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What have you done with a PowerPC today?

Tried to optimize my desktop setup. Over on the Hi-Res to my right, I have a whole load of programs. probably six, on screen at once comfortably (Leopard WebKit isn't even breaking a sweat, it's still nice and smooth), which has been doing a lot to finally convert me to widescreens (3:2 in specific). I'm amazed I'm able to do as much of it as I have on this iBook G4 considering it's a bog-standard 14.1" 1024x768 panel. I really like this setup, though, I think I'll start to use it everyday. Quick notepad access and quick calculator use (which I use surprisingly often) is very, very nice, especially when they don't take that much room away from the web browser.
Picture 39.png​
 
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lepidotós said:
Tried to optimize my desktop setup. Over on the Hi-Res to my right, I have a whole load of programs. probably six, on screen at once comfortably (Leopard WebKit isn't even breaking a sweat, it's still nice and smooth), which has been doing a lot to finally convert me to widescreens (3:2 in specific). I'm amazed I'm able to do as much of it as I have on this iBook G4 considering it's a bog-standard 14.1" 1024x768 panel. I really like this setup, though, I think I'll start to use it everyday. Quick notepad access and quick calculator use (which I use surprisingly often) is very, very nice, especially when they don't take that much room away from the web browser.
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How ?? Did you get darkmode under PowerPC? That is so radically kewl !
 
Got it ! Thanks man ! Good to have dark mode on a PowerPC Mac ! Thanks for your help. I am going to try Netscape composer to write a blog and test website, just so I can get back into web design.
 
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Not that I know of, at least not yet. Maybe I might get around to it to give my Pi 4 a reason to be hanging around in my possession. At least not the forums, you can read the MacRumors homepage in Frogfind. There's Mac OS 9 Lives and System 7 Today, but those are pretty specialized.​
 
lepidotós said:
I've been wanting to turn my blue-and-white Ultra 64 into a blue-and-black with a Daiei Hawks bottom.​
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Thanks!

Had my original, cantankerous Rev.1 B&W since new and acquired 3 more in a bulk purchase. Now have 3 working and 1 parts machine. All Rev.2 boards now!

Tired of the age-old scuffs, scratches and gouges in the B&W side panels and broken / cracked handles and feet so… lightly sandblasted side panels and some clear replacement handles & feet from MDDs to get that original milky-white matte finish of the original B&W. Replaced some of the sandblasted handles & feet on the #2 machine and thought… why not just paint the 3rd machine?

Biggest problem for me (as usual) was leaving it alone long enough to adequately cure the paint before reassembly. And KRYLON Hammered Black spray paint helps to reduce any small imperfections (and handling marks) of the finished bits. Might consider it for your Ultra 64?

*Used Satin Black on the handles and feet.😉
 
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Wild Hare said:
Finally completed the conversion of a B&W G3 to a B&B G3.
(I know, blasphemy to some.)😉

Text that accompanies these images:
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How stable is your G3 with all RAM slots filled? I just pulled my B&W G3 out of storage as well and it's super-tempermental, the only way I can get it to run stable is to run with a single stick of RAM in the first slot. Just fresh-installed 9.0.4 and now installing 10.2 on top of that since I already have plenty of Tiger machines:

IMG_0779 (1).jpg

The ThinkPad (running macOS) is using Internet Sharing to share the Wi-Fi connection over ethernet to the G3 so I can download stuff from the garden.

Also, what's the speaker volume on yours like? My built-in speaker works, but it's very quiet even at maximum volume. Not sure if that's a hardware problem with the speaker or if they were just like that from the factory.
 
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ahurst said:
How stable is your G3 with all RAM slots filled? I just pulled my B&W G3 out of storage as well and it's super-tempermental, the only way I can get it to run stable is to run with a single stick of RAM in the first slot. Just fresh-installed 9.0.4 and now installing 10.2 on top of that since I already have plenty of Tiger machines:
Also, what's the speaker volume on yours like? My built-in speaker works, but it's very quiet even at maximum volume. Not sure if that's a hardware problem with the speaker or if they were just like that from the factory.
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Very nice looking B&W you have there.

All three of the B&W’s here (including the recent B&B variant) run rock solid stable with all RAM slots filled. And the B&B is the only one running mis-matched PC100 and PC133 sticks. The other two have matched sets of RAM. You might try removing and re-seating each stick of additional RAM one at a time. Over time, stored machines can lose good contact from oxidation, etcetera. Was it stored long and under what climate conditions?

And is there a chance that you may have a Rev.1 motherboard in yours? I painfully remember the always super-temperamental behavior of the Rev.1 board in the B&Ws. Check your CMD chip.

Rev.1&2.png


There’s a source down in Houston Texas now selling Rev.2 boards fairly cheap…
*Make certain to specify a Rev.2 - if & when purchasing.
(Not my listing.)

I did have problems with speaker distortion in one of mine but I swapped-in another speaker. However the B&B does have that very quiet, lower volume… compared to the other two - even when set at max volume. And the same quiet under OS 9, Panther & Tiger. I might try another speaker and get back to you if there’s any news / improvement.

Oh, and your various OS installs on separate partitions? (Best practice.)
1 HD or more inside?
 
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Wild Hare said:
Very nice looking B&W you have there.

All three of the B&W’s here (including the recent B&B variant) run rock solid stable with all RAM slots filled. And the B&B is the only one running mis-matched PC100 and PC133 sticks. The other two have matched sets of RAM. You might try removing and re-seating each stick of additional RAM one at a time. Over time, stored machines can lose good contact from oxidation, etcetera. Was it stored long and under what climate conditions?

And is there a chance that you may have a Rev.1 motherboard in yours? I painfully remember the always super-temperamental behavior of the Rev.1 board in the B&Ws. Check your CMD chip.
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Thanks! I got it from a store room in a climate-controlled university lab building (one of the department admins knows I'm an old mac nerd so I got first dibs on ewaste when they were clearing out old equipment), so it *should* be good for corrosion, but I'll try popping/replacing the RAM a few times to see if that improves the contact at all.

Unfortunately mine is indeed the infamous Rev. 1 board, and the seller you linked doesn't ship to Canada so finding a replacement isn't trivial (also my old mac budget is currently set aside for a Pismo PRAM battery rebuild and a BlueSCSI). I guess I'll just have to be delicate with it going forward 🙂

Interesting to hear the speaker issue only affects some B&Ws. I wonder what's causing it?

As for storage, I only just started tinkering with this one so it's just got a single crunchy Quantum Fireball 13.6 GB IDE drive. If I get my hands on a spare IDE drive in good shape I might make it a dual-drive machine: one of the reasons I always wanted a B&W was to play around with the early OSX betas and previews, but I'd like to keep that on a separate drive from OS9/OSX.
 
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barracuda156 said:
Looks like I just got Haskell onto PowerPC: ghc 7.6.3 should be enough to build modern versions (provided it is fully functional, I have only tested helloworld.hs now).

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nice that you have a Powermac G5 Quad. It is not often to see one ! I have the same Powermac G5 Quad 🙂 I use my Powermac G5 Quad for my Work (most of the Time for Word and PowerPoint) But also i use the Browser (TenFourfox) Today i have done an application for my cousin on a really new website. I like how the Powermac G5 is almost so fast for webbrowsing . The Computer is 17 Years old and still perfect for daily things 🙂
How your Powermac g5 is doing? Did you change the liquid in your Liquid Fueling system?
 
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ahurst said:
Thanks! I got it from a store room in a climate-controlled university lab building (one of the department admins knows I'm an old mac nerd so I got first dibs on ewaste when they were clearing out old equipment), so it *should* be good for corrosion, but I'll try popping/replacing the RAM a few times to see if that improves the contact at all.

Unfortunately mine is indeed the infamous Rev. 1 board, and the seller you linked doesn't ship to Canada so finding a replacement isn't trivial (also my old mac budget is currently set aside for a Pismo PRAM battery rebuild and a BlueSCSI). I guess I'll just have to be delicate with it going forward 🙂

Interesting to hear the speaker issue only affects some B&Ws. I wonder what's causing it?

As for storage, I only just started tinkering with this one so it's just got a single crunchy Quantum Fireball 13.6 GB IDE drive. If I get my hands on a spare IDE drive in good shape I might make it a dual-drive machine: one of the reasons I always wanted a B&W was to play around with the early OSX betas and previews, but I'd like to keep that on a separate drive from OS9/OSX.
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A B&W G3 considered “ewaste”? (Not at this here ranch.)

Corrosion may not be evident on topside of that mobo. I’ve found surprises on the backsides of many G3-G4 Mac mobos. (Not a pleasant find.) BUT quite nice that you got yours from Uni at that "cost” and from under those storage conditions.

Hopefully RAM stick re-seats will help. A cotton swab with 91% isopropyl alcohol rubbed over all the RAM stick contacts can sometimes remedy the problem. Have you tested / swapped the RAM with that other Mac in your pic? Is this possible?

Oooooh, Rev.1 board. (Sorry ‘bout the no-Canada shipping.)

Think you might be restricted to one HD in the Rev.1. The original Rev.1 here was finally reformatted to a two-partitioned single HD to accommodate OS 9 on one partition and OS X on the other. This, long after Apple’s initial insistence that it was just peachy to install the new OS X with OS 9 - right on the same non-partitioned single HD.

On a Rev.1 B&W?
Apple, you surely jested way back then. But maybe it was all the nefarious Rev.1 board CMD controller?

Just set up the B&B to test sound & after I plugged back into power, had a freeze @ boot, rebooted and zapped PRAM. Then adjusted sound panel to max & all’s now okay. Try this, or maybe reset PMU?

Running OS 9.2.2 from MacOS9Lives here - along with Panther & Tiger
AND the sound is now as loud as the other B&Ws.😉

SOUND.png
 
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Wild Hare said:
A B&W G3 considered “ewaste”? (Not at this here ranch.)
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You'd be surprised the kind of goodies I've saved from the trash in that department. A Blueberry iMac G3 that'd been upgraded with an 80 GB HDD, a SCSI Apple colour scanner, a bootable TechTool firewire pen drive, some eMacs I gave to a friend...
Wild Hare said:
Corrosion may not be evident on topside of that mobo. I’ve found surprises on the backsides of many G3-G4 Mac mobos. (Not a pleasant find.) BUT quite nice that you got yours from Uni at that "cost” and from under those storage conditions.
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Will have to check for that. I've found unexpected corrosion hidden in other electronics before and it's never a fun discovery.
Wild Hare said:
Hopefully RAM stick re-seats will help. A cotton swab with 91% isopropyl alcohol rubbed over all the RAM stick contacts can sometimes remedy the problem. Have you tested / swapped the RAM with that other Mac in your pic? Is this possible?
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I spent a good chunk of the past few hours testing every RAM module individually using TechTool Pro 3 and Gauge Pro, and they all checked out individually, so I started putting them back in one-by-one and now it works! I ran a full TechTool RAM battery with all 512 MB installed and it passed without issue. I guess it must have been the contacts.

Oh, and the speaker's working at full volume again! Playing around in the sound control panel a bit and it suddenly jumped up to a reasonable volume. Of course, it's now obvious that the speaker is blown and sounds pretty distorted, but progress nonetheless!
 
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Thought my speaker was blown too, with the amount of rattle & distortion. But really not a great mount for the speaker - it’s dependent upon the magnet fitting snug within that opening to “grasp” it in position. Then you have the blue plastic housing that simply clips into the metal front.

Wondered why Apple placed that gray foam rubber circle over the front speaker holes on the metal, behind the front bezel? Vibration dampening? After all these years, likely some rigidity of the mount’s been lost. A small amount of pliable rubber cement between the blue plastic housing and the front metal AND a bit to keep the speaker firmly stuck to the plastic housing might be an improvement.

BUT, the wire leads running into the housing can also rattle. I twisted the two wires a bit more and pushed a little slack into the housing and now no more distortion. Maybe experiment with pulling or pushing those wires into and out of that plastic shroud. And careful with that blue plastic clip (missing in these images).

Surely there’s now a better replacement speaker available that could affix to the backside of the front metal?
8Ω 2W

IN.pngOUT.png
 
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Mercedes33 said:
nice that you have a Powermac G5 Quad. It is not often to see one ! I have the same Powermac G5 Quad 🙂 I use my Powermac G5 Quad for my Work (most of the Time for Word and PowerPoint) But also i use the Browser (TenFourfox) Today i have done an application for my cousin on a really new website. I like how the Powermac G5 is almost so fast for webbrowsing . The Computer is 17 Years old and still perfect for daily things 🙂
How your Powermac g5 is doing? Did you change the liquid in your Liquid Fueling system?
Click to expand...
So far LCS seems to be okay. I replaced GPU with X1900 and put an SSD as a boot drive.
 
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Mercedes33 said:
I installed an Samsung SSD EVO 860 im my Powermac G5 next I search vor the Nvidia Quadro GPU with 512 mb because I play often games on my Powermac g5 Quad and the 125 mb Nvidia GPU is a little bit Weak for Halo and Battlefield 1942
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Very nice!!! Hoping you can find that GPU so you can be the king at LAN parties
 
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Yesterday and early this morning I watched some documentaries on YouTube, browser Wikipedia using Links2 and started a Macromedia Dreamweaver project using photoshop 7 to make the graphics. Also spent a good part of the day just playing Zuma but we don’t talk about that
 
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ahurst said:
You'd be surprised ... a bootable TechTool firewire pen drive...
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Wow, such a nice score! Those 1gb TTP flashdrives were like $230+ USD when new. I've been searching far and wide for one of those but you'd have better luck finding a raindbow unicorn 😀

Thanks for keeping it out of landfill. I suspect alot of those went into the ground as FW faded and the transition to Intel occurred. Super cool find & piece of mac kit :apple:
 
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Wild Hare said:
Finally completed the conversion of a B&W G3 to a B&B G3.
(I know, blasphemy to some.)😉

Text that accompanies these images:

View attachment 1961575View attachment 1961576View attachment 1961577View attachment 1961578View attachment 1961579View attachment 1961580
Click to expand...
Very nice.

zen.state (now @timidpimpin) had a G4 similar to your G3, but the paint was inverted. It was referred to as the G4 Stormtrooper and he had also altered his keyboard to have both black and white keys.

It's in one of the pics in this post (thread: Post Your PowerPC Setup).

forums.macrumors.com

Post Your PowerPC Setup

Some older setup pics I found. All are from 2006. The painted one is the first (not the current one I have) painted case I did. Used spray paint on this one and car paint on the one in my sig. This pic is from 2005. Naked B&W G3 that later got a G4 600MHz upgrade and a Sawtooth...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com
 
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barracuda156 said:
Looks like I just got Haskell onto PowerPC: ghc 7.6.3 should be enough to build modern versions (provided it is fully functional, I have only tested helloworld.hs now).

View attachment 1961150
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UPD. Well, nothing turn out to be easy LOL, I cannot build 7.8.4 using 7.6.2 or 7.6.3. Working on that at the moment.

If we happen to have Haskell gurus here, I will really appreciate your help.
 
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