PowerBook G3 Wallstreet "PDQ" Appreciation

[LightBulbFun]

if thats the case with the clamshell then yeah, does sound like a case of the Bad RAM being in a section not used by the PDQ

as for the 233Mhz model you mention (which indeed called the Mainstreet around here) sadly that just uses a Regular PowerPC 750 CPU card just with no cache installed much like the cache-less Quicksilver cards. I do wish they used 740s as you say it would of given me a good candidate for transplanting onto the 4400

 

[AphoticD]

I know Mactracker has given me the wrong information a few times now, so I double checked on Everymac and it is listed as having the 740 in both the intro and the spec-sheet;
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/specs/powerbook_g3_233.html

I will place my bets on that information being wrong and our own walking PowerPC encyclopedia (@LightBulbFun) being right of course, but if someone in ownership of a Mainstreet could confirm the output of Gauge Pro (or Metronome), then this could be confirmed?

 

[LightBulbFun]

I know Mactracker has given me the wrong information a few times now, so I double checked on Everymac and it is listed as having the 740 in both the intro and the spec-sheet;
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/specs/powerbook_g3_233.html

I will place my bets on that information being wrong and our own walking PowerPC encyclopedia (@LightBulbFun) being right of course, but if someone in ownership of a Mainstreet could confirm the output of Gauge Pro (or Metronome), then this could be confirmed?

Id trust Mac Tracker over Everymac after that whole 7448 PowerBook fiasco LOL... but indeed both have some miss-documented information.

as for the Mainstreet, I base my own information from the Mainstreet CPU cards that I see on ebay. (the PowerPC 740 and the PowerPC 750 share the same PVR so its pretty hard to tell them apart from software POV sadly.)

see for example https://www.ebay.com/itm/391743511979 and https://www.ebay.com/itm/112426406982 notice how these are the same as other wall-street/PDQ cards but they just dont have the L2 cache soldered on.

 

[AphoticD]

Oh yes it does if it works, it "clonks" out the card. Never dismantled that mechanism, indeed the elastic maybe comes from it.
It doesn't spit out the card like a 3400c or a Kanga, these you have to put your hand in the way of the card to prevent it falling on the ground.
[doublepost=1527340660][/doublepost]Edit: in doubt I've checked on mines. that black elastic must come from one on the two PCMCIA doors, these are maintained close by these kind of elastics. The ejection card mechanism must be spring loaded... I do have some Wally/PDQ with one of the ejection mechanism failed. the card works fine , it just doesn't eject... have to pull it by hand.

Ok. So the mechanical eject feature works a treat in OS9. It sent my CF card adapter flying across the desk! It startled me a bit actually because I didn't expect anything to happen.

Tiger doesn't do the same though, so I was manually removing it (which was a little tricky). I also found that if the machine is powered down but plugged into power, then the PC Card eject buttons work; the machine revs up like it's going to boot, then pop! goes the card and it powers off again.
[doublepost=1527573659][/doublepost]

Id trust Mac Tracker over Everymac after that whole 7448 PowerBook fiasco LOL... but indeed both have some miss-documented information.

as for the Mainstreet, I base my own information from the Mainstreet CPU cards that I see on ebay. (the PowerPC 740 and the PowerPC 750 share the same PVR so its pretty hard to tell them apart from software POV sadly.)

see for example https://www.ebay.com/itm/391743511979 and https://www.ebay.com/itm/112426406982 notice how these are the same as other wall-street/PDQ cards but they just dont have the L2 cache soldered on.

Good spotting. At least it should be easy to install some L2 onto those cards if you can source the chips for it. The solder balls/pads are already in place.

 

[AphoticD]

Just for the curious; I was able to get a working Mac OS 9.2.2 system on this machine by...

1. Installing Mac OS 9.0.4 (Retail CD)
2. Updating to Mac OS 9.1 (International English multipart update)
3. Updating to Mac OS 9.2.1 (International English Full updater)
4. And finally Mac OS 9.2.2 (International English update)

I then ran the QuickTime 6.0.3 update which I had downloaded some time ago.

For some reason the MacOS9Lives Universal installation which I have used on my other OS9 supported Macs just caused the PDQ to power off while booting from the HDD.

 

[weckart]

I will place my bets on that information being wrong and our own walking PowerPC encyclopedia (@LightBulbFun) being right of course, but if someone in ownership of a Mainstreet could confirm the output of Gauge Pro (or Metronome), then this could be confirmed?

Gauge Pro isn't that useful. On my Mainstreet, it reports the CPU as a 740/750 G3.



And here's the bad news

 

[AphoticD]

PDQ Accelerated!

Not to be discouraged by a few failed attempts, I systematically went through each iteration of Mac OS X updates from 10.4.11 backwards to find a working driver for the ATI Rage LT Pro.

Mac OS X 10.4.3 - 10.4.11 ATIRagePro.kext + ATIRageProGA.plugin v1.4.4.2 (1366)
Mac OS X 10.4.0 - 10.4.2 ATIRagePro.kext + ATIRageProGA.plugin v1.4.0.11 (2895)
Mac OS X 10.3.7 - 10.3.9 ATIRagePro.kext + ATIRageProGA.plugin v1.3.26.1 (2435)
Mac OS X 10.3.4 - 10.3.6 ATIRagePro.kext + ATIRageProGA.plugin v1.3.18.2 (2059)
Mac OS X 10.3.3 ATIRagePro.kext + ATIRageProGA.plugin v1.3.8.6 (1978)
Mac OS X 10.3.0 - 10.3.2 ATIRagePro.kext + ATIRageProGA.plugin v1.3.0.11 (1734)

(Each patched to include the '0x4c501002' device ID).

All of which resulted in the same behaviour as before; Purple patches in Millions of Colors and psychedelic distortion when set to Thousands.

Until finally;
Mac OS X 10.2.8 ATIRagePro.kext + ATIRageProGA.plugin v1.2.26.32 (1679)

We now have full 2D acceleration in Tiger 10.4.11 on the PDQ! Setting bit depth to "Thousands" results in the best performance. Disabling shadows makes a massive improvement in redraw (I'm using Shadowless, but ShadowKiller will do the same).

This has made the 233Mhz/512K PDQ with 384MB of RAM a very acceptable performer with Tiger. Everything has become fluid and responsive much like the Pismo (which operates at more than twice the speed at 500Mhz/1MB with 1GB RAM).

The only downside is that OpenGL surfaces fail to initiate due to an invalid pixelformat error. This means Screensavers are broken and any OpenGL based 3D apps and games which don't have a fallback.


VRAM is now reported as 8MB (not 16MB as before). Actual is still just 4MB though.



Attached is the modified ATIRagePro.kext and ATIRageProGA.plugin drivers (v1.2.26) to install into a Tiger installation.

ATIRageProDrivers10.2.8.zip

To install, download and unzip, copy into /System/Library/Extensions/, then in Terminal;

sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRagePro*
sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRagePro*
sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache

You can then reboot and OS X will rebuild the caches during boot time, but I found it's easier to ask XPostFacto to "Install Extensions", which will automatically rebuild the boot caches and allow a normal reboot.

I hope this can help some other PDQ owners to squeeze the most out of this old Mac.

-AphoticD

 

[swamprock]

Nice! I wonder if this same kext would work in the Bondi (mine's a Rev B with the Rage Pro). Will test soon...

EDIT: seems to work. I get the same 8mb video memory report as the PDQ (the Bondi has 6mb) but everything seems snappier now. Screensavers even work, albeit slowly. I'll have to run a few tests to see the effects. Great work!

Some pics:

 

[AphoticD]

Nice! I wonder if this same kext would work in the Bondi (mine's a Rev B with the Rage Pro). Will test soon...

EDIT: seems to work. I get the same 8mb video memory report as the PDQ (the Bondi has 6mb) but everything seems snappier now. Screensavers even work, albeit slowly. I'll have to run a few tests to see the effects. Great work!

Some pics:

Awesome!

Can you try dropping into Thousands of colors? (16-bit) The smoothness of window movement should be instantly noticeable.

Also, grab Quartz Debug (attached if you need it) and see if disabling BeamSync improves things. You'll probably get some tearing, but it should be a bit smoother. I noticed on the PDQ that disabling shadows reduced the amount of tearing quite substantially when BeamSync is also disabled.

 

[swamprock]

Awesome!

Can you try dropping into Thousands of colors? (16-bit) The smoothness of window movement should be instantly noticeable.

Also, grab Quartz Debug (attached if you need it) and see if disabling BeamSync improves things. You'll probably get some tearing, but it should be a bit smoother. I noticed on the PDQ that disabling shadows reduced the amount of tearing quite substantially when BeamSync is also disabled.

Disabling Beamsync helped a bit in 32-bit color, but dropping to 16-bit color boosted responsiveness tremendously; so much so that I could re-enable Beamsync. I'm going to run a few more tests when I have the time later this week.

 

[weckart]

To install, download and unzip, copy into /System/Library/Extensions/, then in Terminal;

sudo chown -R root\:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRagePro*

You can then reboot and OS X will rebuild the caches during boot time, but I found it's easier to ask XPostFacto to "Install Extensions", which will automatically rebuild the boot caches and allow a normal reboot.

I hope this can help some other PDQ owners to squeeze the most out of this old Mac.

-AphoticD

There's a typo there:

It should be sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRagePro* without the additional backslash after root. You could also substitute 0:0 for root:wheel if you are extra lazy.

I always added sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRagePro* whenever I dropped in a kext.

Thanks for doing all the legwork in trying out all of the ATI revisions backwards. That cannot have been fun. It's good to know that Jaguar is still good for something, even if it is only propping up Tiger.

 

[AphoticD]

Thanks @weckart, I've edited the post. It was a bit of an ordeal to download and extract each revision, even with Pacifist. But at least I didn't have to go right back to 10.1.x (which I believe was known to work with the hardware ID patch on the PDQ). I was actually surprised that the kext from Jag was even recognized in Tiger.

 

[Project Alice]

I've got one of these. Dead backlight, or inverter. And no hard drive. It does work though. I got it for 30 bucks. Theres a stripped screw under the keyboard so I havent gotten any further progress in diagnosing it.

 

[AphoticD]

I bought a 2nd PDQ which had a thrashed out screw head in the middle of the heat shield (the one with the wide head). Luckily the screw head protrudes enough that I was able to use a pair of pliers to grab it by the sides and unscrew it. The machine isn’t booting and I suspect it is the CPU Card at fault...

The postie just knocked on my door and hand delivered a package from the Bookyard (UK) - “Here is your package on behalf of Her Majesty’s Royal Mail, Sir” [ @LightBulbFun ]. I believe there is a 250Mhz/1M PDQ Wallstreet CPU Card in here.

I’ll go test it out.. I also think a dead PRAM battery is causing trouble, but I need to pull the machine apart to unplug it. It’s not as simple as just lifting the keyboard and pulling out the connector as on the Pismo.

 

[AphoticD]

This is strange. When running with the 250Mhz Wallstreet CPU, the display is blank - no backlight. It booted into OS9 and I could change the speaker volume and hear the OS doing things, but the brightness controls didn't respond at all. Tried closing the display to put it to sleep and woke back up again with the same result.

Thinking it might be a failed inverter, I thought I should put the 233Mhz CPU back in to confirm. The original CPU is back in and it boots perfectly fine.

I know the Wallstreet/PDQ have a number of idiosyncrasies. Is there a trick to get the display to come on? (What do you think @swamprock ?)

I might try setting up os9 VNC, reinstall the CPU and see if I can adjust brightness controls over the network. Or maybe try setting the backlight on via the pmu in an Open Firmware telnet session...


EDIT: To avoid confusion I should mention that I'm trying to install the 250Mhz card into the working PDQ (#1) and I will then transfer that unit's CPU into the PDQ #2 next.


EDIT #2: I tried resetting the PMU, no change.

 

[swamprock]

This is strange. When running with the 250Mhz Wallstreet CPU, the display is blank - no backlight. It booted into OS9 and I could change the speaker volume and hear the OS doing things, but the brightness controls didn't respond at all. Tried closing the display to put it to sleep and woke back up again with the same result.

Thinking it might be a failed inverter, I thought I should put the 233Mhz CPU back in to confirm. The original CPU is back in and it boots perfectly fine.

I know the Wallstreet/PDQ have a number of idiosyncrasies. Is there a trick to get the display to come on? (What do you think @swamprock ?)

I might try setting up os9 VNC, reinstall the CPU and see if I can adjust brightness controls over the network. Or maybe try setting the backlight on via the pmu in an Open Firmware telnet session...


EDIT: To avoid confusion I should mention that I'm trying to install the 250Mhz card into the working PDQ (#1) and I will then transfer that unit's CPU into the PDQ #2 next.


EDIT #2: I tried resetting the PMU, no change.

The Wallstreet I (233mhz no cache, 250mhz, 292mhz, 83mhz FSB) CPU cards are incompatible with the PDQ. I found this out years ago when I tried a 292 in a PDQ. Same symptoms as you had. Beats me why. Maybe @LightBulbFun, @bunnspecial, or @dosdude1 have an idea...

Re: my own PDQ- I just replaced the hinges on mine, from a dead donor unit that I got off the 'bay ($60 shipped US, but it came with a working CDROM drive to replace my dead one, and a spare, nice screen, working CPU card, etc.), installed OS 9 and Tiger on it, and am now playing around with the video kext mods. Definitely much snappier, especially in 16-bit color.

 

[AphoticD]

Thanks @swamprock. This is as far as I have gotten. I jumped through a few hoops to setup os9vnc, (and also set TCP/IP to always load) so that I can screen share my way into the PDQ with the 250Mhz Wallstreet card installed.


Apple System Profiler shows that the PDQ is booting from the Wallstreet 250Mhz /1MB L2 card.. but I can't see anything on screen.

I have confirmed that it is definitely not a backlight issue. Shining a torch on the display shows it is completely blank. This is confirmed when I went into XPostFacto and saw the OF output device was set to "None".






In the list we can can see the pci1002,4c50 device, which is the device address of the ATI Rage LT Pro. On the other PDQ, this is labelled as "ATY,RageLTPro"


The hardware device is confirmed in ASP...

Setting the output-device to the pci1002,4c50 device doesn't make a difference, it still won't initialize the display. I have set auto-boot? to false and can blindly type into the Open Firmware prompt. Unfortunately this is pre-telnet Open Firmware capabilities. I don't have any localtalk/printer cables, which would allow me to send I/O between the two PDQs to see what I'm doing... I had a thought that maybe I could use an S-video cable to do the job, but the pin alignment is different (maybe that was ADB I was thinking of?).

Is it possible to get OF I/O using an RJ-11 phone cable going internal modem to internal modem? I've tried listening to /dev/tty and /dev/tty-modem on the working PDQ while the other unit is blindly sitting at the OF prompt but it doesn't get any output. I know the localtalk / serial ports can send/receive plain text when hooked up like that, but I can't recall if the modem is capable of simple I/O without some kind of dialing software.

 

[AphoticD]

Booted into Mac OS X 10.4.11 and manually set "nvram output-device=screen", rebooted and still no dice. Here I'm screen sharing the PDQ over Ethernet with Remote Desktop active..

The specifics show the bus speed has been bumped up to 83Mhz.

Also, the ATIRagePro driver has loaded;

$ kextstat | grep ATI
   47    0 0x6c0000   0x1a000    0x19000    com.apple.ATIRagePro (2.2.6) <46 45 16 11>

if I could somehow get I/O from Open Firmware, I might be able to browse the device tree to attempt to manually locate and connect to the display device... Any ideas?

 

[weckart]

My understanding is that PDQ cards will function in a Wallstreet but the PDQ can only handle PDQ cards. The Wallstreet handles cards with 66MHz and 83MHz buses. The PDQs are all pegged at 66MHz. I guess the 233MHz Wallstreet card might work with a PDQ if any.

 

[AphoticD]

My understanding is that PDQ cards will function in a Wallstreet but the PDQ can only handle PDQ cards. The Wallstreet handles cards with 66MHz and 83MHz buses. The PDQs are all pegged at 66MHz. I guess the 233MHz Wallstreet card might work with a PDQ if any.

The PDQ appears to handle the faster bus speed and increased L2 from the wallstreet card, but can’t figure out the display device. My guess is the NDRV for the ATIRageLTPro is embedded in the PDQ BootROM, which the wallstreet wasn’t aware of. I wonder if there might be a trick to flash a PDQ BootROM onto the Wally card?

 

[swamprock]

My understanding is that PDQ cards will function in a Wallstreet but the PDQ can only handle PDQ cards. The Wallstreet handles cards with 66MHz and 83MHz buses. The PDQs are all pegged at 66MHz. I guess the 233MHz Wallstreet card might work with a PDQ if any.

Oh yeah... the 233's bus is still clocked at 66mhz. It should definitely work.
[doublepost=1529420403][/doublepost]

The PDQ appears to handle the faster bus speed and increased L2 from the wallstreet card, but can’t figure out the display device. My guess is the NDRV for the ATIRageLTPro is embedded in the PDQ BootROM, which the wallstreet wasn’t aware of. I wonder if there might be a trick to flash a PDQ BootROM onto the Wally card?

I ended up buying a Wallstreet I lower case for mine, and popped the 292 into it. Ran hot as hell, even after replacing the paste under the heat sink disc and the thermal pad.

Finding any Wallstreet is a bit difficult lately. The days of piles of them for $20 are long gone. I got $150 for my maxed one a few years ago.

 

[galgot]

I have one of these 250Mhz Wally, with a smaller 14" 1024X768 screen , with the rounded front edge. Very nice.
But while my other Wallstreet/PDQ all accept boot on Mac OS X 1.2 server, this one refuses absolutely, showing a broken folder icon at start up.
It refuses to boot in OF too, and zapping PRAM works one out of ten times...
Changed the PRAM battery changes nothing. Gave up and left OS 8.6 on it.

 

[AphoticD]

I have one of these 250Mhz Wally, with a smaller 14" 1024X768 screen , with the rounded front edge. Very nice.
But while my other Wallstreet/PDQ all accept boot on Mac OS X 1.2 server, this one refuses absolutely, showing a broken folder icon at start up.
It refuses to boot in OF too, and zapping PRAM works one out of ten times...
Changed the PRAM battery changes nothing. Gave up and left OS 8.6 on it.

On these two PDQs I found they won’t drop into open firmware while holding the key combo after a restart, however they will if it starting up again after being shut down or after a PMU reset (fn-ctrl-Shift-Power). This is where the nvram auto-boot?false Option in XPostFacto has been useful for dropping into OF at every boot.

I managed to get the faulty 233Mhz/512K CPU Card from the 2nd PDQ to boot after a quick trip into the oven. It worked perfectly for a few hours and then a hard freeze while I was doing CPU intensive work in Puma (loading image thumbnails). It then refused to boot until it cooled right down again. I wouldn’t call it a repair, but at least it didn’t make it worse! Maybe I should just keep it running OS9 only to keep duties light.

 

[LightBulbFun]

@AphoticD interesting

it looks like whats happened is the PDQs Video card has a diffrent Device ID then the video card in the WallStreet

so the Wallstreets Video ROM is not loading on the PDQ as it cant find a video card with the right device ID

basically with a WS card in a PDQ the video card never gets initialised and just shows up as a PCI device like a PC card in a PPC mac.

in theory you could try swapping the BootROM Chip from a PDQ card onto the WS card and that should kick the display into life.

(another Option would be to edit the Video ROM in the WS Card to match up with the PDQs video cards Device ID but im not sure if this is possible without having to de-solder the BootROM)

BTW im curious what that AAPL device is in the PCI list, is that the built in SCSI or is that Heathrow? I have never seen it show up like that.

 

[AphoticD]

Perhaps it is the display’s device id which makes the pairing process model-specific on the 3rd party WS/PDQ upgrade cards?

I might have to put it on hold until I arrange to buy some tools to swap the BootROM.