I have tried connecting an old USB Bluetooth dongle I used to use with my G4 iMac nearly 20 years ago to my Cube, but it doesn't recognise it, nothing shows up in System Profiler. It still works as my Macbook Pro can see it when connected. Is there any reason why a Bluetooth dongle wouldn't work with a Cube? I'm pretty sure the G4/700 iMac I used to have was also USB 1.1.
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USB Bluetooth Dongle for G4 Cube?
- Thread starter eddjedi
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I have had great luck with these:
- D-link DBT-120
- Belkin F8T001
The D-link works seamlessly on my G3 B&W (Tiger) which is late 90s. The Belkin works seamlessly on my G5 running Leopard but I have not tried it on other systems. Both are cheap as chips on eBay but do not support the latest and greatest BT revisions.
- D-link DBT-120
- Belkin F8T001
The D-link works seamlessly on my G3 B&W (Tiger) which is late 90s. The Belkin works seamlessly on my G5 running Leopard but I have not tried it on other systems. Both are cheap as chips on eBay but do not support the latest and greatest BT revisions.
Can I clarify this?
If you get a modern Bluetooth USB dongle (Bluetooth 5.0), say off eBay, will it work with PPC and allow (for instance) to connect to a modern Magic Keyboard?
If you get a modern Bluetooth USB dongle (Bluetooth 5.0), say off eBay, will it work with PPC and allow (for instance) to connect to a modern Magic Keyboard?
Doubt it. I vaguely remember back in the day that you needed a certain chipset in the BT dongles (Cambridge Silicon?) for it to be natively recognised, otherwise you had to have a driver.
If you get one of the dongles listed as known to work, then you might actually have a decent chance getting a modern Bluetooth keyboard to work. It's anecdotal but I've read good reports of people being able to use fairly modern Bluetooth peripherals on old versions of BT. Just don't expect to have good audio.
But there's basically no way a new dongle would work in Tiger or Leopard. You might have better luck with something like Void Linux, though.
Not to my knowledge. Chances are you will get a modern Bluetooth dongle to work with a modern macOS but I don't think it would be compatible with older OS X version, let alone PowerPC. As @weckart pointed out, the dongles need to have a certain chip inside and the one I mentioned (LogiLink BT0015) has the "Cambridge Silicon Radio" built in which works natively in Tiger and Leopard (i.e. without any additional drivers, plug and play). Whether or not you can use modern peripherals with it I can't say for sure but I will test an Arc Mouse that requires BT4 the next time I use my TiBook.