Great video =) The 90s and early 2000s were definitely a different era when it came to computers and gaming. It's crazy to think I was gaming on a Pentium II with like 256MB of RAM playing titles like Heavy Gear and Battlezone when the iMac G3 came out. =O
Holy crap thats very very late to be using those! I remember that when I was in school in 2009 we has shit Pentium 4 optiplex Dell machines that ran Windows XP if I remember correctly.
I actually managed to just find an iMac G3 last summer in a thrift store in it's stock configuration with MacOS 9.something, so yeah I had some fun with it before I had to leave it. I'll be able to play around with it again this summer though, as I'll be around it. Might look into upgrading it as well.
@@snadwichbcuzyes3359 OOF yeah best thing to do is get an IDE to SATA converter and a cheap 128GB SSD and go that route. Plus it would make the imac totally quiet.
It was very thoughtful to have the flicker warming at the beginning. I'm not sensitive, but I appreciate it for those who are. I have this machine. Just got it with 1GB ram and 64GB Rust drive. You can swap in an IDE to mSATA adapter. Getting rid of the spinning disk sped mine up a bit. Looking forward to having time to REALLY play with it. I've also got a Clamshell arriving today! So stoked!
Oh man I'm kinda jealous you got a clamshell. One county music video that I still listen to to this day, Online, has a clamshell in the beginning and I think that scene is just perfect
@@DimondDoesTech I got the Clamsgell bug again watching Gilmore Girls. They have the Bondi and I remembered how very much I coveted them when they came out! I also do wireless stuff for a living, so the fact that it was the first machine with in-built WiFi made it a must have.
@@DimondDoesTech I acquired a slot-loading iMac G3 about a week before Christmas, and upgraded it with 1 GB of RAM and a 128 GB Compact Flash card for a hard-drive. The iMac boots fast and runs very smooth and stable with these upgrades. :D
The G3 isn't ideal for 2000s gaming but it's a perfect computer for running 68k software. I recommend installing an SSD, max out the ram and memory put in a Noctua fan, and you'll be BALLING like it's 1998.
Back in the day, we used to think all Macs could play were educational titles like Pajama Sam and Putt Putt, or super solvers... Try American McGee's Alice, Diablo 2, Clive Barker's Undying, SNES9x, Connectix VGS (PS1), Tomb Raider games, starcraft, warcraft, etc.. Despite the iMac's success, I still consider it a marketing disaster because it was mainly advertised to schools and libraries rather than the home user :/ I would have rocked the hell out of an iMac had I owned one. I held onto a 600MHz Pentium 3 until around 2003..
To a large degree I think you are true but honestly not completely. There more than likely kids who did realize that Macs could also play actual games but most didn't. I mean hell look at what Google is doing with them sending a metric boatload of chromebooks to schools. Most kids will think that they are just for work (and they are because they are locked down) but other kids will eventually get older and want their own chromebook and will find that they'll be able to play proper games on it. TLDR yeah it was a marketing disaster but not a complete failure.
I wouldn't say the upgradability in the modern day is "none", precisely. The most common thing you'd do with a computer of this era is replace the ailing 23 year old hard drive with an SSD or SD card with appropriate conversion hardware, CF card, or Disk On Module (it seems Mac folks have finally discovered what Amiga folks have been doing these past several years, with those). A DOM is usually a drop-in replacement for any IDE disk, and they can be had for a reasonable price, at least compared to the price of an SSD that'll largely go to waste, and a bevy of converters the G3 isn't going to like before you find one that works. Running OS X 10.4 on these is also a little ambitious. It works, and I'm sure running contemporary applications, and browsing a contemporary web, it was fine, but you're really better off putting OS 9 on these things, for performance. Between putting in some kind of modern storage device, and rolling back to OS 9, you should find this thing practically flies, by comparison.
True that. 10.4 is quite high intensive on this old hardware but I really do like how it looks software wise. Also I'm not sure if OS 9 could sync with my iPod 3rd gen. And I did test in OS 9 (I forget the revision) and it really did run much faster, especially on bootup, vs 10.4 Edit: Oops this is my first channel. Meant to comment on the 2nd
I bet it works beautifully for that! I still can't believe how sharp and smooth this CRT actually is. Like it almost doesn't even look like the image was made on a CRT for how good it looks
If I remember correctly that would've been the powermac G5 which was the first cheese grater mac and yeah I LOVE how those look. I'm kinda sad I passed up the chance to buy a cinema display though :(
That and said monitor was of fantastic quality. Idk if I mentioned this in the video but that thing could do 640x480 @ 117hz! It could even still do 1024x768 @ 75hz and man it is definitely the clearest and most colorful CRT I've ever had the pleasure of viewing. It's even decently bright as well!
I'm pretty sure that if you press F11 on Minecraft and use a texture pack that limits all the textures to 4 individual pixels on one block, you could maybe get a playable game in a plains biome or a superflat world, I would want to try it myself but I don't really have a working G3 iMac right now.
I wish I had kept some of my old Power Mac G3s. Though I do have an eMac, but with these old Macs their main problem is finding a decent web browsers for modern websites... Still can't find any 3rd party browsers can that render those yet...
Well the browser I used, TenFourFox, worked... ok enough. It wasn't insanely good as youtube was just straight up not gonna happen but other sites, as you saw, were actually usable somehow. But that browser is probably the last browser you can find for the PPC architecture as even the fastest G5 processors are pathetically slow even in comparison to, say, a late Pentium 4.
LInks 2 (down to 10.3.9), Arctic Fox PPC (10.4.11 required) are your best bets. Don't expect miracles, but with Arctic Fox much of the web is accessible, albeit slow on anything that isn't a speedy G4 or a G5. Building a new browser for old OS'es is like going back to the moon but only using the leftover technology of 1960s space race.
@@jackilynpyzocha662 When I got my 2005 G5 imac I was stunned at how fast it was. Running Panther, it tore through everything I threw at it. In two years, it was obsolete (Intel switch). A cautionary tale when dealing with Apple. Same thing is going to happen when they kill Intel support in a year or so....
You need to give me a few names as I'd love to try these older games! I don't have my Win 98 PC up and running yet so itd certainly be interesting to see
Cute as it was, I ended up trading my 400 MHz slot loader for a dual 450 MHz G4 Power Mac GE. Not sure who came on top there, but I did actually need the expansion slots of the tower and I imagine it'll be much easier to keep running in the future.
@@DimondDoesTech Who knows, the guy seemed to have a few spares. The biggest problem I could find was a broken clip on the front speaker bracket, it barely even had dust in it. I did pay him 20€ for an extra hdd, a gig of ram and OS9 install discs though.
This takes me way back to when I was in elementary school and we had these back in classrooms and the PC lab. This thing pretty much kicked windows out until XP came along, those specs while worthless in today's time were very good back then. Pretty shocking to see only 512MB of Ram and 8MB of vram and little storage, 400 or so mhZ processer. Here I am now with a 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD mixed with TB's in external storage, i7, and 6GB of Vram on my more modern gaming laptop. So yea, no big modern gaming ever on the imac G3, but VERY old school games seem fine, I wonder if sc4 would be alright given how sc3000 plays fine?
While I haven't tried Sim City 4 out on this thing I'd imagine it won't run well. Given the type of game it is it might just be fine but who knows. I'd have to give it a go but I don't have the time to dink around with my G3 currently and if left on for too long it will turn itself off (flyback transformer is dying in the CRT causing, I believe, voltage ripple?)
Depending on where you go you might be able to find one at a recycler for cheap. That's what I did. But as far as their value it's not like they are skyrocketing vs their ancestors like the OG macintosh
I have the exact same imac with 1gb of ram as well :p i don't have the airport card but it doesn't support modern encryption standards anyway :p great video!
Thanks! I noticed the airport card only supports 802.11a/b so its rather useless today but still VERY interesting to play with WiFi on a machine before the year 2000
@@DimondDoesTech Yeahi have my dad's old pismo, it has the same airport card in it, under tiger it supports wpa 1, i have an older airport express base station which supports this standard so i can get wifi on my oldie pismo :p
@@bramvandenbroeck5060 Wow! Unfortunately for me my router is 802.11x and does not support any encryption lower than WPA2. Thankfully because I live out in yonder nowhere I can leave a password-less connection to my router visible so I can actually connect to said router.
Well depends on when you had to use them. If you were in a school that couldn't afford new PCs and ya'll had to use these into the mid 00s... yeah that would've been absolutely AWFUL. If you used these back around when they came out then they were actually pretty snappy.
I believe that something like that sorta exists but only for older websites. Its like old.net or something? I saw someone use it in a video or something like that. Was still really surprised that Facebook loaded and worked perfectly, just as a 2008 version of itself. How very bizarre...
I just scored a 1998 G3 on ebay, and I'm so excited to get it lol.
Dude that is awesome!
Updates?
That's cool. What color of iMac did you get?
Great video =)
The 90s and early 2000s were definitely a different era when it came to computers and gaming. It's crazy to think I was gaming on a Pentium II with like 256MB of RAM playing titles like Heavy Gear and Battlezone when the iMac G3 came out. =O
Yeah no kidding! I was born after this machine so it's very interesting to go back and look at how things used to get done
We had to use these at school even in 2007 and 2008
Holy crap thats very very late to be using those! I remember that when I was in school in 2009 we has shit Pentium 4 optiplex Dell machines that ran Windows XP if I remember correctly.
@@DimondDoesTech it was elementary school
@@yutaka831 I was also in elementary school in 2009 but heck machines from, as late as 2003 I suppose, being used in 2007 & 8 is kinda nuts
I actually managed to just find an iMac G3 last summer in a thrift store in it's stock configuration with MacOS 9.something, so yeah I had some fun with it before I had to leave it. I'll be able to play around with it again this summer though, as I'll be around it. Might look into upgrading it as well.
That's pretty cool! Depending on the model you may even be able to upgrade the CPU!
@@DimondDoesTech I'm not sure if it narrows it down enough, but mine also has a slot-loading CD drive
@@snadwichbcuzyes3359 Dang so you're in the same boat as me. Only the very early tray loading G3s could have their CPU upgraded
@@DimondDoesTech ah, damn. At least I can get more ram and maybe a hard drive more than six gigabytes in there-
@@snadwichbcuzyes3359 OOF yeah best thing to do is get an IDE to SATA converter and a cheap 128GB SSD and go that route. Plus it would make the imac totally quiet.
It was very thoughtful to have the flicker warming at the beginning. I'm not sensitive, but I appreciate it for those who are.
I have this machine. Just got it with 1GB ram and 64GB Rust drive. You can swap in an IDE to mSATA adapter. Getting rid of the spinning disk sped mine up a bit. Looking forward to having time to REALLY play with it.
I've also got a Clamshell arriving today! So stoked!
Oh man I'm kinda jealous you got a clamshell. One county music video that I still listen to to this day, Online, has a clamshell in the beginning and I think that scene is just perfect
@@DimondDoesTech I got the Clamsgell bug again watching Gilmore Girls. They have the Bondi and I remembered how very much I coveted them when they came out! I also do wireless stuff for a living, so the fact that it was the first machine with in-built WiFi made it a must have.
@@TheCerealHobbyist Oh you bet!
@@DimondDoesTech
I acquired a slot-loading iMac G3 about a week before Christmas, and upgraded it with 1 GB of RAM and a 128 GB Compact Flash card for a hard-drive.
The iMac boots fast and runs very smooth and stable with these upgrades. :D
I remember is having this.l back in the day. The only thing I played on it was Backyard Baseball
The G3 isn't ideal for 2000s gaming but it's a perfect computer for running 68k software. I recommend installing an SSD, max out the ram and memory put in a Noctua fan, and you'll be BALLING like it's 1998.
Cool vid. Love the G3
Thanks! Glad to hear and I myself, even though I didn't grow up with it, love this thing
Back in the day, we used to think all Macs could play were educational titles like Pajama Sam and Putt Putt, or super solvers... Try American McGee's Alice, Diablo 2, Clive Barker's Undying, SNES9x, Connectix VGS (PS1), Tomb Raider games, starcraft, warcraft, etc.. Despite the iMac's success, I still consider it a marketing disaster because it was mainly advertised to schools and libraries rather than the home user :/ I would have rocked the hell out of an iMac had I owned one. I held onto a 600MHz Pentium 3 until around 2003..
To a large degree I think you are true but honestly not completely. There more than likely kids who did realize that Macs could also play actual games but most didn't. I mean hell look at what Google is doing with them sending a metric boatload of chromebooks to schools. Most kids will think that they are just for work (and they are because they are locked down) but other kids will eventually get older and want their own chromebook and will find that they'll be able to play proper games on it.
TLDR yeah it was a marketing disaster but not a complete failure.
I wouldn't say the upgradability in the modern day is "none", precisely. The most common thing you'd do with a computer of this era is replace the ailing 23 year old hard drive with an SSD or SD card with appropriate conversion hardware, CF card, or Disk On Module (it seems Mac folks have finally discovered what Amiga folks have been doing these past several years, with those). A DOM is usually a drop-in replacement for any IDE disk, and they can be had for a reasonable price, at least compared to the price of an SSD that'll largely go to waste, and a bevy of converters the G3 isn't going to like before you find one that works.
Running OS X 10.4 on these is also a little ambitious. It works, and I'm sure running contemporary applications, and browsing a contemporary web, it was fine, but you're really better off putting OS 9 on these things, for performance. Between putting in some kind of modern storage device, and rolling back to OS 9, you should find this thing practically flies, by comparison.
True that. 10.4 is quite high intensive on this old hardware but I really do like how it looks software wise. Also I'm not sure if OS 9 could sync with my iPod 3rd gen. And I did test in OS 9 (I forget the revision) and it really did run much faster, especially on bootup, vs 10.4
Edit: Oops this is my first channel. Meant to comment on the 2nd
I use my original iMac for classic point and click games. Glad I never threw it away!
I bet it works beautifully for that! I still can't believe how sharp and smooth this CRT actually is. Like it almost doesn't even look like the image was made on a CRT for how good it looks
I had a g4 2000 running 10.1! Cheese grater, Cinema display, great set-up!
If I remember correctly that would've been the powermac G5 which was the first cheese grater mac and yeah I LOVE how those look. I'm kinda sad I passed up the chance to buy a cinema display though :(
Yes. Thanks.
Sure it wasn't the most powerful thing on the market, but it was a full monitor and hardware combined without the need of a tower.
That and said monitor was of fantastic quality. Idk if I mentioned this in the video but that thing could do 640x480 @ 117hz! It could even still do 1024x768 @ 75hz and man it is definitely the clearest and most colorful CRT I've ever had the pleasure of viewing. It's even decently bright as well!
@@DimondDoesTech plus play Classic Macintosh games like Marathon
Great Video! you have to be in fullscreen for mc and on a server you will get like 20 fps
Wait seriously? That explains so many things now.
I'm pretty sure that if you press F11 on Minecraft and use a texture pack that limits all the textures to 4 individual pixels on one block, you could maybe get a playable game in a plains biome or a superflat world, I would want to try it myself but I don't really have a working G3 iMac right now.
I owned an iMac Blueberry for two years.
Heck yeah!. I personally prefer the Bondi blue G3s but the blueberry systems have a nice color of blue as well
I wish I had kept some of my old Power Mac G3s. Though I do have an eMac, but with these old Macs their main problem is finding a decent web browsers for modern websites... Still can't find any 3rd party browsers can that render those yet...
Well the browser I used, TenFourFox, worked... ok enough. It wasn't insanely good as youtube was just straight up not gonna happen but other sites, as you saw, were actually usable somehow. But that browser is probably the last browser you can find for the PPC architecture as even the fastest G5 processors are pathetically slow even in comparison to, say, a late Pentium 4.
Have you tried classila? :)
LInks 2 (down to 10.3.9), Arctic Fox PPC (10.4.11 required) are your best bets. Don't expect miracles, but with Arctic Fox much of the web is accessible, albeit slow on anything that isn't a speedy G4 or a G5. Building a new browser for old OS'es is like going back to the moon but only using the leftover technology of 1960s space race.
@@arthurvanparijs6121 Classila isn't TLS 1.2 compatible, so most of the web will not render at all.
Unreal tournament runs fine, I used to play it all the time
Heck I forgot I should've run UT
I have a iBook G4 it’s a model from 2004 and it has Mac OS X 10.5.8 on it and it holds up pretty well
iMac G5, 17", bought for Tiger!
@@jackilynpyzocha662 When I got my 2005 G5 imac I was stunned at how fast it was. Running Panther, it tore through everything I threw at it. In two years, it was obsolete (Intel switch). A cautionary tale when dealing with Apple. Same thing is going to happen when they kill Intel support in a year or so....
oh man...hundreds of great ppc games will work on that thing. hundreds!!
You need to give me a few names as I'd love to try these older games! I don't have my Win 98 PC up and running yet so itd certainly be interesting to see
@@DimondDoesTech look in the macintoshgarden.
e.g. marathon series! fantastic, aleph-one if you want opengl and hires textures.
@@drzeissler Ooooo I'll have to go take a look at that one. Thats where I got the games to test in this video was from macintosh garden I believe
Cute as it was, I ended up trading my 400 MHz slot loader for a dual 450 MHz G4 Power Mac GE. Not sure who came on top there, but I did actually need the expansion slots of the tower and I imagine it'll be much easier to keep running in the future.
Wow who on EARTH would've traded a dual G4 power mac for something as pedestrian and old as the G3? Very very strange...
@@DimondDoesTech Who knows, the guy seemed to have a few spares. The biggest problem I could find was a broken clip on the front speaker bracket, it barely even had dust in it. I did pay him 20€ for an extra hdd, a gig of ram and OS9 install discs though.
@@ozzyp97 I mean even so that is still a killer trade!
This takes me way back to when I was in elementary school and we had these back in classrooms and the PC lab. This thing pretty much kicked windows out until XP came along, those specs while worthless in today's time were very good back then.
Pretty shocking to see only 512MB of Ram and 8MB of vram and little storage, 400 or so mhZ processer.
Here I am now with a 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD mixed with TB's in external storage, i7, and 6GB of Vram on my more modern gaming laptop.
So yea, no big modern gaming ever on the imac G3, but VERY old school games seem fine, I wonder if sc4 would be alright given how sc3000 plays fine?
While I haven't tried Sim City 4 out on this thing I'd imagine it won't run well. Given the type of game it is it might just be fine but who knows. I'd have to give it a go but I don't have the time to dink around with my G3 currently and if left on for too long it will turn itself off (flyback transformer is dying in the CRT causing, I believe, voltage ripple?)
Are these holding onto their value? How much would one of these cost to a collector?
Depending on where you go you might be able to find one at a recycler for cheap. That's what I did. But as far as their value it's not like they are skyrocketing vs their ancestors like the OG macintosh
OMG I loved that 4x4 game and this video has made me remember! I'm glad I have BeamNG Drive now that times have moved on
Yeah. But heck when I had a crappy computer this game was awesome but I remember the physics sucked. Hitting a car felt like hitting a brick wall
I have the exact same imac with 1gb of ram as well :p i don't have the airport card but it doesn't support modern encryption standards anyway :p great video!
Thanks! I noticed the airport card only supports 802.11a/b so its rather useless today but still VERY interesting to play with WiFi on a machine before the year 2000
@@DimondDoesTech Yeahi have my dad's old pismo, it has the same airport card in it, under tiger it supports wpa 1, i have an older airport express base station which supports this standard so i can get wifi on my oldie pismo :p
@@bramvandenbroeck5060 Wow! Unfortunately for me my router is 802.11x and does not support any encryption lower than WPA2. Thankfully because I live out in yonder nowhere I can leave a password-less connection to my router visible so I can actually connect to said router.
i have the same blue mouse bro!
Yep the awful hockey puck mouse
You can use the terminal and use a more powerful unix/linux machine remotely (ssh).
? For what exactly?
Can it be used just as a monitor for ur laptop or pc?
Nope but you can hook up another monitor to it to have a dual monitor setup
God these things were bloody awful
Well depends on when you had to use them. If you were in a school that couldn't afford new PCs and ya'll had to use these into the mid 00s... yeah that would've been absolutely AWFUL. If you used these back around when they came out then they were actually pretty snappy.
would be cool if someone made a website or program that could convert newer sites to work on older computers
I believe that something like that sorta exists but only for older websites. Its like old.net or something? I saw someone use it in a video or something like that. Was still really surprised that Facebook loaded and worked perfectly, just as a 2008 version of itself. How very bizarre...
MMM or click on me yes
mMMmMMmm yes maybe click on him
@@DimondDoesTech MMmmmm yes click on both of them