Gigabit ethernet card for an old OS 9 machine?

[haravikk]

Hey there,

Despite the prevalence of OS X in the Mac market place now, I've been unable to get OS X versions of some applications I use now and then, and a few games whose source-code no-one seems even willing to acknowledge ever existed, so I have an older blue and white G3 (300mhz) lying around. However, I no longer have any monitors I can really reliably use with it, so I was thinking I'd use VNC to remote-desktop into it instead. I got this all set-up, and it works okay-ish, but the main issue is speed.

I'm connecting to it via a direct connection to my Mac Pro, which of course has gigabit ethernet, so I figured it might be possible to pick up a gigabit ethernet card somewhere, but with OS 9 being so old there is the issue of drivers.

I'm hoping someone here might know where I can find a gigabit ethernet card for my G3? I may try firewire to see if that works at all, but I suspect that gigabit ethernet would be better overall if I can get that!

Thanks!

 

[bizzle]

Faster ethernet is not going to help at all. It's not maxing out the bandwidth available already.

 

[Consultant]

Powermac G3 uses VGA port.

You can find lots of CRT monitors for free. Many cheap LCD comes with VGA only.

Your problem is lack of CPU. Gigabit ethernet is probably not going to help.
There are companies that sell upgrades for PowerMac running os 9.

Solutions
- Display
- Upgrade G3
- Get a OS9 capable PowerMac G4

 

[haravikk]

If it's unlikely to make any difference, then is there any alternative you can recommend? Sheep Shaver won't run any of the applications I want, while I could get a monitor somewhere for my G3 there isn't really anywhere to put it, I'd like to be able to use my existing ones but the only one which supports VGA the G3 seems to hate, is a very annoying situation

I'm not sure processor is an issue? The most demanding of the games (Zork Nemesis) has extremely low CPU requirements (pre-G3) and only uses 8-16mb of RAM. Meaning the processor is mostly free to do nothing but send the image-data.

 

[brand]

If it's unlikely to make any difference, then is there any alternative you can recommend?

A 10/100/1000Mbps network card would not help you at all. The backplane of your system will not even be able to process that much data.

Don't wast your money on this ancient computer.

 

[Consultant]

Remote desktop requires a lot more processor power than you think,
especially at millions of color. Turn the colors down and
frame rate might increase.

17" LCD, currently $100
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=207538531

Your mac supports up to 1600x1200, so the above lcd should work
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=207538531

Pick up PowerMac G4, maybe dual processor ones and try to vnc it.
No guarantee on frame rate, but you can always sell it.

You can also try a processor upgrade but probably not worth it for a g3.

 

[haravikk]

Remote desktop requires a lot more processor power than you think,
especially at millions of color. Turn the colors down and
frame rate might increase.

I'm not sure why, surely all it does in RAW mode is grabs the screen image-data and throws it over to the connected client(s)? The overhead of doing that should be really low once you've got a hook into the video-memory, compression is obviously a lot more demanding but with a direct connection it shouldn't be enabled. Other than that, it's just doing stuff with input-signals.

However, that said, it's still pretty crappy on 640 x 480 resolution in thousands of colours, so I can't think what it's spending all it's processing time on.

17" LCD, currently $100
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=207538531

Your mac supports up to 1600x1200, so the above lcd should work
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=207538531

There are loads of great displays out there, but my main problem; no space! Here's a picture of my desk:

Unless I bolted a monitor on top of the cinema display I'm kind of out of room! The cinema display only has DVI, and would need to be switched all the time into an adapter to work with the G3, the HDTV meanwhile has VGA, but goes crazy even when the G3 uses a supported resolution, a friend of mine plugged their Windows laptop (older one with a funny VGA port) into it and it worked fine, so I'm inclined to believe that either the ATI RAGE 128 card or OS 9 don't support it in some way.

Pick up PowerMac G4.

I'd like to, but the reason I'm posting here is in my investigation into trying not to have to =)
The G3 works perfectly well, and can run the software I want, I just need a way to display it. VNC would have been ideal as it lets me view its "screen" within OS X so I can move it around, put things over the top of it etc. as I please.