Biege G3!!

Nice pick up!

a single serial port (wtf? the other one has a blank), a built in modem

Click to expand...

Just answered your own question

I'm willing to bet the serial port with the blank is the one with the modem icon next to it.

I've never heard of a beige with a single serial port. There are two built in to the motherboard. The modem lives on the PERCH card, so that's not it.

What the hell, punch out the blank and see what's behind it.

No no no, what I meant was, if you have the modem in the slot on the personality card, why would you ever need a modem serial port?

That's why apple put blanks over the modem ports on macs that came with a modem.

My performa 6200 had one, and I've seen pictures of Beiges with them.

so there is a second serial port behind that? I will open her up tomorrow and look.

oh, forgot to mention it's the minitower, not the desktop

yeah, the modem looked to be on a card when I was in it.

also, did the 9600 not offer built in video? I seem to remember either the 8600, 9600, or BG3MT had a blank over where the video port would be.

-digital

Yes, there is most likely a port behind it. I suppose apple didn't want people to connect their old external modems and have it conflict with the internal modem, that's what the problem with the Performa 6200 was.

Also, I don't think the 9600 has internal video. I know for a fact that my 9500 does not, and my Beige G3MT has internal video, as do all others.

Nope, 9600s don't have internal video. I think the 8600 does, and can confirm that the G3MT definately does.

Yes, the 8600 has internal video. None of the 6 slot PCI Macs (9500, 9600) have built in video or any A/V functions so those ports are blocked off.

Alright, had the chance to boot it. Looks to be a video editor machine. Has a 100mb image of commercials, dunno if they were made by them or not, but the HD is labled "E. D. Jacobs Graphic Design".

It has a 233mhz G3, 160mb of RAm, a 128mb and a 32mb stick. Has Mac OS 9.0.4 and a bunch of Adobe apps, old version of stuffit. Looks like a CD burner and a scanner were hooked to it at one time. A 4gb HD in this one, little more than 900mb free.

But the biggest surprise is it has a working copy of Mac OS X Public Beta on it. The OS 9 System Folder is actually in /Mac OS 9/System Folder. Pretty cool. Unfortunantly, I could not log in to OS X because you have to type the name, the way it's set up. OS 9 has a spare account, so I can log in.

Any thoughts as to what to do with it now we know the specs? I am leaning more towards parent's computer.

Oh, I am using my B&W LCD (VGA) hooked to the ATI video card in the bottom PCI slot. When booting, I get some bad rasters, but they go away after the extensions start to march and the ATI drivers load. With OS X, I did not get any video until the progress bar. Shame, i wanted to see smiling mac with the circle thingy. Oh well.

-digital

Any thoughts as to what to do with it now we know the specs? I am leaning more towards parent's computer.

Click to expand...

Get a little bit more Ram and put Tiger on it - with Tiger they're very modern and useable machines. You might also want a better CPU as you can drop in the faster G3 CPUs from later Beiges or the B&W for a very cheap performance boost.

if you have the modem in the slot on the personality card, why would you ever need a modem serial port? /
My performa 6200 had one

Click to expand...

Because you might have more than one serial device that isn't a modem?

Any thoughts as to what to do with it now we know the specs? I am leaning more towards parent's computer.

Click to expand...

Get a little bit more Ram and put Tiger on it - with Tiger they're very modern and useable machines. You might also want a better CPU as you can drop in the faster G3 CPUs from later Beiges or the B&W for a very cheap performance boost.

Click to expand...

I have found the Beige G3s to be quite overclockable too. I have a 233 MHz machine running comfortably at 300 MHz. It's running Panther, with a Radeon 7000 card.

A 233Mhz G3 seems to be very slow for OSX to me. I would run OS 9.2.2 on it and dig out some old OS 9 Apps for it, the thing would fly. A little more RAM would probably be nice, also get a larger HD.

The beige is easy to overclock. All you need is a jumper block from a faster machine and hope the CPU can handle it.

It's easier just to dig the jumpers out of the block with a pin, I found they came out quite easily. I was changing it to make it accept the B&W's CPU though, personally I wouldn't risk overclocking my CPU or bus, but then I'm not a risk-taker

The modem slot on a beige G3 isn't really a CSII slot, it's just CSII form factor. It is really a serial port. When you put the modem in the modem slot, the modem port stops working. Thus the blank.

You can have either a modem internally or a working serial port, but not both.

Peace,

Drew

If anybody is interested, I know some interesting tidbits of information concerning clock speed modifications on beige G3s (specifically, ID'ing components to determine whether or not higher bus speeds are possible). It won't work on every beige G3 (usually just the first two revisions), but when it does, it works perfectly. Any interest and I'll put it in the G3 section.

What do you mean? If you identify the spec on the MPC106 ("Grackle") chip, you can usually figure out what a good possibility is for overclocking the bus. The MPC106 came in 89 MHz rated parts on early G3s, but later ones were limited to 66 MHz. The 89 MHz part has significantly more overhead...

Peace,

Drew

Some of the old ones are rated 83MHz, yes. Many of the people I talk to don't seem to know about that, so I thought I might mention it.

Excuse me, yes, 83 MHz. Interestingly, this seems to have been a planned design feature of the G3s as even the Rev A Wallstreets had an 82.9 MHz bus on some models (the 292 MHz model comes to mind). I don't know why Apple backed down on the bus speed for the Gossamer boards. They seem to handle higher bus speeds just fine. Maybe it was an issue with the cost of the parts...

Peace,

Drew

If anybody is interested, I know some interesting tidbits of information concerning clock speed modifications on beige G3s (specifically, ID'ing components to determine whether or not higher bus speeds are possible). It won't work on every beige G3 (usually just the first two revisions), but when it does, it works perfectly. Any interest and I'll put it in the G3 section.

Click to expand...

Why would you not post that information?

If other people knew about it, there would be no point in me saying anything about it. The whole thing is simple, really: just look for the system controller - a small FCBGA microchip on the motherboard (near the processor and memory slots - it looks a lot like the processor, actually). The chip will have writing on it, like this: MPC106ARXxxYY. The YY doesn't matter, but usually it's CG. The xx is what the hopeful overclockers will want to look at: if it's 83 instead of 66, then clock your bus up to 83MHz and rejoice! Your system will run 100% stable and all subsystems will continue working (sometimes overclocking the bus on 66MHz parts resulted in non-functional or unreliable floppy drives).

According to some Apple manuals (some still available on Apple's website with some scrounging around), the beige G3 had a range of frequencies available, some at 50MHz (that's why you'll find some chips with 250 and 275MHz ratings on early models), others faster. I guess they went 66 to keep everything standard and to avoid confusion or having to deal with extra stock.

/edit/ Forgot to mention - make sure you use PC100 RAM if you o/c your bus, or you may have issues.

If other people knew about it, there would be no point in me saying anything about it. The whole thing is simple, really: just look for the system controller - a small FCBGA microchip on the motherboard (near the processor and memory slots - it looks a lot like the processor, actually). The chip will have writing on it, like this: MPC106ARXxxYY. The YY doesn't matter, but usually it's CG. The xx is what the hopeful overclockers will want to look at: if it's 83 instead of 66, then clock your bus up to 83MHz and rejoice! Your system will run 100% stable and all subsystems will continue working (sometimes overclocking the bus on 66MHz parts resulted in non-functional or unreliable floppy drives).According to some Apple manuals (some still available on Apple's website with some scrounging around), the beige G3 had a range of frequencies available, some at 50MHz (that's why you'll find some chips with 250 and 275MHz ratings on early models), others faster. I guess they went 66 to keep everything standard and to avoid confusion or having to deal with extra stock.

Click to expand...

Bumping the clock from 66 to 83 results in about a 26% O/C on the CPU using the stock multiplier. That's a tad high without additional cooling. You'll probably want to knock the multiplier down a bit to keep your CPU cool. Also, how does o/c'ing the system bus to 83mhz affect the timings on the PCI bus? You may end up with problems there, as well.

My G3MT runs on an 83MHz bus, and yes, the processor is lightly overclocked as a result (416MHz instead of 400). I use a socket 7 heatsink with a little fan on it. My G3DT runs on an 83MHz system bus, and its processor runs 333MHz (up from 300MHz). It uses its standard heatsink, though, and I have no problems with it (no extra fans or anything either).

The MPC106 controller is designed to run at a variety of speeds. If you can find the datasheet for it (Freescale doesn't have it, and Tundra Semiconductor doesn't, either, the jerks), you can read for yourself. You may be able to find it at www.datasheet.com. The long and short of it is that the PCI bus runs at 33.3MHz regardless of whether the system bus is at 33.3, 66.6, or 83.3MHz. If one wants to try other speeds (say, 50 or 75MHz system bus), the PCI bus will run at a different speed (keeping with the example, PCI will run at 25MHz).

Is this what you were looking for?

http://tinyurl.com/yrcgl4

You can set the multiplier of the PCI bus independently, so you can change the timing when you change the bus clock. In fact, you can change the bus clock, PCI clock, and CPU multiplier using the same jumper block on all varieties of G3 desktop/tower/AIO (including the B&W).

Takashi Imai's "Mystic Room" is always a good reference:

http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~t-imai/g3ae1.html

And so is Accelerate Your Macintosh:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3_OC/tims.html

I used these instructions to clock up my Rev A G3 MT from 266 to 70 MHz bus, 35 MHz PCI, 315 MHz CPU the day my warranty expired (I didn't want to void it early by removing the tape over the jumper block ). It was rock solid for three years until I got a processor upgrade for the machine and undid the overclock. Though I did get some strange video artifacts on my Voodoo 3 2000 from time to time...

Peace,

Drew

I already have the spec sheet, Quadraman. I had to find it on an alternate website, however, as the links on Freescale transfer to Tundra Semiconductor (the now-owner of the PCI/memory bridge chips from Freescale), and Tundra, like most firms (especially Sony), doesn't like to admit to manufacturing stuff over two years old. Thus, it's difficult to impossible to find the document on their site either.

Those linked pages are probably some of the best for G3 o/c data. I had another one around here somewhere... but those sites don't mention anything about the different controller parts. Thus, one would be going trial and error by simply reading those instructions, whereas if they knew about the part differences, they could simply ID their controller's maximum speed and eliminate the guesswork involved. There's no point in running an 83MHz part at lower speeds, is there?

There may be some main bus <-> PCI bus timing issues that make running at 66 MHz more sensible. I'm no expert, but I would think it would be a simple question to answer with some benchmarks running on the same machine with an 82.9 MHz bus and with a 66.6 MHz bus. Check RAM throughput, disk performance, and ethernet throughput for differences...

Some of the G3 upgrade manufacturers for PCI-class Macs insisted that there were some good reasons for not clocking the bus up to the maximum possible speed (say, 60 MHz for some Macs) and instead sticking with the Apple defined bus speeds between 40 MHz and 50 MHz (and usually somewhere in between like a stupid 45 or 46.5 MHz) claiming that RAM timing didn't work out well for high-speed busses. The argument went something like it would take two cycles on a high-speed bus to perform the same RAM operation that it would take on a 40 MHz bus, so they locked their cards to slower bus speeds. I don't know if the same thing would be true with an 82.9 MHz bus, but that does seem like an odd number to me.

The only drawback to the 82.9 MHz bus Macs of which I'm aware is that they are all Rev A machines with poor graphics (ATI Rage II+DVD/IIc) and no IDE slave device support. A ROM upgrade solves one of those problems, and a video card solves the other...

Peace,

Drew

alright, the jag CD I have is not working. It boots after 10 minutes, but all I get is a blue background with a moveable mouse pointer, and nothing else.

So, I turned it in to an experimental rig for now. I have it running Rhapsody DR2. I have ran the x86 in VPC, but never anything nativly, or the PPC version.

After that, I think I will put a complete install of 9.2.2 on there and go from there. I might just leave it at that and install Office 2k1 and all the other apps. It's really nice now that I have 384mb in there.

-digital

Man, I gotta check my facts. 82.9 MHz? Yeah. Try 83.3. ;-)

That sounds a bit like a corrupted CD. Rhapsody DR2, eh? I've got OS X Server 1.2, and it seems to work well on a PowerBook G3, but I've never tried it on a beige G3. What are you using for a web browser?

9.2.2 should positively haul on that machine. Get yourself a nice Rage 128 or Voodoo 3, and you've got a good OS 9 gaming rig if you're into that sort of thing.

Peace,

Drew

You're not using the original POS Matsushita-manufactured optical drive, are you? Try a different drive and see if that helps.

Matsushita is the worst for optical drives. They'll often have trouble reading perfect discs, or just crap out half-way through an install for no reason. Other Macs with troublesome drives from the same firm are the PowerBook G3s (except the Kanga), B&W G3, and the clamshell iBooks - my newer iBook G3s have Toshiba and Sony drives, though my iBook G4 has a Matsushita DVD burner (works for now, knock on wood). I try as much as possible to not use any OEM Matsushita stuff because it'll often break if I do. Surprisingly, other stuff from them was fantastic - Matsushita Kotobuki Electrochemical (MKE) made Quantum's HDAs, and they were some of the best hard drives ever. They make some decent LCD and plasma setups, too.

Anyway, Voodoo cards are fantastic in those old things. My top-end beige box runs a Voodoo3 or 4 (since I'm using a Rev. A 83MHz board with the lame RAGE II, the Voodoo is almost required), and my B&W has a Voodoo5 5500. Sadly, those cards have no OS X support (that I know of), so they should be really cheap - I got mine for free, anyway. It's fantastic running Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, StarCraft, or Diablo II on those machines under 8 or 9. Have fun with it.

Matsushita is the worst for optical drives. They'll often have trouble reading perfect discs, or just crap out half-way through an install for no reason.

Click to expand...

Yes, I originally tried to install Tiger on mine with that drive as you're supposed to use as many stock components as possible with XPF, but it kept stopping with file copy errors during the second stage of the installation (from the second CD, after the reboot during Setup), yet it worked fine with a Sony DVD-RW.

You should try putting Tiger on it though, it does run very nicely on these!

the only way i can get OS X to install on my Beige G3 is by using the stock 24x cd drive. it boots instantly and installs flawlessly. if i use any other drive it wont boot or fails during copy.

i have seen what happens when you OC the system bus to 83mhz, yes you get a performance gain but that is somewhat hampered by the ram timing (refresh timing) being slowed down ( it will be running at 83mhz but the timing goes from CL2 to CL 3) which hurts the memory throughput and in tern hurts the speed gain you would get if the ram stayed at CL2. so i guess you can say it sort of works against itself in some way's.

i am no way shape or form saying you wont see a performance gain from the system bus OC but a bit is lost when the memory timing gets slowed down.

in gauge pro (in OS 9.2.2) shows my memory performance at 75mb/second - 78mb/second and that is with a G3 450mhz (OC to 466 cause of system bus) system bus is at stock 66mhz with 3 256mb PC100 CL2 stick's.

i would like to see other peoples results with the system bus OCed to 83mhz around the same speed or slower G3 CPU. for the life of me i cant remember what memory performance gauge pro showed with the stock G3 266mhz CPU with the same amount of ram (i am thinking around high 40's or mid 50's) but its been a long time since i have seen what it shows so i am not for sure on those numbers.

in gauge pro (in OS 9.2.2) shows my memory performance at 75mb/second - 78mb/second and that is with a G3 450mhz (OC to 466 cause of system bus) system bus is at stock 66mhz with 3 256mb PC100 CL2 stick's.
i would like to see other peoples results with the system bus OCed to 83mhz around the same speed or slower G3 CPU. for the life of me i cant remember what memory performance gauge pro showed with the stock G3 266mhz CPU with the same amount of ram (i am thinking around high 40's or mid 50's) but its been a long time since i have seen what it shows so i am not for sure on those numbers.

Click to expand...

FWIW, I set up a beige G3 with an 83 MHz bus and a G4 500 downclocked to 416 MHz. Gauge Pro reports 105 MB/s.

Slower-than-expected ZIF upgrade

Peace,

Drew

If you overclock, I am pretty sure you will need PC100 memory to run at 83mhz.

And I checked my two G3's and they both have the 66mhz chips.

in gauge pro (in OS 9.2.2) shows my memory performance at 75mb/second - 78mb/second and that is with a G3 450mhz (OC to 466 cause of system bus) system bus is at stock 66mhz with 3 256mb PC100 CL2 stick's.
i would like to see other peoples results with the system bus OCed to 83mhz around the same speed or slower G3 CPU. for the life of me i cant remember what memory performance gauge pro showed with the stock G3 266mhz CPU with the same amount of ram (i am thinking around high 40's or mid 50's) but its been a long time since i have seen what it shows so i am not for sure on those numbers.

Click to expand...

FWIW, I set up a beige G3 with an 83 MHz bus and a G4 500 downclocked to 416 MHz. Gauge Pro reports 105 MB/s.

Slower-than-expected ZIF upgrade

Peace,

Drew

Click to expand...

You're better off with a faster bus and a slightly slower CPU. You might still find a way to get the extra speed out of the CPU, but dropping the system bus speed wouldn't be a good way to do it.

Simple Installation

Apple designed your Power Mac to be easily upgradeable. A processor upgrade installation happens in minutes—simply replace your Power Mac's current processor with a faster 500 MHz or 1.0 GHz Encore/ZIF upgrade. (2) The included documentation details the process step by step. The Encore hardware automatically configures the correct bus ratio without the need for switches. In no time you're Power Mac will be up and running—simply fast.

alright, I scrapped Rhapsody, since I could not get it to configure my network right, even manually inputting the IP, DNS, subnet, gateway, and all that.

So, I popped in my OS 9.2.1 CD, and installed that. I now updated it to 9.2.2, installed all my games , and slapped iCab and soon Office 2k1 on there, and it will be a decent rig for my parents.

I also plugged in my 12" LC CRT to the built in video, which can not pull anything higher than 640x480x67htz, though it can pull millions of colors; and tried to get OS X going. i got the apple logo, and the spinner, but that was it, it just kept spinning for 20 minutes. If I had a spare CD-ROM, I would swap that in. Hell, if I had an apple DVD-ROM, I would pop my decoder card from my RAGE 128 in my B&W on to the ATI video card in it.

I also noticed the ATI video card has a SGRAM slot, which is odd, because I do not know of any older ATI Rage cards with expandable memory. I will ID it in ASP as soon as I am done copying files.

I am not going to OC the thing, why mess with success? besides, guage pro reports it running at 50C as it is, which is 122F. My B&W is currently reporting 100.4F at 400mhz.

Another thing I noticed with the built in video, I get a white screen for a split second before it starts booting, from what I can tell looks like a text cursor. Open firmware? I am not pressing anything. If I can, I will get a video of it.

-digital

If I had a spare CD-ROM, I would swap that in. Hell, if I had an apple DVD-ROM, I would pop my decoder card from my RAGE 128 in my B&W on to the ATI video card in it.

Click to expand...

Do you have any other CD or DVD drives at all, not only Apple-logoed ones? PC ones should work, though not all will boot the machine - Sony ones usually play nicely with Macs if you have any of those.

nope, at least I don't think I do. Maybe in this one big box of computer parts. I did have 3-4 52x drives I got cheap, and a 32x sony drive...

-digital

I also noticed the ATI video card has a SGRAM slot, which is odd, because I do not know of any older ATI Rage cards with expandable memory. I will ID it in ASP as soon as I am done copying files.

Click to expand...

Ayup, they sure did. All Beige G3s and tray load iMacs with either a Rage IIc, Rage II+DVD or Rage Pro came with an SGRAM slot on the mobo that could take a 2 or 4 MB SGRAM DIMM. Later machines (such as Rev. C G3s (IIRC) and Rev. B, C and D iMacs) already came with a 4MB DIMM in the slot.

I installed the ATI utilities, and it recognises the PCi card as a Rage Pro. The built in stuff is a Mach64, and ASP identifies that as having 4mb of VRAM. No idea how much the card has. The slot on it is empty.

Makes me wonder what revision the ROM is, not that I care...

-digital

The BIV would be a Rage IIc...the Rage II was basically a redesigned Mach64. On top of that, those were the only three chips that Apple used on the Beige G3s: The Rage IIc, Rage II+DVD and Rage Pro. Rage IIc machines got a Rev. A ROM, so yours would most likely be Rev. A

People say "Rage IIc", but they really mean Rage II+DVD (the two are virtually the same thing, and the underlying 2D/3D acceleration of the II+DVD is the same as the IIc). I've never actually heard of a Rev A machine with a straight Rage IIc. My two Rev A boards have Rage II+DVD. But all that is a fancy way of saying Mach64, and it's a silly distinction. ;-)

Rage IIc was used on the x500 Gazelle motherboards (about time, too, as the Valkyrie was getting a little dated). IIc/II+DVD/Mach64 was also used on Rev A Bondi iMacs.

The Rage Pro was used on Rev B beige G3s and on Rev B/C/D iMacs.

The video card is probably an ATI XClaim 3D Pro. (More here: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/index6.html )

Peace,

Drew

all I know is my head is spinning with all of these video card names. I know about them all, but when you list them all in one post, and connect them, that's a major brain fart

I got office 2k1 installed. Going out to find a USB->PS/2 adapter, so I can use the existing keyboard and mouse, and they have a descent pentium killer.

-digital

Beige's are great machines. I have one that has been working great for me for years. Good quality machine. Almost as good as my 8500, almost.

alright, I got it all set up, hooked up, and I am typing on it now in iCab 3.03 under OS 9.2.2.

One issue I am having is I can not get the Deskjet 812c to work. It's hooked to the USB card, but the HP utility can not find it, even though it is hooked in properly (tried both USB ports), and it's on.

Any thoughts? I always seem to have trouble with printing in OS 9. I don't know why.

other than that, it's a great fast little box, virus free (thanks to norton systemworks), which I think my dad will get a lot of use from, a lot more than the slow as molasses windows 98 pentium 166 box, which would always crash. I have only had 2 type 11 errors on boot, but only after installing something, and a nother reboot fixed that problem.

Oh, and I love how GURU (guide to RAM upgrades), the little app put out by newer does not seem to think Apple made a Beige G3 in a 233mhz tower config, but made a 233 in a desktop config. It's not there.

-digital

hello from the beige. I popped 10.2.8 on it tonight. Runs like a champ with 384mb, quite a nice rock stable machine, until my dad figures out how to KP the thing. He already locked up 9.2.2 hard more than a dozen times, so I figured I may as well pop X on it.

Now I just need Office 2k4 and a working printer, and USB -> ADB adapter, and away we go.

-digital

You'll probably want to stick with ADB on that machine as the USB card requires drivers (it doesn't have drivers in the ROM like later machines) to work and thus won't work until the OS boots past a certain point. If you ever need to trouble shoot, ADB is indispensable.

Are you using the Rage Pro for video? I would recommend putting at least a Rage 128 in there as it has better support in OS X. Rage 128s should be cheap ($20 or less) on the used market.

Peace,

Drew