Yeah, I figured the MP extensions were going to be bad once I got past Mac OS 7 since Daystar lost their license (which apparently included even supporting their clones) before it got much further than that. I was hoping to at least get 8.1 on it. I can try again, but a lot of the issues with that Daystar go beyond just the MP extensions and into some bizarre hardware behavior. This thing is on the top of my list for a component-level refurb. Maybe that'll help, and if it doesn't, then oh well, it was going to need one soon enough and the Daystar is rare enough that it should absolutely have one at some point.
Were these machines always so painful? Maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe age hasn't been kind to them.
- Thread starter The Finale of Seem
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I did try some minimal configs. Sometimes they were better, sometimes not. Sometimes it was something particular that should work (none of these machines could reliably use a video card past a Rage 128 when I know for absolute certain that they could back in the day, same with OS 9 compatible USB cards beyond just that Opti chipset), sometimes it was other goofiness. They're definitely not operating as they should, or at least as they did once upon a time. Like I said in another reply, I'm hoping a component repair will get them back to normal levels of possessed.
Is the SD adapter performant enough to match 166? You're going to need something at least at a UHS-I class to get 100MB/sec transfer speeds (compared to ATA/166 speeds of 166MB/sec). Most of the adapters I've seen are IDE to SDHC, which is usually 25MB/sec read and 10MB/sec write. That's a pretty big drop in read/write performance over a native device -- big enough to be noticed, and possibly enough to really impact usability.
I can get some numbers, but when I tested it vs. BlueSCSI on the internal fast SCSI on the PTPro (10 MB/sec), it was at least four times faster read and write. Maybe not 166, but a lot better.
With the original PCI bus, there are significant overheads and you'll never attain the stated maximum throughput of 133MB/s, let alone 166MB/s using an "ATA/166" card; good quality SD and CF cards used in good quality adapters provide improved performance over IDE-based spinning media any day of the week.
The tipping point to look for something better/faster would be in later PPC Macs, but OldWorld earlier PCI Macs enjoy these cheaper solutions.
One caveat is some Macs there are compatibility issues using flash-based adapters such as these so there is some experimentation at times to find out what works.
The tipping point to look for something better/faster would be in later PPC Macs, but OldWorld earlier PCI Macs enjoy these cheaper solutions.
One caveat is some Macs there are compatibility issues using flash-based adapters such as these so there is some experimentation at times to find out what works.
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You sure that's ATA166 and not a mistype? I thought UDMA-7 didn't find much purchase as SATA showed up and didn't really get used in desktop systems much at all. I don't recall ever seeing a Mac card for it, but I'd be very curious about it if I'm wrong on that.
Indeed it is. This is what happens when you have brain farts when you are otherwise occupied mentally by other things. It’s an ATA 133 card.
ATA/100.
I got a can of Deoxit and worked a possessed 7300/200 over with it. I hit every slot, then set something in and out of the slot while it was wet. All contacts cleaned and dried.
The G3 333mhz (running at 350mhz) CPU upgrade is now working flawlessly! It boots up just fine and the Powerlogix software is enabling the cache! It has 3.5ns cache chips, which means they should run at 166mhz, but bumping them from the stock 117mhz to 140mhz resulted in a hard lock a couple minutes later. I also have an old OrangeMicro USB + FW card that is now working fine too, though at least one of those NIB OS 9 compatible cards still isn't working at all. It's recognized as two USB cards in ASP, but the LED on a thumbdrive doesn't even blink on when plugged in. Usually it'll at least blip on for a second, then stay dark when the cards don't work. I also have the Mac Radeon 7000 working. Oddly enough, it only started working when I installed it, booted from the onboard video, installed the 2002 ATI drivers, and then rebooted with the monitor attached to the card. Some kind of NVRAM sorcery? And if so, would it survive a PRAM zap/NVRAM reset?
Oh well, at least this has solved some problems. I'll probably work over all the other machines as well just to be sure everything is nice and squeaky clean. I'm definitely a believer in the power of Deoxit!
The G3 333mhz (running at 350mhz) CPU upgrade is now working flawlessly! It boots up just fine and the Powerlogix software is enabling the cache! It has 3.5ns cache chips, which means they should run at 166mhz, but bumping them from the stock 117mhz to 140mhz resulted in a hard lock a couple minutes later. I also have an old OrangeMicro USB + FW card that is now working fine too, though at least one of those NIB OS 9 compatible cards still isn't working at all. It's recognized as two USB cards in ASP, but the LED on a thumbdrive doesn't even blink on when plugged in. Usually it'll at least blip on for a second, then stay dark when the cards don't work. I also have the Mac Radeon 7000 working. Oddly enough, it only started working when I installed it, booted from the onboard video, installed the 2002 ATI drivers, and then rebooted with the monitor attached to the card. Some kind of NVRAM sorcery? And if so, would it survive a PRAM zap/NVRAM reset?
Oh well, at least this has solved some problems. I'll probably work over all the other machines as well just to be sure everything is nice and squeaky clean. I'm definitely a believer in the power of Deoxit!
Nice one, I also had a possessed 7300 in my hands recently. It had some upgrades/PCI cards, lots of RAM, would not boot or chime. Had to strip it down to absolute basics, sprayed and deep cleaned everything down, and had to literally run it stock no cards 16MB RAM, new OS install, play around for a while on the desktop. If you went too fast adding more than one item at a time - no boot. Once this process was done with great patience, it's been fine with all the upgrades and not skipping a beat.
Deoxit is a wonderful product - I've not seen the spray, using the red/yellow bottles at moment. The generic electronic cleaning solvent with "lubrication" you can find at electronics store, I've heard referred to in the store as "poor man's Dexoit" which comes at a fraction of the price.
Deoxit is a wonderful product - I've not seen the spray, using the red/yellow bottles at moment. The generic electronic cleaning solvent with "lubrication" you can find at electronics store, I've heard referred to in the store as "poor man's Dexoit" which comes at a fraction of the price.
Huh, at least part of the problem may be that I have a Sonnet TempoATA 133 that either doesn't like old world machines or is just plain bad. It would work and I could install to a drive attached to it (though sometimes that would come with read errors that made it look like the CD-ROM drive was struggling with the CDR in it, though now I wonder), but sometimes when I'd boot from the fresh install, the font on the menu bar was wrong and I sometimes wouldn't get all of the default menu items in the Apple menu. Just saw that again when I tossed it in the 7300 today. I swapped it out with an Acard ATA133 card and it seems to be working properly now. I still see quirks regardless of that, though. I have an old Firewire drive with some software on it and a USB thumbdrive with some other stuff on it. When I pull a Classilla .sit file from the FW drive, I'll sometimes get errors in Stuffit 5.5 saying that certain localization files couldn't be decompressed. No such issue when pulling from the USB drive. In either case, sometimes the Classilla application has the T-Rex icon once decompressed, sometimes it doesn't. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.
Good luck is all I can say. Mine are like that too.
One of my beige G3 towers was working great until the hard drive died. Fortunately I had a backup so I restored that onto a new drive. Now I have issues with software crashing, video card glitches, extension conflicts that disappear on their own, files that become corrupt or lose their icons, etc. The new hard drive has the exact same contents as the old one... no hardware changed other than the hard drive itself... why.
I have an old dual CPU Pentium III machine with 4GB RAM (4x 1GB sticks) and 4x 250GB IDE hard drives in a RAID 0 array. I have to watch when it boots, sometimes the RAID controller will only recognize three drives and I shut it off & wiggle stuff until all four come to life. Sometimes it'll lose a stick of RAM too. That one always comes back on its own.
One of my beige G3 towers was working great until the hard drive died. Fortunately I had a backup so I restored that onto a new drive. Now I have issues with software crashing, video card glitches, extension conflicts that disappear on their own, files that become corrupt or lose their icons, etc. The new hard drive has the exact same contents as the old one... no hardware changed other than the hard drive itself... why.
I have an old dual CPU Pentium III machine with 4GB RAM (4x 1GB sticks) and 4x 250GB IDE hard drives in a RAID 0 array. I have to watch when it boots, sometimes the RAID controller will only recognize three drives and I shut it off & wiggle stuff until all four come to life. Sometimes it'll lose a stick of RAM too. That one always comes back on its own.
