A few days ago I got to the Powermac. I played around with it for a bit.
It has two SCSI hard drivers, one for the boot drive. The boot drive is 3-4 GB Quantum fireball, and the second drive is 80 MB (yes, 80 MB O-o) Quantum and also VERY LOUD!!!
This Powermac has two SCSI bays; and two ATA bays, one of which is for the optical drive. The other ATA bay is on the floorboard (or whatever you call it) next to the motherboard under the other drive bays.
The plastic parts are old and brittle. While I was working with it, it would go crunch crunch crunch
Many plastic parts are missing. i remember there was some vent-like thingy that went over the open area above the mother board next to the drive bays. Also the power button has broke completely now (the switch itself is still good).
After several hours of several days messing with the crappy OS and extensions (it was all corrupt and broken and froze and crashed often), I disabled all extensions and then rebooted. After this, most of the extensions disappeared!!
No hard drive space seemed to have freed up so it must've been somewhere, but nowhere to be found! Just vanished just like that!
So bla bla...
I could not find the original optical drive. It was everywhere when I didn't need it and now when I need it it is nowhere.
Too bad because it had the mount thing for mounting in the ODD bay. Oh well, not too bad, I can just drill holes for screws to keep the ODD in place.
I took the optical drive out of my PowerMac G4 (DA) and put it in the G3. Put a Jaguar install disk in it, and it worked. OS 8 recognized it, and the installer application opened, but nothing happened when i clicked Restart. So I just restarted and held down C key, it booted in OS 8 but then halted and restarted in OS X from the disk!
The boot disk had some history crap but because it used SCSI and the Powermac G4 uses ATA it would be too much hassle to save that crap, so I just went ahead and erased it and installed Jaguar! Everything went perfectly.
After the install, the setup assistant said it could not be displayed on my Display (at default resolution) so I had to manually setup in System Preferences. (Which is good because I didn't have to go through the fancy music and the registration crap
). So now all is well
After switching from OS 8.6 to 10.2, WOW, OS X is such a great OS. I realized how absolutely terrible classic OS X was! With OS 8, this computer was a useless piece of junk, but OS X has brought new life into it! I never knew how much more useful, beautiful, and fun 10.2 was. I just can't look back at this such terrible classic Mac OS. No wonder people hated Macs and went with Windows.
I had so much fun just playing with the few apps there were
especially iTunes (though I rarely use itunes or listen to music). I really like this old iTunes 3 and hate the new iTunes 11 or 12 or whatever they have today. And that good ol' classic visualizer! The internal speaker works quite well, despite having a hole in it
(The G4 DA has a bad speaker)
10.2 runs pretty fine on it. It is a bit laggy but not bad enough to annoy you. The animated screensaver (flurry) lags too much to use, but the slideshow ones work fine.
The CPU usage is very crazy and spiky. When idle, it is near the bottom, but when I move the mouse, it goes up to around 1/3 or 1/2. Dragging a window or something similar will make it zip up to 100%.
So I have a few questions.
Can I just use any usual USB PCI card and would it work out-of-the-box with OS X?
Do floppy disks work with OS X?
