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I was hoping to get the beast of a PowerMac G4 Mirror Door setup complete by the end of this month for Marcintosh, but sadly nope. I wanted to have the fastest GPU that is supported in Mac OS 9, a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 (technically, it's the Quadro 4 900 XGL with some rom mods, but I haven't had luck on that one either as someone did a snipe bid at the last minute). I found one and overpaid ($200 on Ebay) and flash it to find out that it was defective. Not only the games crashed, it kernel panic with some lovely graphical artifacts.

When I flashed the original ROM back and test it in my custom build Pentium III retro gaming computer, and it showed graphical artifacts, but didn't fail spectucally. It's a shame since I want one of these cards since they are the holy grail for Mac OS 9 gaming and OS X.Not the fastest card in Mac OS X, but I needed the Mac OS 9 support. I am stuck with a Radeon 9000 Pro, which I am not satisfied with the performance at all. I ordered a Radeon 8500, but I still want a Geforce 4 Ti 4600, but not at a ridiculous price and surely not for $1273. At that point, I may as well get a scalped RTX 3xxx series card. I hope to probably source one out from the vintage Mac/computing community, hopefully not at ridiculous EBay prices. I just never going to be satisfied with a lowly Radeon 9000 Pro card. Even the Radeon 8500, the fastest ATI card on Mac OS 9 is outclassed by the Geforce 4 Ti 4600.
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With that, this is my current setup. The M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI sound card caused issues with Mac OS X Tiger and strange sound issues in Mac OS 9, so I got the Firewire Audiophile one, which works perfectly both on Tiger and Mac OS 9. Now I can listen to quality Hi-res/Lossless Japanese music on my Mac.
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Also, there is my Pentium III build. I decided to go with the Silverstone case since it gives the classic Desktop look from the 90s. Yes, I like the idea of building a reverse sleeper build. The funny thing is that I had a hard time sourcing a good Slot 1 motherboard that supports the Pentium III processor. I don't want to go with the Pentium 4 since it's a terrible processor and the newer Pentium III motherboards don't have ISA slots if I want to put in a AWE64 or something. I eventually bought a old stock new SE440BX2 and it works perfectly. It has a 700 MHz Pentium III processor, 512 MB of RAM, a Radeon 9000 Pro (ugh, the Radeon 9000 Pro is very disappointing), Gigabit Ethernet and a M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card, better than any Sound Blaster. It's running on a 30 GB hard drive since the CF to IDE adapter doesn't work due to the IDE controller, but I have a PCI ATA controller that will fix that on order. It runs most early 2000 games fine. Anything later can be run in my virtualized gaming PC via VMWare Horizon/Jump Desktop.
i picked mine up from usedmac. i think i paid with shipping is around $300USD (thats including shipping to Canada)
 
@chikorita157
Excuse my offtopic question, but do you know Japanese?
Yes, been doing so since 2011 teaching myself through textbooks. I study it mostly so I can read stuff in Japanese, mostly video games and manga.
i picked mine up from usedmac. i think i paid with shipping is around $300USD (thats including shipping to Canada)
I tried ordering a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 from them and they cancelled my order as they don't have any in stock.
 
I tried ordering a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 from them and they cancelled my order as they don't have any in stock.
interesting, since i got mine last month and they told me they had several in stock. hence why i have one in my QS that will eventually go into my MDD once i get a new PSU for it
 
interesting, since i got mine last month and they told me they had several in stock. hence why i have one in my QS that will eventually go into my MDD once i get a new PSU for it
I think I tried to order mine on Mar 8, and they said they don't have any stock Maybe several only means a few.. However, that doesn't matter as I managed to buy a official Mac version of the Geforce 4 Ti 4600 for a bit less than what Usedmac sell them for, including shipping. I know it works since the seller from a vintage Mac community tested it and shared photos before I paid for it. Still, I wish they update their stock instead of saying it's in stock.

Either way, I am happy to have a beast of a video card that works in Mac OS 9. Now, my early 2000s vintage gaming computers are now complete. (I ended up installing the Radeon 8500 in the Pentium III reverse sleeper build and it runs all the games from the early 2000s well at 1024x768 at high settings. I think it's on par or even faster than the original XBox, which had a 733 MHz Pentium III and a Geforce 3 running a custom version of Windows 2000). If you are curious, my retro PC build consists of a 700 MHz Slot 1 Coppermine Pentium III on an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard, 512 MB of SDRAM, 64 GB Sandisk Extreme CF Card, ATI Radeon 8500 64 MB, and a M-Audio Audiophile 2496 for sound.
 
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@pipetogrep Even after having fully aged, I prefer its brightness level over the newer aluminum ACDs. Max brightness is bright enough to see in broad daylight, and lowest brightness is accommodating to an otherwise dark environment, and goes even lower than the newer ones.

I wouldn't get a 20" now, though. I didn't know that most of them (mine included) have a partially failed backlight where the bottom-half of the screen is tinted yellow, the status LED won't stop blinking, and I've just noticed subtle green patches on mine near the bottom edge.

I'm told the 17" is usually more reliable, as well as less expensive, and more plentiful. Plus is easier on the GPU.
 
@pipetogrep Even after having fully aged, I prefer its brightness level over the newer aluminum ACDs. Max brightness is bright enough to see in broad daylight, and lowest brightness is accommodating to an otherwise dark environment, and goes even lower than the newer ones.

I wouldn't get a 20" now, though. I didn't know that most of them (mine included) have a partially failed backlight where the bottom-half of the screen is tinted yellow, the status LED won't stop blinking, and I've just noticed subtle green patches on mine near the bottom edge.

I'm told the 17" is usually more reliable, as well as less expensive, and more plentiful. Plus is easier on the GPU.
Interesting. I was considering getting the 22" model.
 
@pipetogrep Even after having fully aged, I prefer its brightness level over the newer aluminum ACDs. Max brightness is bright enough to see in broad daylight, and lowest brightness is accommodating to an otherwise dark environment, and goes even lower than the newer ones.

I wouldn't get a 20" now, though. I didn't know that most of them (mine included) have a partially failed backlight where the bottom-half of the screen is tinted yellow, the status LED won't stop blinking, and I've just noticed subtle green patches on mine near the bottom edge.

I'm told the 17" is usually more reliable, as well as less expensive, and more plentiful. Plus is easier on the GPU.
my 23" 1920x1200 display has that backlight issue, on top of a broken stand. it probably just needs to be tossed because i don't imagine the backlight is cheap to fix, nor is the stand unfortunately.
 
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@originaldotexe The stand is fixable through several unofficial means. The backlight however, you'd be right about, at least to my knowledge.

Sell it before tossing it though.
 
VLC I read has the ability to play blu-ray.. Leopard of course since Snow Leopard won't run on it.
How do you mount a Blu-Ray on-to EIDE? not sure they produced that (only external....) was thinking of Upgrading DVD-RW on G5... I figured instead of buying Blu-ray I just searching for an cheap external drive.... I use mostly ext-hdds and save movies on-to DVDs.....
 
How do you mount a Blu-Ray on-to EIDE? not sure they produced that (only external....) was thinking of Upgrading DVD-RW on G5... I figured instead of buying Blu-ray I just searching for an cheap external drive.... I use mostly ext-hdds and save movies on-to DVDs.....
Get an cheap bluray rom and sata to ide adapter that would work i guess. Oh i didnt read the question fully sorry lad
 
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I came to the Mac back in 1994 when I bought a Performa 630 CD as a replacement for my Atari Mega ST I have fiddled around with a bit too much. The intention was to run "Magic Mac" on it to use my Atari Software, but since the Hardware ate up all my money, I had to bridge the time gap until I could afford the software by using Mac programs - well, I never bought Magic Mac.

In 1997 I started to work at a company that transitioned from Macs to Windows a year later and I had the opportunity to buy out a Powermac 7600/132 as my new main computer, alongside with a Powerbook 2300c and a Mac IIci as free gifts. I expanded the RAM of that machine to 1 GB with modules from an IBM RS/6000 machine when it was scrapped, but as time went by the 7600 became quite outdated and new Macs were a bit too expensive for me.

So I skipped the whole G3/4/5 era during which I used Windows PCs until Apple came up with Intel processors and a new Aluminium/Glass iMac. I got myself the 20" iMac 2007 which was delivered with 10.4 Tiger preinstalled and also included an upgrade DVD to 10.5 Leopard. As a UNIX specialist I was fascinated by the combination of a good looking GUI with a UNIX kernel and a shell at hand. The iMac was replaced (it actually is in use by my daughter) by the late-2013 27" model and complemented with a mid-2012 13" Macbook Pro I bought second hand later on.

Recently I heard the "20 Macs for 2020" podcast of Jason Snell (https://www.relay.fm/20macs) and also read an article about the 20th birthday of Mac OS X (https://www.heise.de/news/20-Jahre-...chichte-begann-fremd-und-langsam-5997455.html - in German). This triggered me to think about my personal "Mac museum" which from an OS perspective has a gap between Mac OS 9.1 as the newest one supported on the 7600 and Mac OS X 10.4 as the oldest one running on the Intel iMac. So I started thinking about which machine I could buy second hand to fill that gap, especially for the early cats. Since it should be able to run classic Mac OS as well as not being underpowered for the newer OS X variants, the choice was quite obvious a G4 Powermac.

After some research on the internet and checking the second hand market, I ended up with a Quicksilver 2002 model with 1.25 GB of RAM and 2x 1Ghz processors. It had a defective HDD and I bought it for 47 € (original price was $2.999,- when released in 2002). Since I'm not good at scrapping stuff that is still functional, I was able to put in a 250 GB HDD and set up the machine as a multiboot system with 9.2.2, 10.1.5, 10.2.8, 10.3.9 and 10.4.11 as you can see on the photo.

In an old PC I found a WiFi PCI card and a Geforce FX 5200 AGP graphics card. The WiFi card doesn't seem to work in the Mac (doesn't even show up in system profiler) but I think about flashing the Geforce card to get a digital video out that on the original card is present only in form of an ADC interface I don't have an adapter or the monitor for. But this would impact the performance in Mac OS 9 and might not even be a noticeable step up in OS X from what I've read so far. But since the hardware is at hand, I might just give it a try. To get WiFi, I connected a USB powered wireless nano router in client mode to the LAN port.

IMG_2092.jpg
 
I came to the Mac back in 1994 when I bought a Performa 630 CD as a replacement for my Atari Mega ST I have fiddled around with a bit too much. The intention was to run "Magic Mac" on it to use my Atari Software, but since the Hardware ate up all my money, I had to bridge the time gap until I could afford the software by using Mac programs - well, I never bought Magic Mac.

In 1997 I started to work at a company that transitioned from Macs to Windows a year later and I had the opportunity to buy out a Powermac 7600/132 as my new main computer, alongside with a Powerbook 2300c and a Mac IIci as free gifts. I expanded the RAM of that machine to 1 GB with modules from an IBM RS/6000 machine when it was scrapped, but as time went by the 7600 became quite outdated and new Macs were a bit too expensive for me.

So I skipped the whole G3/4/5 era during which I used Windows PCs until Apple came up with Intel processors and a new Aluminium/Glass iMac. I got myself the 20" iMac 2007 which was delivered with 10.4 Tiger preinstalled and also included an upgrade DVD to 10.5 Leopard. As a UNIX specialist I was fascinated by the combination of a good looking GUI with a UNIX kernel and a shell at hand. The iMac was replaced (it actually is in use by my daughter) by the late-2013 27" model and complemented with a mid-2012 13" Macbook Pro I bought second hand later on.

Recently I heard the "20 Macs for 2020" podcast of Jason Snell (https://www.relay.fm/20macs) and also read an article about the 20th birthday of Mac OS X (https://www.heise.de/news/20-Jahre-...chichte-begann-fremd-und-langsam-5997455.html - in German). This triggered me to think about my personal "Mac museum" which from an OS perspective has a gap between Mac OS 9.1 as the newest one supported on the 7600 and Mac OS X 10.4 as the oldest one running on the Intel iMac. So I started thinking about which machine I could buy second hand to fill that gap, especially for the early cats. Since it should be able to run classic Mac OS as well as not being underpowered for the newer OS X variants, the choice was quite obvious a G4 Powermac.

After some research on the internet and checking the second hand market, I ended up with a Quicksilver 2002 model with 1.25 GB of RAM and 2x 1Ghz processors. It had a defective HDD and I bought it for 47 € (original price was $2.999,- when released in 2002). Since I'm not good at scrapping stuff that is still functional, I was able to put in a 250 GB HDD and set up the machine as a multiboot system with 9.2.2, 10.1.5, 10.2.8, 10.3.9 and 10.4.11 as you can see on the photo.

In an old PC I found a WiFi PCI card and a Geforce FX 5200 AGP graphics card. The WiFi card doesn't seem to work in the Mac (doesn't even show up in system profiler) but I think about flashing the Geforce card to get a digital video out that on the original card is present only in form of an ADC interface I don't have an adapter or the monitor for. But this would impact the performance in Mac OS 9 and might not even be a noticeable step up in OS X from what I've read so far. But since the hardware is at hand, I might just give it a try. To get WiFi, I connected a USB powered wireless nano router in client mode to the LAN port.

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Nice. I started in 2000 with MS-DOS +W3.1...

At least you have the Willpower to do all that... I have more(newer stuff G3/G4/G5) in my collection but 0 will-power to sort them all out :-(
 
Nice. I started in 2000 with MS-DOS +W3.1...

At least you have the Willpower to do all that... I have more(newer stuff G3/G4/G5) in my collection but 0 will-power to sort them all out :-(
I dont know about the G3 but if you start tinkering with the G4 or G5..they can become addictive..and somehow more fun than the most uptodate PC out there... dont know wot it is about them.
 
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I dont know about the G3 but if you start tinkering with the G4 or G5..they can become addictive..and somehow more fun than the most uptodate PC out there... dont know wot it is about them.
..though perhaps all that wonderful software at macintoshgarden has something to do with it..???
 
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How do you mount a Blu-Ray on-to EIDE? not sure they produced that (only external....) was thinking of Upgrading DVD-RW on G5... I figured instead of buying Blu-ray I just searching for an cheap external drive.... I use mostly ext-hdds and save movies on-to DVDs.....
Look up Panasonic SW-5582-C IDE/PATA drive.
 
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