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Doq

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 8, 2019
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The Lab DX
No I'm not asking for how to do it.

Before the days of Apple new, Macs were shockingly expandable, whether that be through various card slots on PowerBooks or through PCI on Power Macs (or even NuBus if your Power Macintosh is old enough!). What I want to know (and the purpose of this thread) is to share in one thread the expansions that are possible for our PowerPCs.

And I really don't want done-to-death upgrades like "max the ram" "add AirPort" "put an SSD in" "cheap bluetooth". Get super weird with it. The Mac is your canvas!
 
Here are my absolutely knuckle dragging, mind numbingly obvious powerpc upgrades for donkeys. Some are out of the box, some flashed using different utilities etc.

CPU daughter card upgrades
AGP Video cards - 9000 pros and up.
PCI Video cards - flashed visiontek 7000
PCI USB 2 cards - siig, sonnet, generic via
PCI USB/FW400 Combo cards - sonnet and generic
PCI Wifi cards - Dynex g DX-EBDTC
PCI SATA cards - flashed 3512s and Acard
USB BT radios 2.1
pata/sata adapters - generic w/ jumpers
3.5 to 2.5" pata adapter - generic
PCMCIA USB2 - NEC
PCMCIA card reader, ibm microdrive, iclick etc.
Ext HDDs - Generic USB 2.5 & 3.5 & Lacie FW 3.5
Ext Zip drives - USB & SCSI

Additional case fans
SDRAM heatsinks
component heatsinks

There is a gentleman on here who has been working on PowerPC OSX sound blaster live drivers. That looks like a pretty cool upgrade if you have some old SBL pci cards laying around (which I do). Dosdude has some very cool cpu upgrade options as well as flashed GPU upgrade services that you can buy from him.
 
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These are my two slightly less than obvious contributions:


 
Belkin F8T001. Add native functionality of Bluetooth 2.0 to OS X. Technically, you can get away with model numbers from 001 to around 013, but after that they tend to be incompatible. Can be used in either a PowerBook, iBook or PowerMac.

31wsoeSV8ZL._AC_.jpg

For laptops with PC slots. This was the suggestion from @B S Magnet:

Linksys WPC600N. Dual band, 802.11n WiFi card. Allows connections to WPA2 and 5ghz WiFi.

61pf+Ru7STS.jpg
 
For laptops with PC slots. This was the suggestion from @B S Magnet:

Linksys WPC600N. Dual band, 802.11n WiFi card. Allows connections to WPA2 and 5ghz WiFi.

View attachment 2145384

I mean, you’re not exactly getting MIMO with the WPC600N, but it’s still well north of anything 802.11g will ever be able to deliver.

And I really don't want done-to-death upgrades like "max the ram" "add AirPort" "put an SSD in" "cheap bluetooth". Get super weird with it. The Mac is your canvas!

Here’s one: upgrade your laptop display.

As with @netsrot39 and the PowerBook 17-inch or me with the iBook clamshell, upping the monitor (and the resolution) is a lot of fun, once in place. Additionally, other hacks: removing the anti-glare film (another thing I’ve done with my iBook) and also taking out the CCFL and inverter board and swapping in an LED strip (not at all for the faint of heart, but also been done to my iBook).

Here’s another: upgrade the BGA-soldered CPU. This I am still waiting to do with the aforementioned clamshell and also to my A1139, but these are things I would really like to make happen. For the Rev. C clamshell, the best jump I can hope for is going from a 466 MHz PPC750CX to the 700MHz PPC750CXe (found only in the summer 2001 iMac SE); for the PowerBook, that would, obviously, be finding the right PPC7448 CPU (turns out there are a couple of variants which do not like overclocking one bit).

There are more which come to mind, but these are the ones I think about the most.
 
Belkin F8T001. Add native functionality of Bluetooth 2.0 to OS X. Technically, you can get away with model numbers from 001 to around 013, but after that they tend to be incompatible. Can be used in either a PowerBook, iBook or PowerMac.

View attachment 2145382

I do have on of those Belkin Bluetooth dongles and it works great. However I'd like to point out that even Bluetooth 4.0 dongles will work on PowerPC (I've tested it with Tiger & Leopard). I do not know however if there is a speed advantage over older version Bluetooth dongles since I only wanted to add Bluetooth functionality in order to use my Mighty Mouse (i.e. I did not test further). An advantage though is that those Bluetooth 4 dongles do not stick out that much. An example for such dongle would be the LogiLink BT-0015 but I think that other dongles that state "CSR" will also work out of the box since early OS X has driver built in for "Cambridge Silicon Radio".
 
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I do have on of those Belkin Bluetooth dongles and it works great. However I'd like to point out that even Bluetooth 4.0 dongles will work on PowerPC (I've tested it with Tiger & Leopard). I do not know however if there is a speed advantage over older version Bluetooth dongles since I only wanted to add Bluetooth functionality in order to use my Mighty Mouse (i.e. I did not test further). An advantage though is that those Bluetooth 4 dongles do not stick out that much. An example for such dongle would be the LogiLink BT-0015 but I think that other dongles that state "CSR" will also work out of the box since early OS X has driver built in for "Cambridge Silicon Radio".
For me the advantage was simply to use BT where non existed (I too have a Magic Mouse). I wan't thinking beyond 2.0 at the time. In any case, there's no real reason now for me to add 4.0 to my PowerPC Macs. Although, it might be an excuse to start using my 17" Powerbook more. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
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OK, here’s an “inb4” some polka-dot fraudster gets ideas from it:

Manually pop out the keys from either the titanium or Pismo PowerBook, and pop them in place of the white keys of the iBook clamshell. In true polka-dot huckster action, pull off all the coloured silicone to leave either a grey or white polycarbonate shell, paint the apple icon a mocha hue, and post it on eBay as a “PVT pRoToTyPe ICED COFFEE iBook” for the low, low price of $9876.54. Alternately, apply the keys to an ice iBook and do the same on eBay.

In all seriousness: throwing on the translucent dark brown keys and matching it with an indigo or blueberry iBook would be kind of wild — like, kind of an “ocean-and-land” aesthetic. Dark brown and tangerine, I fear, would cause people to try to “whack and unwrap”. And dark brown, matched with key lime? An Andes-brand mint iBook, obviously.

But putting iBook keys on the Pismo? I can almost see a melee breaking out.
 
Not a mac but technically a powerpc upgrade, but my main pc uses the POWER9 based raptor blackbird motherboard. Can't really get more upgraded than that in a desktop form factor :p

I have a 1.8ghz 7448-based newtech maxpower G4 cpu upgrade in my sawtooth. I tried to bump the speed up to 2ghz, but it was too unstable so I bumped it back down. Plus apparently this cpu is pretty rare, so i'd rather keep it at the stock freq to prolong it's life.

@Dronecatcher you don't happen to have a link on-hand for the drivers for the turbo264 do you? I'm probably going to get one of those myself as I've been looking for a hardware encoder for my powermacs
 
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There’s a couple I’ll mention here.

I’ll start with my Sawtooth G4. Note that I actually moved everything I’m about to mention in this Mac over to a Mystic G4 after I found one; save for the NIC.
-PCI SATA card, loaded up with 4 HDDs. There was also a single IDE hard disk used to troubleshoot/boot OS 9
-2GB RAM
-Geforce 6200
-Xserve 64bit PCI Gigabit NIC
-IDE DVD-RWDL drive with lightscribe
-USB 2.0 Card
-Dual 450MHz and later dual 500MHz G4 CPU card. The machine was originally a 450MHz single.
All of these upgrades have been moved into the Mystic G4, save for the NIC as it already had a built in one. The NIC has been repurposed into my next mention…
The Mystic currently serves as a “backup” NAS for all my PowerPC related files. It has multiple HDD’s over 1TB. But I don’t actually use it a lot and I can’t remember off the top of my head how large the disks and total available space is. I wanna say 4-5TB.

PowerMac G3 B&W

-ATA133 IDE card
-Geforce FX 5200
-Xserve 64bit PCI Gigabit NIC (of course its only 32bit in this Mac but it doesn’t seem to make a difference)
-400MHz (it might be 450) G4 CPU from a Yikes!
This Mac boots into Leopard and Tiger. Leopard is very nice on it.
I chose to use my leftover GigE NIC I mentioned instead of a USB 2.0 card, since I only use my NAS for transferring files now. Haven’t used a USB drive in long time unless I’m making an installation disk for something. And GigE is way faster than USB 2.0.
 
Not a mac but technically a powerpc upgrade, but my main pc uses the POWER9 based raptor blackbird motherboard. Can't really get more upgraded than that in a desktop form factor :p
I've seen those and I've wanted to get one in the Lab but they're also prohibitively expensive. $3,000 for POWER ain't it, sadly.

--
Oh, here's a contribution of my own. Get a personality card for your Beige Macs. The video-in functionality is pretty neat for being an official expansion.... when it works. Which, mine might not? All it's giving me is sad coloured bars. Maybe it's a me problem. Further investigation required.
 
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Get super weird with it. The Mac is your canvas!
Well, in terms of nonstandard setups, my Oddball is pretty weird for a post speed-dump AGP by having just 128MB RAM and an 8MB Rage 128 VR. Also has a USB card. I count this as a positive because it just gives me a visceral pleasure to see my PCs have to work to run 3D games, it just feels right. And yet at 854x480, Quake III still gets a respectable 40 fps.

Donatello has a CF card adapter in it. That by itself wouldn't be notable, but its rationale I think is -- it makes swapping between Mac OS 8/9/X DP2 (16GB) and Linux (64GB) trivially easy. On a machine with such a barebones version of New World on it, that makes a huge difference as multiboot only barely works on it yet, and not usefully.

Sequoyah has my Radeon 9800 Pro at the moment. Maybe I'll shove an X800 XT into it, or switch it out for an MDD, FW800, or G5 and throw in an HD 4670.

Crowley is currently still out of commission but I've been thinking up a plan to get it up and running again, involving transplanting it into a Fractal Design Core 1000 with ATX PSU, replacing its Rage 128 Pro with something a bit better that OpenBSD still supports, getting myself a SeriTek 1V4, and throwing in USB and FireWire cards. Then I'd go and look for a dual 1 GHz CPU card from a Quicksilver, overclock the FSB to 133MHz, and see if dual 1GB PC133 sticks will work to get the system back up to 2GB despite the RAM slot issue in the Sawtooths.
I'd use the build to try out CRUX and T2 SDE before finally putting it on server duty.​
 
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Does anyone know of any PCI TV tuners that are well supported in Jaguar or earlier? I've been thinking about digitizing some videos recently, and on top of that record console gameplay for YouTube with my VCR on some blank tapes, and I feel like that could be a fun use case for Oddball.​
 
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