The Prettiest Computer

2016-10-15 17:10

Our “Blue & White” Power Macintosh G3 got a desk to call home. And some upgrades. I guess I should call it the Blue & White G4.

Blue & White Power Macintosh G3 on a desk with two monitors, Extended II keyboard, and Yamaha DX7

1999 through 2001 is my absolute favorite era of Apple and this machine exemplifies it more than any other. All the stuck-up professionals complained about the pretty blue case so all the later G4 hardware turned muted grey. The Blue & White actually has some personality!

This is kind of a sleeper system since it collected a few cheap upgrades I ran across while thrifting and online over the years:

  • Swapped motherboard to Revision 02 with the fixed ATA controller
  • It’s rocking a 1ghz Sonnet G4 CPU upgrade despite the label on the side of the machine. Stock was a 450mhz G3. I’d like to find a 700mhz G4 since anything over that requires lowering the bus speed from 100mhz to 66mhz which is a poor trade-off for the extra CPU speed.
  • 1GB PC133 SDRAM
  • Boots from an old SATA SSD adapted to a bootable ATA133 PCI card.
  • Replaced the stock DVD-ROM with an RPC1-flashed Pioneer DVR-109. The 109 was used as the OEM drive in the later MDD G4 towers, so this drive is fully supported by Disc Burning and iTunes in both OS 9 and OS X. No PatchBurn!
  • Installed an internal OEM ATA Zip250 pulled from a later Powermac G4.
  • The GPU is a 64MB PC Radeon 7000 that had a bigger BIOS chip soldered on and flashed with Mac firmware. The largest official Mac Radeon had only 32MB VRAM.
  • Modem replaced with a Stealth Serial Port to regain the legacy Macintosh mini-DIN serial for things like syncing with a Newton or serial MIDI interfaces. I managed to buy the very last one they had in stock after they graciously scrounged the warehouse for me.
  • The remaining two slots hold a Digi001 interface card and a DigiDesign SampleCell II sampler card. I’d like to replace the Digi001 with the FireWire-based Digi002 to free up that slot.
  • Triple boots Mac OS 9.2.2, Apple Rhapsody 5.6 (Mac OS X Server 1.2), and Mac OS X 10.4.11. Rhapsody is my favorite :3

This is the last machine that can use the fabled Apple Extended II keyboard (pictured!) without a USB adapter since it is the last machine ever made with Apple Desktop Bus support.