I call my G4 Quicksilver "the money pit." Bought in 2006 and proceeded to put a GigaDesigns dual 1.8GHz upgrade. The CPU was an insane $500. Over the years the system has received a 9800pro, 1.5GB RAM, SeriTek SATA card, Pioneer DVD burner, SSD, and noctua fans. Like I said, "money pit"
Hah, I was doing same thing with my G4 MDD. Maxed the ram, swapped in a flashed BIOS ATI card (forget which one but it was way better than you could get from Apple). I would have loved to have upgraded the processor too, but I just got tired of sinking money into it when there was already much better for cheaper out there. It did play a mean game of Doom 3 though!
@@FinalManaTrigger at a college LAN party we had a Quake 4 benchmark shootout. Let's just say the G4+9800Pro got trounced by my friends' Athlon64 and new Intel Core systems... By a lot... By a whole lot.
@@Revenant_Knight The ports now aren't very good. Rebooting into Windows on a Mac gives miles better performance, on the same hardware. Games that run a bit stuttery on macOS run like silk in Windows. I don't know about Quake 4, but Quake 3 had an excellent, multi-processor aware version on OS X. But obviously any G4 would get hammered by an Athlon64 or Core CPU, especially as they'd likely have an extra GHz of clock speed. The G4's 167MHz bus couldn't even take advantage of DDR RAM.
Part of the reason upgrade culture was so big was we were seeing huge increases in performance within a single generation. Performance was jumping 2x, 4x, 1500x (68k -> PPC) at a time compared to the 5%-15% we're getting now. So people want to take advantage of those jumps without sinking tons of money into keeping up.
Computers (Macs in particular) were also very expensive, so it made more sense to upgrade rather than just replace. That powerbook 540c that he held up cost about $4000 when it came out in 1994, or nearly $8000 in today's money.
Exactly. When I popped up a $300 G3 200 MHz Sonnet L2 card into my PPC 603e 180 or 200 MHz Performa the performance jump was HUGE. These 300 bucks, while a pretty penny back in '98, was a well spent 300 bucks, and I never regretted it.
FWIW, I've had really good luck burning discs for old 90s era CD-ROM drives (like my Kenwood 72X) by using blank media specifically labelled as for "music". These are specifically made to work in all CD players, which are finicky much in the way old ROM drives are. They're the only type the Kenwood drive will read. You'll also want to burn them at the lowest speed your burner can manage. HTH!
What you might not know is that Wolfenstein 3D on the Mac utilized textures which where 4 times the size of the PC version. So instead of textures being 64x64 in size, they where 128x128 in size. That extra data might be placing some additional strain on the bus as well which is likely resource strained anyways.
You forgot to mention my favorite part: how this hardware hack actually works. Mac OS 8/9 boots on the native CPU, then the Sonnet Crescendo extension loads, finds the CPU on the cache card, patches Mac OS on RAM to redirect CPU calls to the upgraded CPU, and startup continues. This requires that the original CPU still be installed to facilitate the first part of boot, and comes with a handful of hardware quirks, but works very well overall.
Very cool! I have the same Sonnet L2 accelerator in a 500 Mhz G3 version in my Power Macintosh 6500. So glad I bought it way back in the day! One important thing to note is that, in addition to the G3 upgrade, it also upgrades the L2 cache to 1MB over the stock 256k. When I installed mine, I had to remove the original cache card to put the accelerator in. I love these lower end PCI Power Macs from the late 90s!
I have two TAMs and both came with their own Sonnet G3 accelerator cards. While the performance is night and day between the on-board CPU and the Sonnet, the fact that the heatsink faces downwards in the PDS (cache?) slot on the TAM had me worried about cooling. A cheap 40mm Raspberry Pi fans fit perfectly on the purple heatsinks, even the fins were aligned so I could screw the fan directly to the heatsink. After splicing into the existing fan power cables, everything seems to work fine. I don't have an OS9 temp. monitor, but I'm less nervous running the Sonnet under heavy loads now, knowing that its getting air flow. Edit: I also took the heatsink off, cleaned off the old crusty thermal paste and put new paste on for added protection.
I bought a G3 beige tower from eBay a little while back, it came with an XLR8 G4@400 MHz. Took a while to source the driver. So glad to have it. Love the video.
Back when I was in high school I did work experience at an AASP. i remember in the workshop they had a 5400 that was used for things like surfing the net, downloading drivers and software, doing data recovery, etc. It had one of these, I used to love watching it boot up, first booting up with the onboard 603e, then loading the Sonnet driver and switching to the G3, and watching the rest of the extensions and control panels load really fast.
My “Challenged” Mac is a Performa 6400/200, upgraded with a Sonnet Crescendo G3 400 L2 Cache swap. Amazing how they got it to work from the Cache. It still works to this day but retired to the closet floor for now.
I had a thought. Wikipedia says the original Macintosh II can support up to six monitors simultaneously if you filed it with six Nubus video cards, but I've never seen a photograph of anyone doing it, or even heard of anyone doing it at all. Might make for a fun pipe dream (and potentially a UA-cam first) if you can somehow find a way to get that many monitors and graphics cards in one place. I cannot imagine how slow it would perform with all those unaccelerated cards and a 16mhz 020. Still, if you had a processor upgrade...
Daystar Digital was actually the inventor of Mac multiprocessing. Though the 60x bus is designed to have either a single CPU and a bus-level cache or up to 4 CPUs with no cache, Daystar managed to perform some magic to get up to 4 CPUs to work along with the cache, which greatly improved performance. UMAX may have arrived at a similar solution independently but more likely they were a Daystar licensee. Regardless, Apple (and others such as Newer and Interware) used Daystar's system in their MP models. Later, the G4 was easier to work with because it didn't have bus-level L2 or L3 caches (they were backside instead) so they didn't require the Daystar trickery for SMP+cache support. Details are fuzzy but Interware seems to have been the first to discover and develop the L2 cache slot upgrades, originally for the Tanzania-based models (4400 and related clones), followed by a separate upgrade for the Alchemy models (54/6400). Sonnet later developed the faster, multi-model compatible L2 upgrades. The hardest G3/G4 upgrade to get, aside from the "official" G3 upgrades for things like this C500, is the Crescendo/7200. Amiga weirdos pay tons of money to snatch these any time they come up for sale. There are likely more hacked into A4000s than there are sitting in the Macs they were designed for.
I had one of these L2 cache upgrade cards in my Performa 6400 years and years ago. I think it clocked in at 400Mhz. At one point I even went as far as hacking the 6400 into a LC 580 case replacing the built-in display with one from an external monitor. The power supply was too large to fit inside the case, so I had to do some work to make it external. It was an interesting experiment. I really wish I would have kept all my old Mac gear. I had a ton of fun tinkering with this stuff back in the late 90's - early 00's.
I love the C500! It was my first Mac Clone, oddly enough I installed the same G3 / 400MHz upgrade in mine. Although my clone was stock with a 603e/200 CPU. I look forward to see what you’ll do with these going forward. 🤓 Oh and nice shirt!
You mentioned having some upgrades planned for the 5400; I'm really curious if there's anything that can be done to upgrade the 5300/6300 series, short of just replacing the motherboard with a PCI model.
No, sadly. These are already basically Quadra 630 boards with PPC upgrades grafted on, and the ROM is installed on the L2 cache card on most of these models (except for some of the later 100 or 120MHz versions) so there's nowhere to install a CPU upgrade. A logic board swap isn't hard, though: just modify the harness slightly (cut a particular ground wire and replace it with +3.3V to the logic board) and it'll slide right in.
I've upgraded every Mac I've ever owned as much as was possible over the course of ownership. Even the original Bondi Blue iMac had a voodoo card installed in it via the proprietary PDS slot. The last Mac I bought (not purchased by work) was a Mac Pro 3,1 8 core xeon. That one was the most upgradable yet, then something terrible happened. I couldn't buy a mac that's user upgradable for any price. The M1 certainly made it worse. I was a real fan of Xlr8yourmac back in the day. I really appreciated the info they provided about upgrade compatibility with various models and tracked when something went on sale. This takes me back to happier times. Thanks!
I had to go search after you mentioned Phase 5... I only ever knew them for their Amiga work like the legendary Blizzards and Cyberstorms. I had absolutely no idea they were working on G3 upgrades for Macs too, that's neat!
This reminds me of my old commodore64 upgrade, upgrading the processor and memory by clamping a card directly on top of the cpu. It worked by having the addon pushing power to a specific pin to force the original processor in to a constant reset state while having the new processor take the bypassed duties. It was pretty awesome.
I had one of these in my Performa 6360. It was only 250MHz but with a modified version of the Sonnet extension it could easily be overclocked. Mine was stable at 300MHz.
These upgrade videos are so fun, and they speak to me! I remember dropping an 040 upgrade in a Mac IIsi (quite buggy) and searching high and low for the elusive 7200 upgrade card. Does this cache card work in a 7200? I can’t remember.
How you manage to actually get a hold of these things is far beyond me, I've never been able to find a single accelerator card for sale for any of my Macs
Apple back then: "hey, wanna turn your 68k into a g4? we got da hookup" apple now: "you want a _new_ Mac? no, no. without a corporate expense account, the best you can get is a Mac Mini, and if the warranty sticker still isn't on everything, we get to wipe the boot drive and ban you from buying another" Apple now has pretty much become like trying to buy a Ferrari, and it's disgusting that people still put up with it. But it then makes these videos that much more exciting!
People wouldn't put up with it if there were a competent, viable competitor that wasn't equally as bad. Like, if you want a good Windows machine today, with the kind of low-bloat out of box experience you get on a mac, you basically have to buy a Surface. A completely unrepairable Surface. My last Windows PC was a HP tablet that cost me literally as much as a similarly specced Mac would have at the time, 2015, and the build quality was appalling. I treat my computers well, but my HP Spectre X2 literally had buttons falling out of the chassis, and the stand had gotten sloppy within six months. Further, despite using USB C to charge, it wasn't PD compliant. Their USB C charger had a 19V mode, and a PD compliant charger wouldn't work in it, so you were stuck with their brick only. HP are supposed to be one of the good ones, the big corporate players. I would have bought a Lenovo, but Lenovo in Australia basically only sells to corporate purchasing departments. If you want a retail Lenovo here, you're paying Thinkpad prices for their budget Ideapad line. Since getting my M1 Air, I've noticed small touches to the hardware that I didn't know _COULD_ be good. Like, until now, I've never used a trackpad that didn't make me immediately want to plug in a mouse, and in Windows, I've never seen multitouch gestures that actually worked. I didn't know laptop speakers could be good on anything but a 4kg gaming laptop, but on the M1 Air, they're impressive, _and they face UP_ which shouldn't be so rare, but it is. Frankly, Apple can get as draconian as they want in their control of the hardware we buy, and I'm probably going to keep buying Apple gear because there just isn't good competition for them. The price isn't even as outrageous as it used to be. I mean, sure, there's no $800 laptop option. I'd like to see them revive the iBook branding. I wouldn't mind a lower res screen and a plastic case if I could get a Mac laptop under nine hundred dollarydoos (the official name of the Australian currency), but if someone is looking at a $1000-1500 HP, there are very few reasons for them not to consider a Mac instead.
@@NoobixCube speaking as someone that's basically built their own desktops and builds and such, sometimes for specific purposes, the big OEMs { Hp, Dell, Lenovo } were _never good._ As someone that primarily is in it for the games, they're all non-starters. Too much of it being bastardized proprietary junk and stuffed into the worst environments to ensure they only survive past an arbitrary 90 day warranty and no more. Hard to appreciate anything about Apple now when it feels like the M1 route was only selected specifically to spite the Hackintosh movement, that was making better builds for less money than what Apple itself was offering officially. Whether it is or not isn't the point; it's the fact that given the timing and everything else going on, it _feels_ as if Apple is only going with ARM just to kill off the ability to have any kind of third party Macintosh. I'm already angry with apple about the iphone making other phone makers basically ape them harder and harder, eliminating all the good android and windows phone designs. Apparently phone makers think everyone can just drop *two thousand dollars a month on a phone* and be happy. Meanwhile I'm stuck with my v20 because nothing newer can let me replace the battery without committing to open heart surgery skills to do. For my usage and needs, I'm not exaggerating when I say I need a phone that can actually do 10+ hours of screen on. When the modern flagship phone can't even surpass four without whinging for a charger, that's actually getting in the way of a typical work day for me. Back on point, though... The M1 was designed to be a disposable notebook, at premium notebook pricing. And that's what I find offensive. Even now I still have project builds for say, running Windows 9x or xp to run games of those eras at optimal fidelity and basically "max all the settings without even trying"; I wouldn't be able to do that with Apple even if I wanted to. It's like Apple's business methods from the beginning are counter to that.
@@ZeroHourProductions407Apple went with ARM because x86 chips could not provide a comparable power/performance ratio. An M-series laptop offers excellent performance as well as very long battery life, coupled with silent operation. Hackintosh builds had nothing to do with it.
Have a Performa 6300CD and it's also CPU upgrade challenged. It has both a PDS and L2 cache slot but no CPU upgrades are available.... unless the board is swapped for a 6360.
I really miss my Power Mac 6100/G3+AV.... i had Windows 98 SE running on Connectix Virtual PC, back in the day. RAM was maxed-out at 136MB. It died during a rolling blackout and I didn't have a UPS unit back then. 😓 Upgraded with the Sonnet Crescendo G3/500 NuBus.
I wonder if it's possible, considering the POWER ISA is a superset of older PPC instruction sets, for NXP or similar to make a modern PPC chip which could fit the old zip sockets, and if that newer CPU could be capable of running older PPC software.
You aren’t kidding that those cache slot accelerators are hard to find. I waited for months to snag one on ebay for my Umax C600. Ended up with a G3/400, even though I had been holding out for the 500. Runs like a dream though.
I used to have one of those L2 G3 CPUs in my Power Mac 5500. It was pretty neat but the 50mhz FSB on that model really crippled its potential. Cool to see one in a clone!
I sort of wish we could still do that. I have a Quadra 650 with a Powerpc 601 card in it. It would nice to upgrade my socket am3+ to a Ryzen with little effort. But, part of that was the price of those early macs and accessories for it. Even for the PC though less used in my area was a Pentium Over Drive chip. But now that prices have come down. Getting a new board, processor and ram is about and the same price and you didn't have some limitations. For instance some extensions and software will not run with the Powerpc enabled. Etc, etc etc. I should say mostly additional hardware limitations.
Gawd Dang! I had a 500c desktop that I acquired in a bulk buy a couple years ago. I got it working and sold it on eBay. Really wish I'd kept that thing...it was pretty neat.
Has anybody managed to install a Unix-ish OS like Linux or NetBSD on a cache-slot upgraded Mac? I remember trying to install LinuxPPC some 10 years ago on a PM 6500 with a Sonnet G3, but it hang on booting not finding some table in memory (I don't remember exactly)
I wonder, if you can use the jumper block to increase the bus speed even further @actionRetro. I see it's set at 67MHz, but I am not sure if that's stock, or controlled by the Sonnet CPU card?
I like upgrades too. That's how I started playing with computers, I took trashed computers and upgraded them the best they could get and then used them. Craziest thing I did was buy a modded 1.4GHz Pentium 3-S. I used that with Windows XP for a while long after Vista and Seven came out. I'm pretty sure my Dad swapped out his 486 board for a Pentium some time in the far past as well. It's a shame modern computers aren't so upgradeable what with all the environmental concerns about throw-a-way culture
Another pretty weird G3 upgrade is for the PowerMac 7200 which didn't have a CPU slot like all the other PCI PowerMacs. The upgrade actually goes in a PCI slot.
Ok if you upgrade the TAM you can get OS9Helper and the 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 upgrades open them in the desktop and trick the upgrade to OS 9.2.2 and the January ATI upgrade to give it millions of colors, and install 128 MB of RAM
Another awesome video!! It’s cool to increase 10 years ahead in processing power but what about graphics performance? A g3 should be playing RTCW or Deus Ex etc
I had a Power Mac G4 and I swapped the 466 MHz G4 to 733 MHz on a daughter card. Also I overclocked my blue and white G3 to 450 MHz from 400 MHz but it is not noticeable increase but it was fun swapping around jumper blocks.
I actually had this exact Sonnet G3/400 upgrade for my 6500 back in the 90s. It was a nice improvement but it wasn't as fast as an actual G3 machine. I eventually replaced it with a Dual 533 MHz G4 PowerMac. Sometimes I wish I hadn't gotten rid of those machines and that upgrade...
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Technically there are more Umax models as European units had different names. I have two Apus 3000 machines (one broken beyond repair due to a battery damage), and thus two CPUs - one is original, one is PPC G3. Those machines are a bit funny as the original CPU uses... Socket 5, just like Intel Pentium processors. Obviously not compatible, but that was quite an surprise when I first disassembled one.
in many ways, we're still in that era. am4 is basically an all-in-house version of this premise for hte modern era. To this day you can boot an end-of-life cpu in a beginning of life board, and thats, what, a 7 year difference, and one of the fastest changing time periods in tech? At the same time though, it also goes to show just how much more could potentially be done if more companies thought outside hte box.
I don't believe any version of Mac OSX runs on any below g3 cpu. Wolfenstein is my test also, though, it seems to me it should have run better on the stock cpu. Mine runs on an LCIII. I have two of the SuperMac clones myself, a 500 and a 700, so I enjoy the effort you put in them.
i need some help. i have the chance to buy a G3 L2 240Mhz from Interware. its japan. 6360CD system. are these worth it? can i play quake 3? will i be able to run a 9200 Radeon in the PCI slot as well?
If you really want to Frankenstein a real Mac, Get a Beige G3 / Blue White G3 and replace the zif G3 with a Zif G4, The beige can accept up to 4 IDE (M/S) including CD/DVD roms drives, 50 pin SCSI internal / External and a Floppy port :) and a few PCI cards like an unmodded Diamond 3D 3DFX just boots :)
Most-likely a stupid question, but given the age of _Wolfenstein 3D_ when the PowerPC was introduced, is the game even a "fat" executable..? (and it's a *long* time since I've used that phrase…) - viz., does it even have any PowerPC code resource, or is it being transparently emulated..? (I remember games saved on a 680x0 (bizarrely) being unable to be opened on a PowerPC, which points to the game having a PowerPC code resource, but the games performance points to it not having a PowerPC code resource 🤷🏻♂️)
I don't know what happened to the rather large comment I posted here, so to summarise; Bit late sorry. UMAX Apus C500 180Mhz - bought in UK 1998, Added a Voodoo 3 2000 and a Phase 5 Aptus G3, played Unreal Engine titles and Glide games like Carmageddon really well, as well as Open GL based Quake III etc. Still worked the last time I turned it on, which was many years ago!
Hey nice video, it’s like a month that I follow you and I can’t miss any of your videos! However I really love that shirt and I would like to buy it too, do you know where I can buy it?
It's a shame Wolf3D is not optimized well for mac. I recently discovered that it's source code has been public since at least 2013 I think. I'm surprised no one has tried to improve it so it runs better on older 68k macs... On a related note I wonder if any PowerPC accelerators were ever made for the LC/LC IIIs? I doubt I'd ever afford to get one even if such a unicorn exists.... :P That machine has a PDS slot so it would be technically possible I would assume. EDIT: had to edit my comment to remove mention of a certain well known repository host for code since it appeared the comment got auto deleted when I tried to edit it for spelling mistakes. Odd why is that particular site getting spam filtered? lol Well it's the place that is a hub where you git code...If you know what I mean. That's where I found the wolf3d source code.
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U when u say that's stock but u are booting from an ssd be like "it's stock officer, i swear"😂😂😂
I call my G4 Quicksilver "the money pit." Bought in 2006 and proceeded to put a GigaDesigns dual 1.8GHz upgrade. The CPU was an insane $500. Over the years the system has received a 9800pro, 1.5GB RAM, SeriTek SATA card, Pioneer DVD burner, SSD, and noctua fans. Like I said, "money pit"
Hah, I was doing same thing with my G4 MDD. Maxed the ram, swapped in a flashed BIOS ATI card (forget which one but it was way better than you could get from Apple). I would have loved to have upgraded the processor too, but I just got tired of sinking money into it when there was already much better for cheaper out there. It did play a mean game of Doom 3 though!
@@FinalManaTrigger at a college LAN party we had a Quake 4 benchmark shootout. Let's just say the G4+9800Pro got trounced by my friends' Athlon64 and new Intel Core systems... By a lot... By a whole lot.
@@agizm0 The ports back during that time weren’t very good. Almost like emulation.
@@agizm0 Sorry to hear that.
@@Revenant_Knight The ports now aren't very good. Rebooting into Windows on a Mac gives miles better performance, on the same hardware. Games that run a bit stuttery on macOS run like silk in Windows.
I don't know about Quake 4, but Quake 3 had an excellent, multi-processor aware version on OS X. But obviously any G4 would get hammered by an Athlon64 or Core CPU, especially as they'd likely have an extra GHz of clock speed. The G4's 167MHz bus couldn't even take advantage of DDR RAM.
Part of the reason upgrade culture was so big was we were seeing huge increases in performance within a single generation. Performance was jumping 2x, 4x, 1500x (68k -> PPC) at a time compared to the 5%-15% we're getting now. So people want to take advantage of those jumps without sinking tons of money into keeping up.
Computers (Macs in particular) were also very expensive, so it made more sense to upgrade rather than just replace. That powerbook 540c that he held up cost about $4000 when it came out in 1994, or nearly $8000 in today's money.
Exactly. When I popped up a $300 G3 200 MHz Sonnet L2 card into my PPC 603e 180 or 200 MHz Performa the performance jump was HUGE. These 300 bucks, while a pretty penny back in '98, was a well spent 300 bucks, and I never regretted it.
FWIW, I've had really good luck burning discs for old 90s era CD-ROM drives (like my Kenwood 72X) by using blank media specifically labelled as for "music". These are specifically made to work in all CD players, which are finicky much in the way old ROM drives are. They're the only type the Kenwood drive will read. You'll also want to burn them at the lowest speed your burner can manage. HTH!
What you might not know is that Wolfenstein 3D on the Mac utilized textures which where 4 times the size of the PC version. So instead of textures being 64x64 in size, they where 128x128 in size. That extra data might be placing some additional strain on the bus as well which is likely resource strained anyways.
Oh interesting, I didn't know that!
You forgot to mention my favorite part: how this hardware hack actually works. Mac OS 8/9 boots on the native CPU, then the Sonnet Crescendo extension loads, finds the CPU on the cache card, patches Mac OS on RAM to redirect CPU calls to the upgraded CPU, and startup continues. This requires that the original CPU still be installed to facilitate the first part of boot, and comes with a handful of hardware quirks, but works very well overall.
On the MacRumors forum, someone got Tiger 10.4.11's kernel compiled for 604s (and maybe 603s?), letting 604s boot into Tiger.
Very cool! I have the same Sonnet L2 accelerator in a 500 Mhz G3 version in my Power Macintosh 6500. So glad I bought it way back in the day! One important thing to note is that, in addition to the G3 upgrade, it also upgrades the L2 cache to 1MB over the stock 256k. When I installed mine, I had to remove the original cache card to put the accelerator in. I love these lower end PCI Power Macs from the late 90s!
Do you plan to revisit your cube and install Linux after GPU is changed to an ati for driver support? Keep up these videos I love them
imo i would rather see the g3 clamshell
Friends, friends! We can Linux all the things
I have two TAMs and both came with their own Sonnet G3 accelerator cards. While the performance is night and day between the on-board CPU and the Sonnet, the fact that the heatsink faces downwards in the PDS (cache?) slot on the TAM had me worried about cooling.
A cheap 40mm Raspberry Pi fans fit perfectly on the purple heatsinks, even the fins were aligned so I could screw the fan directly to the heatsink. After splicing into the existing fan power cables, everything seems to work fine.
I don't have an OS9 temp. monitor, but I'm less nervous running the Sonnet under heavy loads now, knowing that its getting air flow.
Edit: I also took the heatsink off, cleaned off the old crusty thermal paste and put new paste on for added protection.
I bought a G3 beige tower from eBay a little while back, it came with an XLR8 G4@400 MHz. Took a while to source the driver. So glad to have it. Love the video.
I remember this era of Mac computing. Never got to try one of these - thanks for sharing! Now I know!
Back when I was in high school I did work experience at an AASP. i remember in the workshop they had a 5400 that was used for things like surfing the net, downloading drivers and software, doing data recovery, etc. It had one of these, I used to love watching it boot up, first booting up with the onboard 603e, then loading the Sonnet driver and switching to the G3, and watching the rest of the extensions and control panels load really fast.
I love how you're just casually running MacOS 8.7 beta on that PowerBook :D
😂
For real, i saw that and just went "Huh... never knew"
My “Challenged” Mac is a Performa 6400/200, upgraded with a Sonnet Crescendo G3 400 L2 Cache swap. Amazing how they got it to work from the Cache. It still works to this day but retired to the closet floor for now.
I had a thought. Wikipedia says the original Macintosh II can support up to six monitors simultaneously if you filed it with six Nubus video cards, but I've never seen a photograph of anyone doing it, or even heard of anyone doing it at all. Might make for a fun pipe dream (and potentially a UA-cam first) if you can somehow find a way to get that many monitors and graphics cards in one place.
I cannot imagine how slow it would perform with all those unaccelerated cards and a 16mhz 020. Still, if you had a processor upgrade...
That would be pretty wild to see! I never knew that Apple was boasting that "fact".
I second this challenge Sean!
I did it with 5, but the Mac ran out of RAM and froze! 🤣
@@Mac84 I just found the livestream where you did that, and holy moly is it awesome!
Daystar Digital was actually the inventor of Mac multiprocessing. Though the 60x bus is designed to have either a single CPU and a bus-level cache or up to 4 CPUs with no cache, Daystar managed to perform some magic to get up to 4 CPUs to work along with the cache, which greatly improved performance. UMAX may have arrived at a similar solution independently but more likely they were a Daystar licensee. Regardless, Apple (and others such as Newer and Interware) used Daystar's system in their MP models. Later, the G4 was easier to work with because it didn't have bus-level L2 or L3 caches (they were backside instead) so they didn't require the Daystar trickery for SMP+cache support.
Details are fuzzy but Interware seems to have been the first to discover and develop the L2 cache slot upgrades, originally for the Tanzania-based models (4400 and related clones), followed by a separate upgrade for the Alchemy models (54/6400). Sonnet later developed the faster, multi-model compatible L2 upgrades.
The hardest G3/G4 upgrade to get, aside from the "official" G3 upgrades for things like this C500, is the Crescendo/7200. Amiga weirdos pay tons of money to snatch these any time they come up for sale. There are likely more hacked into A4000s than there are sitting in the Macs they were designed for.
I had one of these L2 cache upgrade cards in my Performa 6400 years and years ago. I think it clocked in at 400Mhz. At one point I even went as far as hacking the 6400 into a LC 580 case replacing the built-in display with one from an external monitor. The power supply was too large to fit inside the case, so I had to do some work to make it external. It was an interesting experiment. I really wish I would have kept all my old Mac gear. I had a ton of fun tinkering with this stuff back in the late 90's - early 00's.
I love the C500! It was my first Mac Clone, oddly enough I installed the same G3 / 400MHz upgrade in mine. Although my clone was stock with a 603e/200 CPU. I look forward to see what you’ll do with these going forward. 🤓 Oh and nice shirt!
You mentioned having some upgrades planned for the 5400; I'm really curious if there's anything that can be done to upgrade the 5300/6300 series, short of just replacing the motherboard with a PCI model.
No, sadly. These are already basically Quadra 630 boards with PPC upgrades grafted on, and the ROM is installed on the L2 cache card on most of these models (except for some of the later 100 or 120MHz versions) so there's nowhere to install a CPU upgrade. A logic board swap isn't hard, though: just modify the harness slightly (cut a particular ground wire and replace it with +3.3V to the logic board) and it'll slide right in.
I've upgraded every Mac I've ever owned as much as was possible over the course of ownership. Even the original Bondi Blue iMac had a voodoo card installed in it via the proprietary PDS slot. The last Mac I bought (not purchased by work) was a Mac Pro 3,1 8 core xeon. That one was the most upgradable yet, then something terrible happened. I couldn't buy a mac that's user upgradable for any price. The M1 certainly made it worse. I was a real fan of Xlr8yourmac back in the day. I really appreciated the info they provided about upgrade compatibility with various models and tracked when something went on sale. This takes me back to happier times. Thanks!
I had to go search after you mentioned Phase 5... I only ever knew them for their Amiga work like the legendary Blizzards and Cyberstorms. I had absolutely no idea they were working on G3 upgrades for Macs too, that's neat!
This reminds me of my old commodore64 upgrade, upgrading the processor and memory by clamping a card directly on top of the cpu.
It worked by having the addon pushing power to a specific pin to force the original processor in to a constant reset state while having the new processor take the bypassed duties. It was pretty awesome.
I had one of these in my Performa 6360. It was only 250MHz but with a modified version of the Sonnet extension it could easily be overclocked. Mine was stable at 300MHz.
I love how we all revere dosdude1 as being the god of mac upgradability
These upgrade videos are so fun, and they speak to me! I remember dropping an 040 upgrade in a Mac IIsi (quite buggy) and searching high and low for the elusive 7200 upgrade card. Does this cache card work in a 7200? I can’t remember.
How you manage to actually get a hold of these things is far beyond me, I've never been able to find a single accelerator card for sale for any of my Macs
I've seen one or two on ebay, but they're always "damaged/faulty" but still $700+ because **RARE**
I got mine from vintage Mac user discussion boards, there’s usually a want to buy/for sale section
Apple back then: "hey, wanna turn your 68k into a g4? we got da hookup"
apple now: "you want a _new_ Mac? no, no. without a corporate expense account, the best you can get is a Mac Mini, and if the warranty sticker still isn't on everything, we get to wipe the boot drive and ban you from buying another"
Apple now has pretty much become like trying to buy a Ferrari, and it's disgusting that people still put up with it. But it then makes these videos that much more exciting!
People wouldn't put up with it if there were a competent, viable competitor that wasn't equally as bad. Like, if you want a good Windows machine today, with the kind of low-bloat out of box experience you get on a mac, you basically have to buy a Surface. A completely unrepairable Surface. My last Windows PC was a HP tablet that cost me literally as much as a similarly specced Mac would have at the time, 2015, and the build quality was appalling. I treat my computers well, but my HP Spectre X2 literally had buttons falling out of the chassis, and the stand had gotten sloppy within six months. Further, despite using USB C to charge, it wasn't PD compliant. Their USB C charger had a 19V mode, and a PD compliant charger wouldn't work in it, so you were stuck with their brick only. HP are supposed to be one of the good ones, the big corporate players. I would have bought a Lenovo, but Lenovo in Australia basically only sells to corporate purchasing departments. If you want a retail Lenovo here, you're paying Thinkpad prices for their budget Ideapad line.
Since getting my M1 Air, I've noticed small touches to the hardware that I didn't know _COULD_ be good. Like, until now, I've never used a trackpad that didn't make me immediately want to plug in a mouse, and in Windows, I've never seen multitouch gestures that actually worked. I didn't know laptop speakers could be good on anything but a 4kg gaming laptop, but on the M1 Air, they're impressive, _and they face UP_ which shouldn't be so rare, but it is. Frankly, Apple can get as draconian as they want in their control of the hardware we buy, and I'm probably going to keep buying Apple gear because there just isn't good competition for them. The price isn't even as outrageous as it used to be. I mean, sure, there's no $800 laptop option. I'd like to see them revive the iBook branding. I wouldn't mind a lower res screen and a plastic case if I could get a Mac laptop under nine hundred dollarydoos (the official name of the Australian currency), but if someone is looking at a $1000-1500 HP, there are very few reasons for them not to consider a Mac instead.
@@NoobixCube speaking as someone that's basically built their own desktops and builds and such, sometimes for specific purposes, the big OEMs { Hp, Dell, Lenovo } were _never good._ As someone that primarily is in it for the games, they're all non-starters. Too much of it being bastardized proprietary junk and stuffed into the worst environments to ensure they only survive past an arbitrary 90 day warranty and no more.
Hard to appreciate anything about Apple now when it feels like the M1 route was only selected specifically to spite the Hackintosh movement, that was making better builds for less money than what Apple itself was offering officially. Whether it is or not isn't the point; it's the fact that given the timing and everything else going on, it _feels_ as if Apple is only going with ARM just to kill off the ability to have any kind of third party Macintosh.
I'm already angry with apple about the iphone making other phone makers basically ape them harder and harder, eliminating all the good android and windows phone designs. Apparently phone makers think everyone can just drop *two thousand dollars a month on a phone* and be happy. Meanwhile I'm stuck with my v20 because nothing newer can let me replace the battery without committing to open heart surgery skills to do. For my usage and needs, I'm not exaggerating when I say I need a phone that can actually do 10+ hours of screen on. When the modern flagship phone can't even surpass four without whinging for a charger, that's actually getting in the way of a typical work day for me. Back on point, though...
The M1 was designed to be a disposable notebook, at premium notebook pricing. And that's what I find offensive. Even now I still have project builds for say, running Windows 9x or xp to run games of those eras at optimal fidelity and basically "max all the settings without even trying"; I wouldn't be able to do that with Apple even if I wanted to. It's like Apple's business methods from the beginning are counter to that.
@@ZeroHourProductions407Apple went with ARM because x86 chips could not provide a comparable power/performance ratio. An M-series laptop offers excellent performance as well as very long battery life, coupled with silent operation. Hackintosh builds had nothing to do with it.
phase5 made many accelerators for Amiga Computer, eaven card wich had 68k and 604 PPC on same card :)
Have a Performa 6300CD and it's also CPU upgrade challenged. It has both a PDS and L2 cache slot but no CPU upgrades are available.... unless the board is swapped for a 6360.
I really miss my Power Mac 6100/G3+AV.... i had Windows 98 SE running on Connectix Virtual PC, back in the day. RAM was maxed-out at 136MB. It died during a rolling blackout and I didn't have a UPS unit back then. 😓 Upgraded with the Sonnet Crescendo G3/500 NuBus.
Oh no!
I wonder if it's possible, considering the POWER ISA is a superset of older PPC instruction sets, for NXP or similar to make a modern PPC chip which could fit the old zip sockets, and if that newer CPU could be capable of running older PPC software.
Great video as always. I miss so much my G4.
Nice upgrade. I’m still trying to find the 68040 PDS upgrade for the LC.
there where sometime the same brand that does the Amiga acceleratorr and PPC processor.
Fantastic video. I really appreciate the series. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication.
You aren’t kidding that those cache slot accelerators are hard to find. I waited for months to snag one on ebay for my Umax C600. Ended up with a G3/400, even though I had been holding out for the 500. Runs like a dream though.
I used to have one of those L2 G3 CPUs in my Power Mac 5500. It was pretty neat but the 50mhz FSB on that model really crippled its potential. Cool to see one in a clone!
I actually have a C500e myself, and there was officially a G3 upgrade card using the modified Socket 5 ZIF. But that one is very hard to find
Those upgrades did came in handy!
13:00 Press the mountain buttons on the bottom left to scale the charts!
you should use stratavision 3d as a benchmark and see if you can outperform a network stack of old quadras with one of those upgrade cards
I sort of wish we could still do that. I have a Quadra 650 with a Powerpc 601 card in it. It would nice to upgrade my socket am3+ to a Ryzen with little effort. But, part of that was the price of those early macs and accessories for it. Even for the PC though less used in my area was a Pentium Over Drive chip. But now that prices have come down. Getting a new board, processor and ram is about and the same price and you didn't have some limitations. For instance some extensions and software will not run with the Powerpc enabled. Etc, etc etc. I should say mostly additional hardware limitations.
What CPU is installed in your AM3+ motherboard, and which AM3+ motherboard is it?
@@craigtheduck I forget the model of Asus board it is. But the Amd is the FX-8350.
Gawd Dang! I had a 500c desktop that I acquired in a bulk buy a couple years ago. I got it working and sold it on eBay. Really wish I'd kept that thing...it was pretty neat.
Supposedly Sonnet also made a CPU upgrade for the Power Macintosh 7200 that plugged into a PCI slot.
Has anybody managed to install a Unix-ish OS like Linux or NetBSD on a cache-slot upgraded Mac? I remember trying to install LinuxPPC some 10 years ago on a PM 6500 with a Sonnet G3, but it hang on booting not finding some table in memory (I don't remember exactly)
I wonder, if you can use the jumper block to increase the bus speed even further @actionRetro. I see it's set at 67MHz, but I am not sure if that's stock, or controlled by the Sonnet CPU card?
I like upgrades too. That's how I started playing with computers, I took trashed computers and upgraded them the best they could get and then used them. Craziest thing I did was buy a modded 1.4GHz Pentium 3-S. I used that with Windows XP for a while long after Vista and Seven came out. I'm pretty sure my Dad swapped out his 486 board for a Pentium some time in the far past as well. It's a shame modern computers aren't so upgradeable what with all the environmental concerns about throw-a-way culture
Love your videos
Fans Nooo that's impossible!!
ActionRetro search your feelings, you know it be true
As always, great video!
Is the two-keys-at-a-time issue a quirk with this clone, specifically or was it an issue with Apple machines of this time too?
Another pretty weird G3 upgrade is for the PowerMac 7200 which didn't have a CPU slot like all the other PCI PowerMacs. The upgrade actually goes in a PCI slot.
Ok if you upgrade the TAM you can get OS9Helper and the 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 upgrades open them in the desktop and trick the upgrade to OS 9.2.2 and the January ATI upgrade to give it millions of colors, and install 128 MB of RAM
Another awesome video!! It’s cool to increase 10 years ahead in processing power but what about graphics performance? A g3 should be playing RTCW or Deus Ex etc
Does anyone know if the S910 ever shipped?
I had a Power Mac G4 and I swapped the 466 MHz G4 to 733 MHz on a daughter card.
Also I overclocked my blue and white G3 to 450 MHz from 400 MHz but it is not noticeable increase but it was fun swapping around jumper blocks.
I would love to know whether any upgrades were made for the Powermac 6500. Brilliant video BTW. ;-)
I actually had this exact Sonnet G3/400 upgrade for my 6500 back in the 90s. It was a nice improvement but it wasn't as fast as an actual G3 machine. I eventually replaced it with a Dual 533 MHz G4 PowerMac. Sometimes I wish I hadn't gotten rid of those machines and that upgrade...
Technically there are more Umax models as European units had different names. I have two Apus 3000 machines (one broken beyond repair due to a battery damage), and thus two CPUs - one is original, one is PPC G3.
Those machines are a bit funny as the original CPU uses... Socket 5, just like Intel Pentium processors. Obviously not compatible, but that was quite an surprise when I first disassembled one.
I got a G3 upgrade in my TAM... Sorry for helping to make this type of upgrade scarce! :P
there is a quad mod for the umax
Really?!
@@ActionRetro yes I saw a picture of it . It's not for the main Mac you were featuring in this video it's fir the other umaxx
You must have one of the best collections of upgrade cards now.
I'd be very happy to buy an upgrade for bondi blue iMac that is compatible with the Voodoo2. Can anyone help?
I always loved the upgrade cards; the problem was the cost was always so much that I could not afford it at the time.
your Sony monitor had to have been my favorite ever I replaced it with a viewSonic LCD !
For a second, you had my hopes up that I could easily upgrade my iMac G3 with a soldered CPU.
I hope to see Power PC 7200 processor upgrade one day...
Where did you get that awesome T-Shirt!?!?
No Duke Nukem 3D? :p Also was there Quake for Macs? Those would really kinda show software rendering performance.
There was a version of quake for Classic OS, also a version of Shadow Warrior was ported over as well.
How does ut99 run on it?
There’s just something about old hardware that new hardware just can’t replicate
patience?
in many ways, we're still in that era. am4 is basically an all-in-house version of this premise for hte modern era. To this day you can boot an end-of-life cpu in a beginning of life board, and thats, what, a 7 year difference, and one of the fastest changing time periods in tech? At the same time though, it also goes to show just how much more could potentially be done if more companies thought outside hte box.
Please, could a Mac IIci be upgradable in similar fashion, too? TIA.
I don't believe any version of Mac OSX runs on any below g3 cpu. Wolfenstein is my test also, though, it seems to me it should have run better on the stock cpu. Mine runs on an LCIII. I have two of the SuperMac clones myself, a 500 and a 700, so I enjoy the effort you put in them.
i need some help. i have the chance to buy a G3 L2 240Mhz from Interware. its japan. 6360CD system. are these worth it? can i play quake 3? will i be able to run a 9200 Radeon in the PCI slot as well?
What's the difference between ZIFF and PGA ?
Thanks for the video!!! Have you upgraded a 5400???
I had quite a few of those sony monitors in 15, 17, 19, and 21 inch sizes, they were very nice. Sad that I threw them away...
I’m a lucky owner of a Sonnet G3/400 upgraded Power Macintosh 6100/60. Best part, I found the G3 card in a parts machine I bought.
Still have my Cresendo G3 250 in my 6400/200 & can easily swap into my TAM
If you really want to Frankenstein a real Mac, Get a Beige G3 / Blue White G3 and replace the zif G3 with a Zif G4, The beige can accept up to 4 IDE (M/S) including CD/DVD roms drives, 50 pin SCSI internal / External and a Floppy port :) and a few PCI cards like an unmodded Diamond 3D 3DFX just boots :)
Wow need to do this
wooooaaaooowww long long time waited video. very special thx. you chosen one.
I thought it would be a CPU piggy back upgrade, never imagined a upgrade from the cache slot
Most-likely a stupid question, but given the age of _Wolfenstein 3D_ when the PowerPC was introduced, is the game even a "fat" executable..? (and it's a *long* time since I've used that phrase…) - viz., does it even have any PowerPC code resource, or is it being transparently emulated..?
(I remember games saved on a 680x0 (bizarrely) being unable to be opened on a PowerPC, which points to the game having a PowerPC code resource, but the games performance points to it not having a PowerPC code resource 🤷🏻♂️)
got the powerpc 5500/225 g3 uppgrade to 350 mhz ''00
I keep seeing this cool shirt and I can't find it online, I really want one!
Great video! Let me know if you're interested in the Crescendo Sonnet v3.1 software for that L2 G3 upgrade.
I don't know what happened to the rather large comment I posted here, so to summarise;
Bit late sorry.
UMAX Apus C500 180Mhz - bought in UK 1998, Added a Voodoo 3 2000 and a Phase 5 Aptus G3, played Unreal Engine titles and Glide games like Carmageddon really well, as well as Open GL based Quake III etc.
Still worked the last time I turned it on, which was many years ago!
14:35 Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein und das heisst;
Wish I could upgrade my 5200, hell I I wish I could restore it. Its cosmeticly screwed but it still works.
Cool names like allegro 🤔
Look for the Austin Allegro and rethink the cool 😂🤣
osx and ranch dressing me too😁
Hey nice video, it’s like a month that I follow you and I can’t miss any of your videos! However I really love that shirt and I would like to buy it too, do you know where I can buy it?
The intel Slot-1 was that way.
I wish I could stick this in my Mac SE/30... sigh
It's a shame Wolf3D is not optimized well for mac. I recently discovered that it's source code has been public since at least 2013 I think. I'm surprised no one has tried to improve it so it runs better on older 68k macs...
On a related note I wonder if any PowerPC accelerators were ever made for the LC/LC IIIs? I doubt I'd ever afford to get one even if such a unicorn exists.... :P
That machine has a PDS slot so it would be technically possible I would assume.
EDIT: had to edit my comment to remove mention of a certain well known repository host for code since it appeared the comment got auto deleted when I tried to edit it for spelling mistakes. Odd why is that particular site getting spam filtered? lol Well it's the place that is a hub where you git code...If you know what I mean. That's where I found the wolf3d source code.
Yoo we have the same sata cable
I've always wondered if cache slots could be used to upgrade the CPU. _[insert The More You Know meme here]_
I’m lucky enough to have two of those purple gems 💎
So close to 35K :D