Help with Beige Desktop Rev A

[basseed]

Hi there!

I recently picked up a Beige Rev A sold for parts on Ebay with the intention to restore it.

Only the HDD was faulty so it was a good deal! CPU was an IBM 266, but I sourced a Motorola 400 ZIF and it runs great at 466 and an updated Wraith ROM from a Rev.B.

I have a few questions as I ran into issues with my plan, which was to replace the IDE HDD with a fast SCSI setup. (I know I can run ssds or sata potentially).

I sourced an Adaptec PowerDomain 39160.

with the Rev.A ROM I can boot on an IDE hdd and see that it's not recognised correctly as a PCI device so no dice.

With the Wraith Rev.B ROM, if the Adaptec is in the slot, I can't boot even on other devices and it gets stuck at the grey screen with the cursor at the top left.

In the Adaptec box says requirements Rev.B G3. Am I out of luck and this can't work on the Beige G3? Are there any 160 SCSI cards that are known to work?

Another note:

I got USB to work using the OS9.1 drivers (OS9.2.2 usb drivers are incompatible), but when I press command+Opt+Esc to close forcibly an application, the only mouse/keyboard that work are the ADB ones. Is this normal and can it be addressed?

Thanks in advance

 

[capamac]

Might wanna look at https://shop.rabbitholecomputing.com/ ... hook that up to the internal SCSI mebbe.

 

[basseed]

Internal SCSI is only 5MB/s, with Ultra Wide I can in theory get PCI slot speed..

 

[capamac]

Wiki says 10MB/s ... ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3#Beige

 

[ww2_1943]

The Rev 1 boards are tricky. I have up on mine and found a Rev 2 and it’s perfect! Everything works. I’m using an Adaptec SATA PCI card with it. I couldn’t make that work with the 1st board.

Beige Power Mac G3 (1997) - Low End Mac

The Beige G3 is a third-generation Power Mac. It has a new motherboard with a faster system bus than earlier models, a third-generation PowerPC CPU, uses a completely different type of memory, has a different way of upgrading the CPU, and includes a personality card slot. The Power Mac G3 comes...

lowendmac.com

 

[joevt]

updated Wraith ROM from a Rev.B

What's a Wraith ROM from a Rev.B?
Applefritter say this:
https://www.applefritter.com/node/3964

Use Open Firmware to dump and verify the checksums:
https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/apple-network-server-macos-based-roms-found.4756/post-41390

Does the ROM have flash chips? If so, then the ROM could possibly be upgraded to rev D using Apple's Flash Utility.

The Rev 1 boards are tricky. I have up on mine and found a Rev 2 and it’s perfect! Everything works. I’m using an Adaptec SATA PCI card with it. I couldn’t make that work with the 1st board.

Beige Power Mac G3 (1997) - Low End Mac

The Beige G3 is a third-generation Power Mac. It has a new motherboard with a faster system bus than earlier models, a third-generation PowerPC CPU, uses a completely different type of memory, has a different way of upgrading the CPU, and includes a personality card slot. The Power Mac G3 comes...

lowendmac.com

I don't know which limitations of the Beige G3 are caused by the firmware or the hardware.

Limitations caused by firmware can be patched.
I think the 8 or 128 GiB limits are firmware related. I'm working on patches for those limits.

I don't know about the slave/master limits. I suppose if slave/master can work in DingusPPC emulator but not on a real Beige G3, then the problem is hardware related. The same goes for the 8/128 GiB limit. I'm pretty sure Mac OS 9 doesn't have a 128 GiB limit so that limit might be only for Open Firmware.

The Beige G3 IDE driver for Mac OS X disables LBA48 support. I can make a kext that enables LBA48 support. Maybe Apple had a reason for not enabling LBA48 support in the Mac OS X driver? But if Mac OS 9 can do it, then so can Mac OS X.