Well, I'm happy to report that I'm posting this from my freshly-renovated Beige G3! I scrounged eBay and found a nice Rage128/16 card, a 500MHz G3/ZIF chip, and a set of overclocking-friendly jumpers.
Following Bunsen's advice, I picked up the G3 from IC-China, and it was an awesome experience! The ZIF arrived perfectly packed in a tiny little envelope, and I was very happy to find that it was actually a Sonnet G3 upgrade card with 1MB of L2 cache, rather than a "plain-jane" G3 card. Sweet, and barely $20!
I've been sitting on these parts for a bit more than a week, but with a day off tomorrow I can afford to stay up late tonight, so I put some vintage Etta James on my iPod ("Etta James Rocks The House" is a must-have album!), popped open an ice-cold Blue Moon ale, and set to work.
I've now got the hardware totally put together, and Jaguar 10.2.8 running nicely in 384 megs of RAM. One thing that changed from my earlier posts is that I've combined some parts from the Minitower with a G3 Desktop that I had kicking around. Since the Desktop has the better VRU and a later, more stable set of ROMs, it made a better testbed for these random parts, and frankly, I'm much happier with the smaller size of this unit, so I think I'll keep it as-is for now, and retire the 'Tower to the garage.
Onward and upward!
Huxley
Following Bunsen's advice, I picked up the G3 from IC-China, and it was an awesome experience! The ZIF arrived perfectly packed in a tiny little envelope, and I was very happy to find that it was actually a Sonnet G3 upgrade card with 1MB of L2 cache, rather than a "plain-jane" G3 card. Sweet, and barely $20!
I've been sitting on these parts for a bit more than a week, but with a day off tomorrow I can afford to stay up late tonight, so I put some vintage Etta James on my iPod ("Etta James Rocks The House" is a must-have album!), popped open an ice-cold Blue Moon ale, and set to work.
I've now got the hardware totally put together, and Jaguar 10.2.8 running nicely in 384 megs of RAM. One thing that changed from my earlier posts is that I've combined some parts from the Minitower with a G3 Desktop that I had kicking around. Since the Desktop has the better VRU and a later, more stable set of ROMs, it made a better testbed for these random parts, and frankly, I'm much happier with the smaller size of this unit, so I think I'll keep it as-is for now, and retire the 'Tower to the garage.
Onward and upward!
Huxley