My new old iMac G3!

[fabiettomac]

i've bought recently a blue iMac G3, here's the specs:

PowerPC G3 500mhz
Ram upgraded to 1GB
Hard Disk upgraded to 120GB (i think that's the maximum capacity supported)
Video Board Ati Rage Pro 128, 16MB
Unfortunatly the speakers are broken, i mean there is sound but the foam around the small woofer is damaged and it doesn't sound like it should. very sorry for this. Anyway, i've hooked up a pair of Empire R1000 (i think they're an italian rebrand of some speakers), an outstanding pair of desktop speakers.


When i bought it (for 25€, less than 25$) it has Mac OS 10.4 preinstalled, i didn't bother to reinstall anything, just wiped out the old user account and created a new one.

I've installed so far:

Vox
Perian (vlc was too buggy, version 0.8.6 keep crashing and newer versions were too heavy to manage. quicktime is just fine)
Bean
Appcleaner
The Unarchiver
Camino (safari was doing his job but it was way too slow. camino is not exactly flying (and i should forgot facebook and youtube and everything flash based) but it works. i'm writing from it, right now)

wich is, more or less, the same software that i use on my Air 2011

questions:
is there a more lightweight browser than camino? some sort of chrome for ppc? on this machine i've tride firefox and tenfourfox but they're slow.

Gaming:
Fruit of Dojo ports of Quake and Quake II (and mission packs), they rock at 60FPS on this beast.
PRBoom, an engine for doom, the only that works, i've tried a lot of versions of zDoom (my personal favourite) but they keep crashing.. is there a version of zdoom that works on this machine?
Starcraft, downloaded installer from the blizzard website after registering the cd codes on battle.net but there is no sound and it crashes on tutorial (!!), downloading a patch right now
ScummVM (still not tried but i think it works)
Alien VS. Predator Gold (working but no sound, ****)

I've noticed that in every OpenGL game the brightness is very very low, even pushing it all up from the game itself, is there a workaround for this?


So far i'm satisfied from this little machine, apart from the browsing experience, very slow, and some minor hiccups in tiger due to the graphics effects of the OS (i've already disabled dashboard, keeping spotlight for launching programs)

Suggestions?
Is there some good software that i'm missing?
Some good games for OSX? (is there a version of unreal for tiger?)

I'm thinkig of a dualboot OSX-OS9 but is this a reasonable thing? there are video players and modern browsers (i've heard of classilla) for OS9?


thanks!

 

[LeoTheLion89]

Facebook will work fine on that G3 Facebook will work with no flash installed at all to watch YouTube install a program called MacTubes set it to use the QuickTime as the player and ull be fine.

 

[rugbygangster]

is there a more lightweight browser than camino? some sort of chrome for ppc? on this machine i've tride firefox and tenfourfox but they're slow.

Have you tried Opera 10.10 or Stainless?

 

[fabiettomac]

Facebook will work fine on that G3 Facebook will work with no flash installed at all to watch YouTube install a program called MacTubes set it to use the QuickTime as the player and ull be fine.

ok, technically i can access facebook but pratically it's unusable, maybe there is something wrong with the mac itself, to me it seems everything is working well. problem is when i browse the internet the cpu is saturated by the browser taks, it happens with safari and with camino, too.

 

[LeoTheLion89]

ok, technically i can access facebook but pratically it's unusable, maybe there is something wrong with the mac itself, to me it seems everything is working well. problem is when i browse the internet the cpu is saturated by the browser taks, it happens with safari and with camino, too.

well it is only 500MHz with RAM Maxed have u tried iCab?

 

[Intell]

You can repair the speakers by putting one or two light coats of rubber cement on the speaker foam. While being careful not to get any on the silver inner cone.

Dual booting it with Mac OS 9 shouldn't be too hard. You just have to make sure the hard disk has the Mac OS 9 drivers installed and you have a compatible Mac OS 9 installer disc for it. To check for the OS 9 drivers, open Disk Utility. Select the drive and go to the Partition tab. You'll see a check box labeled "OS 9 Drivers". If it is checked, then they are installed. The only way to install them is to reformat the entire drive as the drivers are simply special partitions at the beginning of the partition table.

 

[LeoTheLion89]

You can repair the speakers by putting one or two light coats of rubber cement on the speaker foam. While being careful not to get any on the silver inner cone.

Dual booting it with Mac OS 9 shouldn't be too hard. You just have to make sure the hard disk has the Mac OS 9 drivers installed and you have a compatible Mac OS 9 installer disc for it. To check for the OS 9 drivers, open Disk Utility. Select the drive and go to the Partition tab. You'll see a check box labeled "OS 9 Drivers". If it is checked, then they are installed. The only way to install them is to reformat the entire drive as the drivers are simply special partitions at the beginning of the partition table.

wouldnt OS 9 already have the drivers?

 

[Intell]

Read my post. The drivers are a set of hidden partitions are the start of the hard drive. They would exist on the OS 9 cd, but not the hard drive.

 

[LeoTheLion89]

Read my post. The drivers are a set of hidden partitions are the start of the hard drive. They would exist on the OS 9 cd, but not the hard drive.

i know that i am meaning cant u just put the OS 9 CD in and install it without the OS 9 Drivers?

 

[Intell]

You can install it, but it won't boot. That is if the installer will even let you install it onto that drive.

 

[92WardSenatorFE]

Regarding internet, you have to eventually stop and realize this machine is at least a decade old, if not older. Even if that doesn't sound that old to you, in computer terms, that's almost ancient. I know saying that doesn't help you much, but that's one of the facts you will have to face when it comes to web browsing and iMac G3's. I have an iBook G3 clocked at 500MHz myself and while its a very good machine, there are just certain websites I don't even bother trying to look at on it.

As far as web browsers go, Camino might be your best bet if Firefox and TenFourFox aren't working for you. I haven't experimented with any other browsers outside of that, but Camino always worked good on the lowered spec'd Mac systems I used it with. If you do install OS 9, Classilla is a good browser, but by no means, it's not a 100% up to date browser. Classilla is focused on making OS 9 work better with mobile websites, rather than full websites that you'd normally browse.

I hope that helps you out some.

 

[Imixmuan]

Omniweb

is the nearest thing to a modern webkit browser like Chrome on a G3. Stainless is leopard only. Omniweb is up to date or at least reasonably so. There is another browser called Demeter which is faster but unstable...there is also Nagara browser, I find it flaky though. A G3 optimized build for Camino also exists. Google is your friend.

On a G3 you can't reasonably expect any youtube playback above 240p. Those are the facts. You can always download a 360p video and view in VLC, Niceplayer, Quicktime etc. Mactubes needs a G4 in my humble experience.

I think Facebook is fracking evil and won't go near it, so no advice there.

Also...mintPPC is another solid choice for an old G3. Here is a video of the performance you can expect if you max out the ram (rkmugen has a 600 mhz Snow imac, so a tad faster than yours).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3wfvh6CdP8

 

[Ariii]

There's three sites which required me to use the mobile version: FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube, out of what I do. A 500 MHz G3 (Assuming you're not doing anything else) shouldn't lag on YouTube if you use the mobile version. As long as you don't do any online gaming or watch a lot of videos from blogs/news sites, uninstall Flash. It's badly coded enough already, and the
Mac version of Flash is worse, so a 500 MHz G3 can't handle it well.*iCab is a bit unstable for web browsing, partly because of the way it changes its indentity. Midori was really (Almost completely) a perfect solution, but no Mac version . If you would've just used Classic and wouldn't have booted natively into MacOS 9, you could probably just drag the system folder onto your machine and then it could be set up with Classic Environment.

 

[LeoTheLion89]

is the nearest thing to a modern webkit browser like Chrome on a G3. Stainless is leopard only. Omniweb is up to date or at least reasonably so. There is another browser called Demeter which is faster but unstable...there is also Nagara browser, I find it flaky though. A G3 optimized build for Camino also exists. Google is your friend.

On a G3 you can't reasonably expect any youtube playback above 240p. Those are the facts. You can always download a 360p video and view in VLC, Niceplayer, Quicktime etc. Mactubes needs a G4 in my humble experience.

I think Facebook is fracking evil and won't go near it, so no advice there.

Also...mintPPC is another solid choice for an old G3. Here is a video of the performance you can expect if you max out the ram (rkmugen has a 600 mhz Snow imac, so a tad faster than yours).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3wfvh6CdP8

theres a alternative to MacTubes called YouView but i know nothing about it

----------

Regarding internet, you have to eventually stop and realize this machine is at least a decade old, if not older. Even if that doesn't sound that old to you, in computer terms, that's almost ancient. I know saying that doesn't help you much, but that's one of the facts you will have to face when it comes to web browsing and iMac G3's. I have an iBook G3 clocked at 500MHz myself and while its a very good machine, there are just certain websites I don't even bother trying to look at on it.

As far as web browsers go, Camino might be your best bet if Firefox and TenFourFox aren't working for you. I haven't experimented with any other browsers outside of that, but Camino always worked good on the lowered spec'd Mac systems I used it with. If you do install OS 9, Classilla is a good browser, but by no means, it's not a 100% up to date browser. Classilla is focused on making OS 9 work better with mobile websites, rather than full websites that you'd normally browse.

I hope that helps you out some.

this is the case with Windows as well try browsing the internet on a 33MHz IBM Windows 95 machines takes like 45 mins for a page to load!

 

[DarioPhantom]

i've bought recently a blue iMac G3, here's the specs:

PowerPC G3 500mhz
Ram upgraded to 1GB
Hard Disk upgraded to 120GB (i think that's the maximum capacity supported)
Video Board Ati Rage Pro 128, 16MB
Unfortunatly the speakers are broken, i mean there is sound but the foam around the small woofer is damaged and it doesn't sound like it should. very sorry for this. Anyway, i've hooked up a pair of Empire R1000 (i think they're an italian rebrand of some speakers), an outstanding pair of desktop speakers.


When i bought it (for 25€, less than 25$) it has Mac OS 10.4 preinstalled, i didn't bother to reinstall anything, just wiped out the old user account and created a new one.

I've installed so far:

Vox
Perian (vlc was too buggy, version 0.8.6 keep crashing and newer versions were too heavy to manage. quicktime is just fine)
Bean
Appcleaner
The Unarchiver
Camino (safari was doing his job but it was way too slow. camino is not exactly flying (and i should forgot facebook and youtube and everything flash based) but it works. i'm writing from it, right now)

wich is, more or less, the same software that i use on my Air 2011

questions:
is there a more lightweight browser than camino? some sort of chrome for ppc? on this machine i've tride firefox and tenfourfox but they're slow.

Gaming:
Fruit of Dojo ports of Quake and Quake II (and mission packs), they rock at 60FPS on this beast.
PRBoom, an engine for doom, the only that works, i've tried a lot of versions of zDoom (my personal favourite) but they keep crashing.. is there a version of zdoom that works on this machine?
Starcraft, downloaded installer from the blizzard website after registering the cd codes on battle.net but there is no sound and it crashes on tutorial (!!), downloading a patch right now
ScummVM (still not tried but i think it works)
Alien VS. Predator Gold (working but no sound, ****)

I've noticed that in every OpenGL game the brightness is very very low, even pushing it all up from the game itself, is there a workaround for this?


So far i'm satisfied from this little machine, apart from the browsing experience, very slow, and some minor hiccups in tiger due to the graphics effects of the OS (i've already disabled dashboard, keeping spotlight for launching programs)

Suggestions?
Is there some good software that i'm missing?
Some good games for OSX? (is there a version of unreal for tiger?)

I'm thinkig of a dualboot OSX-OS9 but is this a reasonable thing? there are video players and modern browsers (i've heard of classilla) for OS9?


thanks!

As far as improving performance, I recommend getting an app called 'Shadowkiller'. It eliminates the shadows around windows. It looks really odd at first, but your machine will definitely have a noticeable increase in speed.

A faster web browser for a PPC is Sunrise. Any version below 1.8.5 should work. It runs pretty swiftly, but there's been a time or two where it slows down to a halt (then again, I have a 400mhz machine and I run iTunes in the background often.) Currently, I'm using the G3 optimized build for Camino and it's probably not the fastest browser but it's consistent (meaning it runs smoothly with another application running in the background).

A game that runs pretty good for me is Diablo II or Escape Velocity Nova. There aren't free, but they are great games and I have noticed little to no hiccup with them.

My little G3 can also dualboot to OS9. But I don't really use it too much, unless I want to play an older game or travel back in time (not literally). Classilla works like a charm but it's recognized as a mobile browser while visiting sites.

 

[fabiettomac]

Have you tried Opera 10.10 or Stainless?

no opera and no stainless for now. but i'll try, eventually. camino is not painfully slow, it gets the work done, but i'd prefer a little more speed.

You can repair the speakers by putting one or two light coats of rubber cement on the speaker foam. While being careful not to get any on the silver inner cone.

Dual booting it with Mac OS 9 shouldn't be too hard. You just have to make sure the hard disk has the Mac OS 9 drivers installed and you have a compatible Mac OS 9 installer disc for it. To check for the OS 9 drivers, open Disk Utility. Select the drive and go to the Partition tab. You'll see a check box labeled "OS 9 Drivers". If it is checked, then they are installed. The only way to install them is to reformat the entire drive as the drivers are simply special partitions at the beginning of the partition table.

thanks for the suggestion for repairing the speakers,
i don't know if there is an OS9 partition on the disk, but i think not (tomorrow i'll check via disk utility), i've cloned the original imac hard disk (entire disk, not only the partition) to a 120gb maxtor, but i don't remember if there was any "os9 drivers" partition. what if i don't have it?

Regarding internet, you have to eventually stop and realize this machine is at least a decade old, if not older. Even if that doesn't sound that old to you, in computer terms, that's almost ancient. I know saying that doesn't help you much, but that's one of the facts you will have to face when it comes to web browsing and iMac G3's. I have an iBook G3 clocked at 500MHz myself and while its a very good machine, there are just certain websites I don't even bother trying to look at on it.

As far as web browsers go, Camino might be your best bet if Firefox and TenFourFox aren't working for you. I haven't experimented with any other browsers outside of that, but Camino always worked good on the lowered spec'd Mac systems I used it with. If you do install OS 9, Classilla is a good browser, but by no means, it's not a 100% up to date browser. Classilla is focused on making OS 9 work better with mobile websites, rather than full websites that you'd normally browse.

I hope that helps you out some.

i don't think it's completely unusable on the internet, but for sure i can't browse facebook smoothly. but this is a problem even on my iphone, sometimes.. keep in mind that this computer is on occasional browsing on the weekend. i've always my air with me, and i can use it for heavy task.

There's three sites which required me to use the mobile version: FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube, out of what I do. A 500 MHz G3 (Assuming you're not doing anything else) shouldn't lag on YouTube if you use the mobile version. As long as you don't do any online gaming or watch a lot of videos from blogs/news sites, uninstall Flash. It's badly coded enough already, and the
Mac version of Flash is worse, so a 500 MHz G3 can't handle it well.*iCab is a bit unstable for web browsing, partly because of the way it changes its indentity. Midori was really (Almost completely) a perfect solution, but no Mac version . If you would've just used Classic and wouldn't have booted natively into MacOS 9, you could probably just drag the system folder onto your machine and then it could be set up with Classic Environment.

i'll check the mobile versions of facebook and youtube. i've already uninstalled flash and i've noted a speed gain in safari (first i've tried with click2flash, then i've uninstalled completely flash from my system with the adobe uninstaller)

in the next weekend maybe i'll try sunrise browser and shadowkiller with an eye on the performance. one thing that could speed up things a little is the capacity of disabling the tiger animation effects (for example, in system preferences if you select an item the icons will "fade out" and you'll be bringed to that item, or when you save a file a popup will fade in (ok, not exactly fading, i don't know the exact term in english but i'm sure you've understood)). maybe onyx or something similar can help?

 

[fabiettomac]

(edited double message)

i have a few problems:

opengl and brightness: it seems that every game that uses opengl is way too dark. is there a way to fix this? i've tried to recalibrate my monitor and setting the gamma, but i didn't worked.

no audio in blizzard games: i'm in search for a fix, for now diablo II and starcraft works ok but without audio. i've founded some threads with similar problems, suggesting a fix in midi audio setup, but it doesn't seem to work

dosbox: i've tried to edit the config file, but it's still too slow. is dosbox too much for my imac?