Thread
What to do with a 7200?
I'm sorry but that sucks. That just really sucks. Don't throw away working stuff. It's plain stupid.Finally bit the bullet and trashed the old 7200. Had a bunch of other Mac stuff to toss too. Had an Apple Design keyboard that wouldn't let you plug a mouse into it, so it's gone. A bunch of old Apple 300i internal CDROM drives found their way to the trash too. As did a few other odds and ends that aren't worthy of mention.
My Mac collection is now down to six. Two PDS Macs, two NuBus Macs, and two PCI Macs. That's all I need. Although, I'm beginning to wonder if I even need the LC. [] ]'>
Which reminds me, Sonnet is having a huge sale on upgrades for these machines. You can get a brand new Sonnet 500MHz G3 PCI processor upgrade for $39. A brand new Crescendo 500MHz processor upgrade $49. Check out their website for more details.
Sonnet Special Offers
Yeah, well, so does keeping stuff around that never gets used. There comes a time when your home begins to look too much like a landfill and it becomes necessary to thin it out.
In the grand scheme of things, there's very little difference between my junk closet and the landfill. Anything that goes into either will never be used again. At least with the curb or the municipal landfill, there's a chance that someone might grab it. Slim though the odds are. [
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Then give it away on Craigslist or Freecycle or something. Come on. There are other people willing to scoop it up. I know if I saw any free Mac on Craigslist or Freecycle I would go get it.
http://store1.sonnettech.com/index.php?cPath=22_30&osCsid=d638e9a5f4a24e183385afdec6e7f780
Holy crap, the G3 400 MHz upgrades for the 7200 are down to a measly $19.99. They must be taking a huge loss on these!
EDIT: Wow, the 500 MHz are on eBay from Sonnet for $29.99: http://cgi.ebay.com/SONNET-CRESCENDO-7200-500-MHz-1MB-G3-UPGRADE-CARD_W0QQitemZ320166336390QQihZ011QQcategoryZ4607QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
I am definitely buying one of these for my 7200.
Holy crap, the G3 400 MHz upgrades for the 7200 are down to a measly $19.99. They must be taking a huge loss on these!
EDIT: Wow, the 500 MHz are on eBay from Sonnet for $29.99: http://cgi.ebay.com/SONNET-CRESCENDO-7200-500-MHz-1MB-G3-UPGRADE-CARD_W0QQitemZ320166336390QQihZ011QQcategoryZ4607QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
I am definitely buying one of these for my 7200.
I see they're also selling the video pass-through cable for their G3 upgrades for 71/8100s at $19.95, instead of their previously insane $99. And the G3 400 is only a fiddy as well.
I guess there's no demand for these things now as no-ones going to bother buying a G3 card for an old 7200 when they can get a real G3 machine for nothing nowadays.
I just trashed my 8200... even worse than the 7200 with its ugly tower case...
I spent a couple of weekends trying to get one to work in a Pippin. From the start, I doubted whether the idea would work (the Pippin uses FPM RAM and a pre-PCI memory controller, whereas the 7200/8200 uses DIMMs). In most other aspects, however, the Pippin is a PCI PowerMac. Whilst the hack failed, it did not harm to the Pippin or accelerator.
The logical Mac to try one in would be a 7500. It might be as simple as changing a couple of gestalt IDs in the Sonnet enabler. The enabler has to turn off the 601, switching instructions to the G3, and patch the memory controller so that it can address RAM on the PCI bus. Getting a single one to work in a 7500 sounds possible. Multiple processors...
It's all down to the Leopard requirement. There is no longer a demand for G3 upgrades now that a fast G4 is the minimum supported by Apple. Probably a lot more G3 upgrades are going to be discontinued soon.
The 7200 upgrade card could not run OS X anyway if I remember correctly. It was more or less doomed from the start, but it was a noble effort anyway. Now they're going for dirt cheap. I just hope Sonnet doesn't do something stupid like write them all off and have them crushed. They're still useful items for 7200 Macs.
My guess is that manufacture of those upgrades has already stopped, and they're trying to recoup their costs of warehousing all that "junk"
My 7200 G3 card should be in soon. I'm going to try it in a 7300 and some other Macs and see how it works. I could try it in a Beige G3 also. Then it goes into my 7200.
One thing i've always wondered is how hard it would be to write some software that allows you to put one of those things in a PC, in order to emulate a G3 Mac. [}] ]'>
] ]'>More trouble than it's worth..!One thing i've always wondered is how hard it would be to write some software that allows you to put one of those things in a PC, in order to emulate a G3 Mac. [}
I know some people here are kinda bashing the 7200, but I think it's a damn fine machine. Then again, I might be biased, since it was the first PowerMac in the house (And I owned it!!! it was solely mine!) as well as the the first machine in the house with a CD-ROM, and the first PC too! (mine had a PC Compatability card. 166Mhz Pentium w/ 32MB RAM) and It was also the first G3 (I bit the dust and got the card 
) Sadly, it was also the first machine taken when we got broken into :S
I loved that machine to death. I want one just like it, and I think it's a mighty fine machine. I had the cache module and the VRAM maxed out. I even thought of taking a VooDoo and flashing it to work with the mac (my brother had two cards. One was flashable)
And if I ever want a Classic machine that was PCI, i would rather have an upgraded 7200, than any modern PowerPC. It was a trouper. I even figured out how to get the system to 9.2.2!!
Sucks it was stolen though... I really was mad at the person that did that (they got caught like 3 months later, but they trashed the system) and when I got it back and it was a mess. My heart sank that over the 4 years I had it, It was a remarkable machine, and to look at it, with a large gaping hole in the motherboard (someone drove a drill right through it) and my G3 card snapped in half, i was heart broken. I had spent about $1k getting it to my dream machine. And it was a dud. I ended up writing it off on insurance and getting a G3 Clamshell, but I still remember the 7200.
Oh well... Sorry to reminisce, but I think someone needs to speak up about how they liked the machine. It doesn't seem to be getting any love around here :'(
) Sadly, it was also the first machine taken when we got broken into :SI loved that machine to death. I want one just like it, and I think it's a mighty fine machine. I had the cache module and the VRAM maxed out. I even thought of taking a VooDoo and flashing it to work with the mac (my brother had two cards. One was flashable)
And if I ever want a Classic machine that was PCI, i would rather have an upgraded 7200, than any modern PowerPC. It was a trouper. I even figured out how to get the system to 9.2.2!!
Sucks it was stolen though... I really was mad at the person that did that (they got caught like 3 months later, but they trashed the system) and when I got it back and it was a mess. My heart sank that over the 4 years I had it, It was a remarkable machine, and to look at it, with a large gaping hole in the motherboard (someone drove a drill right through it) and my G3 card snapped in half, i was heart broken. I had spent about $1k getting it to my dream machine. And it was a dud. I ended up writing it off on insurance and getting a G3 Clamshell, but I still remember the 7200.
Oh well... Sorry to reminisce, but I think someone needs to speak up about how they liked the machine. It doesn't seem to be getting any love around here :'(
Oh man...thats disgusting...i'm sorry that that had to happen to you. Either way, you're obviously a much nicer person than me...were that to happen to me, well, lets just say that i would hunt down the that did that, and...well....lets just say that by the time i'd finished with them they'd be in much, much, much worse shape than that 7200................................................................ [}] ]'>
] ]'>Well, technically, the 7200's Hardware Developer Notes say that it can take a 256MB DIMM, so having twice as many slots doesn't really give the 7500 a higher RAM capacity in theory.
The fact that no one ever made a compatible DIMM with 256 MB on board is a technicality.
The 7300 uses a slightly different connector on the power supply.
The 7200 power supply is compatible with the 7500, 8500 and 9500. The 7500 and 8500 will fit in the 7200 case because it is identical to a 7500 case and the 8500 is built on the same circuit board as the 7500.
Okay this one is way out there, but...
The 7200 has a working Bandit chip and PCI arbiter chip on board. With some work (okay, a *lot* of work) you could put the Bandit and arbiter on a board, plug the board into a Umax S900's secondary CPU slot and add three PCI slots to the S900... I have the necessary pinouts figured out...
Hmm.
Why just a second CPU socket though? Why not any CPU socket, with a pass-through for the CPU?
Why just a second CPU socket though? Why not any CPU socket, with a pass-through for the CPU?
Because the AMP made CPU socket is no longer available unless you order over 1000 of them so it is worth it to AMP to do another run. And that information is about eight years old, so it may not be available any more period.
So, if you wanted to do a CPU pass-through, you'd have to do something like a ZIF socket and give up the ability to use a pre-G3 CPU.
Ignoring the socket problem, there's still the signal integrity issue of putting more connectors between the motherboard and the CPU.
How do you intend to plug into the socket then? And once you've solved that, seems like sticking in a ZIF for a G3 wouldn't be such a bad idea.
The CPU socket soldered to the S900 board accepts a finger-edged circuit board. You don't need a socket in order to plug into an existing socket. You just can't get new sockets to put on new boards, without spending a small fortune.