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The one from my dual 2.7Ghz G5 was working in my MDD after taping Pin 3 and 11. Whatever that card is...you have to search. It is the stock card.
 
My PowerMacs have arrived!

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EDIT: Man these machines are loud!!
 
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My MDD was very unstable at 1.5GHz and the CPUs are now completely dead after I took it up to 1.58GHz. So I'm gonna do a 7457 upgrade eventually. I'm definitely interested to see how the SIl3114 turns out, those cards are plentiful but I haven't heard of them working in a PPC mac.
hello. I got the Sil3114 flashed and running in the MDD a few weeks ago, I just didn't get around to posting about it. I gave the machine a 500GB WD Blue hard disk and a fresh install of Leopard (Tiger was fun while it lasted but I really wanted up-to-date Webkit)
It actually runs just as fast or faster than the old PATA drive, despite what I've heard about the Sil3114 supposedly being a slow chip.
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hello. I got the Sil3114 flashed and running in the MDD a few weeks ago, I just didn't get around to posting about it. I gave the machine a 500GB WD Blue hard disk and a fresh install of Leopard (Tiger was fun while it lasted but I really wanted up-to-date Webkit)
It actually runs just as fast or faster than the old PATA drive, despite what I've heard about the Sil3114 supposedly being a slow chip.
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How did you go about flashing it? I wonder if it's possible to get a Sil3124 working in an MDD but I'm not sure if it could take advantage of the 64bit PCI slot as it's a PCI-X card which came later and was in some G5s that used the same connector as 64bit PCI. Of course that's provided you can even find a Sil3124 card they seem to be rather rare.
 
How did you go about flashing it? I wonder if it's possible to get a Sil3124 working in an MDD but I'm not sure if it could take advantage of the 64bit PCI slot as it's a PCI-X card which came later and was in some G5s that used the same connector as 64bit PCI. Of course that's provided you can even find a Sil3124 card they seem to be rather rare.
there's a post on this forum that provides a firmware dump that can be flashed with flashrom under FreeDOS. I'm pretty sure the firmware dump is just taken from the Firmtek Sil3112 cards, as the card shows up as a Sil3112 in the Mac OS X system profiler.
 
Hi all, just a little update from me in case anyone's interested.

I purchased a Radeon 9600 128MB pulled from a G5 about a month ago, finally took it and installed it (surprisingly, managed to do the taping of pins 3 and 11 the first time). And imagine my surprise when I go to System report and find that it's actually a Radeon 9650 256MB! Not often you get these sort of nice surprises from eBay :)
 
And here I am, now with my own MDD, a 1.25 ghz single cpu, and what I've noticed is that there seem to be quite a few stores that sell parts for it. Parts such as cpu daughtercards, from the look of things. Including ones for the 1.42 ghz dual. Now, I have no idea how good these shops actually are, and my aim is to make the best OS 9 capable Mac I can, which means my graphics card upgrade is a little more limited, but it certainly sounds like I'm thinking about taking my MDD down a similar "silly" path that you were thinking about.

Because the thing of it is, it looks like cpu daughtercard swapping is really limited to bus speed, and if you're starting out with a 1ghz model, you're already at the faster of the two possible bus speeds, meaning a 1.42 ghz upgrade should be possible. The real limiting factor is getting a copper heatsink for it, and those seem to be things you can buy at the same sorts of stores.




Again, no idea how good or valid these are, but I'm not use to a 17 year old computer having parts I can just buy at a shop. These are pretty much the best deals I could find, btw, there seems to be a whole host of shops that still sell this stuff, parted out.
 
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@repairedCheese Yikes... That dual CPU daughtercard is way overpriced, and in my opinion not worth it at all for a nearly decade old machine. Heatsink is not much better, either.

You can do whatever you want, but I'd rather see if anyone here happens to have any spare ones lying around instead.
 
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@repairedCheese Yikes... That dual CPU daughtercard is way overpriced, and in my opinion not worth it at all for a nearly decade old machine. Heatsink is not much better, either.

You can do whatever you want, but I'd rather see if anyone here happens to have any spare ones lying around instead.
See, you're probably not wrong, but I have zero patience for waiting for auctions to show up.
OS 9 does not benefit from dual CPUs, it's just a few applications that can make use of them (on OS 9, that is).
And I am aware of this. The reason for doing it would be entirely for OSX. It's not like there's no reason for doing it, I just want to have a Mac that can do the most things all around.
 
Fair point. The next caveat is that the GF4Ti, while great on 9, doesn't support Core Image.
And I'm aware of that too. Basically, you have to make a choice, either Core Image support, or OS 9 support. Since I already have a PMG5, I kind of have Core Image covered elsewhere. And it would be nice to have the absolute best video card that ever supported OS 9.

For me this is absolutely a toy, and I realize that it could turn into a money pit if I let it. But just thinking about the possibilities is fun, even if it's probably not worth the money.
 
On this note, what OSX PPC games do you guys recommend to push my system? I realise the 9650 is not the best GPU I could have in this machine, but it must be fairly decent for a G4?

PS: I've given up on trying to install OS9 on this unsupported machine, have tried and tried but failed to boot from a OS9 disc or drive.

PS2: And this very much would not push my system, but I've just seen that Escape from Monkey Island, which I very much enjoyed back in the day, only runs well in Classic in 10.2 - perhaps I need to install that as well :)
 
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PS2: And this very much would not push my system, but I've just seen that Escape from Monkey Island, which I very much enjoyed back in the day, only runs well in Classic in 10.2 - perhaps I need to install that as well :)
It would be great if you did that - to check if the 9650 works in 10.2 :)
 
@r6mile Well there's always Fallout 1 and 2, Civilization 2 has a Carbon patch, as does Alpha Centauri, which is kind of where they peaked for a while. Sid Meier's Pirates is a good experience that keeps on sucking me in at any quality and settings on any hardware, and oh yeah, you can play Halo where it was always meant to be played. Just expect it to maybe not run so well. Oh yeah, Escape Velocity Nova also has a Carbon patch, and that's a Mac game series that really needs to be played. As does Marathon, which I believe did get a rerelease to OSX, but that could be an open source thing? I'm a little less clear about that, tbh.

Seriously though, despite going out of my way to get a FW400 MDD just for the OS 9 support, a good 80-90% of the time, I don't even need it. So many things got carbonized, or worked ok enough in classic in the first place. And of course, there were the full on rereleases, there are a lot of those too. I'm more limited by games that want below 256 colors than anything else, as the original Sim City will never run on my MDD. But Sim City Classic runs just fine in Classic, as does Simcity 2000. Not Simcity 3000, though. I want to say Simcity 4 will work as an OSX game, but I remember it being pretty demanding, even on my PMG5 Dual 2ghz. You can play Star Control 2, an absolute classic of a DOS game, through the open source port known as The Urquan Masters, for OSX, if you're willing to dig through their older versions a little, and it turns out Star Control 3, a game no one should ever actually play, but I beat, was officially ported to Mac and works under Classic, sort of.

MDK is a game that doesn't even play nice under 10.2, and demands real OS 9 to get the proper performance, which is a shame because as weird as it is, it's a game more people should get to experience, and I was amazed to find a Mac port at all. It also has a performance meter, and in OS 9, I'm getting double the score I do in any version of 10. I just wish I knew what they were testing for.
 
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And speaking of testing, I thought I might through in a little benchmark. I haven't exactly had much of a need for Speedometer 4.02 since I stopped running Basilisk II on single core machines, but this version does have native PPC support making it perfect for my needs.
benchmarks.png

"This Machine" is the same 1.25 ghz MDD running the same test under 10.4 Classic. I can't say i fully understand the test myself, but I've always found the test useful for doing comparisons.

 
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Not to my knowledge.

Failed at the first hurdle. Burned a 10.2 CD image from Macintosh Garden. G4 refused to boot, I guess as the minimum supported OSX for the G4 is 10.2.3. Anyone know where I can find an image for 10.2.3 or later? I did some searching and came across some methods involving Target Disk Mode, but I don't have another PowerPC machine unfortunately.

EDIT: I have found this - the 10.2.3 restore discs for the FW400 2003 PowerMac. http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,3266.msg20810.html#msg20810

Do you guys think this will work?
 
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I'd grab a 10.2.7 disc set from 'the Garden' and modify it to work on your G4.


The comments even say it works unmodified on MDD 2003.


Edit - But yeah, 10.2.3 for the MDD 2003 should work as the model identifier is the same for all MDDs. According to the description, the images you found contain 10.3 though.
 
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It would be great if you did that - to check if the 9650 works in 10.2 :)

I can confirm that the Radeon 9650 works with no issues (that I can see so far) in 10.2.8 Jaguar. I installed from a 10.2.7 iMac disc (unmodified), ran the 10.2.8 updater, and everything is good!

20200808_195220.jpg
 
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