapter to let me boot off of a SATA drive in this machine.
The G4 QuickSilver is running happily on a Samsung 840 256GB SSD hanging off of a flashed SIIG SC-SA4011 PCI card. Figuring out the actual name of the card from flashrom's point of view was difficult (satasii, I believe). I finally found a post about it, and after that, the firmware updated in just seconds using an old Dell GX280 PC as a host. This machine is running OSX 10.5.8 which I'm told was the end of the road for it.
The one I'm most excited about is the beige G3. I bought a used Acard off of ebay and then found out there was some work to do on the board in addition to flashing the firmware, so that's in the works. I was able to get OS 9.1 to install on the IDE-CF card setup after having to find some CD-R's. That's not as easy as you'd think these days. Needless to say I'm buying a spindle of them just for potential future use. ChatGPT gave me some plausible but ultimately incorrect (SHOCKER!!!) information along the lines of partitioning the CF card into an 8GB partition and leave the rest in a second partition. Then just copy the contents of an OS 9.1 image over to it. While the machine tried to boot off of it and even showed the OS 9.1 boot screen, it immediately tossed up a window saying that OS would only load if installed on a drive, so that was a dead-end. Once I burned an OS 9.1 CD, everything just started working. Likewise, both the Keyspan USB card and the SIID three port firewire card Just Worked(tm). I was able to use VICOM ftp client to connect to my Synology to download the OS 9.2.1 and OS 9.2.2 updaters and they installed properly.
My introduction to Mac's was back in the early/mid 90's working at print shops. Then I transitioned into doing phone support at Supra/Diamond MM for three years (late 1995 to late 1998) supporting Mac's and the Supra modems/Faxcilitate faxing software. I think that was during the OS 7.5.3-OS 8.6 days. I do distinctly remember the first time I took a call with someone that had a then-new iMac. I was so used to the timing on how long reboots took that I asked the person what that noise was because I thought I heard the restart sound after only a couple seconds. "It restarted like you said." she said. The performance increase of the G3 was incredible at the time.
I have a pair of PowerComputing PowreCenterPro 180's, one has a 225mhz NewerTech 604e upgrade card as well. Both are running OS 8.6.
The G4 Cube has been working fine for a while. With the luck I had with an IDE-CF adapter in the beige G3, I'm thinking about trying the same thing in the Cube. I was never able to get an IDE-SATA adapter to let me boot off of a SATA drive in this machine.
The G4 QuickSilver is running happily on a Samsung 840 256GB SSD hanging off of a flashed SIIG SC-SA4011 PCI card. Figuring out the actual name of the card from flashrom's point of view was difficult (satasii, I believe). I finally found a post about it, and after that, the firmware updated in just seconds using an old Dell GX280 PC as a host. This machine is running OSX 10.5.8 which I'm told was the end of the road for it.
The one I'm most excited about is the beige G3. I bought a used Acard off of ebay and then found out there was some work to do on the board in addition to flashing the firmware, so that's in the works. I was able to get OS 9.1 to install on the IDE-CF card setup after having to find some CD-R's. That's not as easy as you'd think these days. Needless to say I'm buying a spindle of them just for potential future use. ChatGPT gave me some plausible but ultimately incorrect (SHOCKER!!!) information along the lines of partitioning the CF card into an 8GB partition and leave the rest in a second partition. Then just copy the contents of an OS 9.1 image over to it. While the machine tried to boot off of it and even showed the OS 9.1 boot screen, it immediately tossed up a window saying that OS would only load if installed on a drive, so that was a dead-end. Once I burned an OS 9.1 CD, everything just started working. Likewise, both the Keyspan USB card and the SIID three port firewire card Just Worked(tm). I was able to use VICOM ftp client to connect to my Synology to download the OS 9.2.1 and OS 9.2.2 updaters and they installed properly.
My introduction to Mac's was back in the early/mid 90's working at print shops. Then I transitioned into doing phone support at Supra/Diamond MM for three years (late 1995 to late 1998) supporting Mac's and the Supra modems/Faxcilitate faxing software. I think that was during the OS 7.5.3-OS 8.6 days. I do distinctly remember the first time I took a call with someone that had a then-new iMac. I was so used to the timing on how long reboots took that I asked the person what that noise was because I thought I heard the restart sound after only a couple seconds. "It restarted like you said." she said. The performance increase of the G3 was incredible at the time.
I have a pair of PowerComputing PowreCenterPro 180's, one has a 225mhz NewerTech 604e upgrade card as well. Both are running OS 8.6.
