I recently purchased this beige G3.
It was sold to me as being fully functional, but became my first retrobright project, as it was way too yellowed to be looked at and not be annoyed.
Here are some pics of the machine when I disassembled it completely to give it a thorough cleaning before getting to retrobrighting the plastics: (This happened within hours of me acquiring the machine!)
This gives you some idea as to how yelled this machine was.
I chose to follow this example to redrobright the machine, as I didn't want to use the submersion method, as it would have damaged the metal screening on the inside of some of the case parts:
The back panel was the first panel I started with, as it was the most yellowed:
Here's how it originally looked and here it is after 1 hour and 48 minutes:
Here's how it looked after the first redrobright session:
Now it was on to the main case plastics:
This is how they looked at the end of the day:
I took this pic when I started the last stretch of this exercise: (The final redrobright session)
This is how the machine looks now after reassembly: (It's not 100% perfect, but it's 99% better than it was, and best of all it's no longer an annoyance to look at!
)
I've fitted the ATI Rage 128 allowing me to run a standard monitor, it also has a dual USB card fitted. I spent the whole evening yesterday figuring out how to get OS9 installed onto this thing with the ATI Rage 128 installed, as every time the OS9 installer loaded, it would run at a resolution which was out or range for my screen, so what I ended up doing was installing OS9 using the video output on the personality card and putting that through a composite to HDMI converter to get an image on my monitor.
Once OS9 was installed I changed the resolution on the ATI Rage 128 to 1280x1024, as it had been defaulting to 1600x1200!
I'm currently having one issue though in that the system detects the USB card and shows it in the system profiler, but for the life of me I can't get it to work! I also tried the Belkin card which works perfectly in my G4 Digital Audio, to no avail. it seems like I need a specific driver to make it work in this machine, as I'd like to run it with a USB keyboard and mouse as well as have mass storage support. (any help with this would be much appreciated!)
The system has a very nice floppy drive, which works, however It's missing its ZIP drive, so I'll have to source one for this machine as well as for my G3 B&W.
I had a bit of a scare this morning when I tried to swap this CPU for the 450MHz one which came out of my B&W.
I thought I’d blown the Motherboard, as the machine didn’t even give me a power light!!! Even with the original CPU and jumper block slotted!
I pulled everything, gave it a good clean, put it back together and now it works again!
The problem here is that I have no idea what happened!
But at least it now works again, so I’ll be skipping this upgrade for now!
Here's the machine's current configuration:
As with all of these projects, one thing leads to another: I currently don't have an ADB keyboard for this machine that works, but I've been able to navigate around a bit with a sticky ADB mouse that I got with the machine.
This brings me to my point: I need an ADB keyboard and mouse to complement this machine, and I need it to be as cool as possible!
So I'm going to get one of these to complement this system:
It was sold to me as being fully functional, but became my first retrobright project, as it was way too yellowed to be looked at and not be annoyed.
Here are some pics of the machine when I disassembled it completely to give it a thorough cleaning before getting to retrobrighting the plastics: (This happened within hours of me acquiring the machine!)
This gives you some idea as to how yelled this machine was.
I chose to follow this example to redrobright the machine, as I didn't want to use the submersion method, as it would have damaged the metal screening on the inside of some of the case parts:
The back panel was the first panel I started with, as it was the most yellowed:
Here's how it originally looked and here it is after 1 hour and 48 minutes:
Here's how it looked after the first redrobright session:
Now it was on to the main case plastics:
This is how they looked at the end of the day:
I took this pic when I started the last stretch of this exercise: (The final redrobright session)
This is how the machine looks now after reassembly: (It's not 100% perfect, but it's 99% better than it was, and best of all it's no longer an annoyance to look at!
)
I've fitted the ATI Rage 128 allowing me to run a standard monitor, it also has a dual USB card fitted. I spent the whole evening yesterday figuring out how to get OS9 installed onto this thing with the ATI Rage 128 installed, as every time the OS9 installer loaded, it would run at a resolution which was out or range for my screen, so what I ended up doing was installing OS9 using the video output on the personality card and putting that through a composite to HDMI converter to get an image on my monitor.
Once OS9 was installed I changed the resolution on the ATI Rage 128 to 1280x1024, as it had been defaulting to 1600x1200!
I'm currently having one issue though in that the system detects the USB card and shows it in the system profiler, but for the life of me I can't get it to work! I also tried the Belkin card which works perfectly in my G4 Digital Audio, to no avail. it seems like I need a specific driver to make it work in this machine, as I'd like to run it with a USB keyboard and mouse as well as have mass storage support. (any help with this would be much appreciated!)
The system has a very nice floppy drive, which works, however It's missing its ZIP drive, so I'll have to source one for this machine as well as for my G3 B&W.
I had a bit of a scare this morning when I tried to swap this CPU for the 450MHz one which came out of my B&W.
I thought I’d blown the Motherboard, as the machine didn’t even give me a power light!!! Even with the original CPU and jumper block slotted!
I pulled everything, gave it a good clean, put it back together and now it works again!
The problem here is that I have no idea what happened!
But at least it now works again, so I’ll be skipping this upgrade for now!
Here's the machine's current configuration:
As with all of these projects, one thing leads to another: I currently don't have an ADB keyboard for this machine that works, but I've been able to navigate around a bit with a sticky ADB mouse that I got with the machine.
This brings me to my point: I need an ADB keyboard and mouse to complement this machine, and I need it to be as cool as possible!
So I'm going to get one of these to complement this system:
