Imac G3 233 Revision A - Revival

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Imac G3 233 Revision A - Revival

Hi

 

Nothing exceptionnal but Iconic for me as this is the orginal one ... and the last one I got in school!

Working great as far as I can test!

 

The beautiful beast 

The wound

I believe this is impossible to make home with 3D printing ....

 

The battery

Probably dead as time not kept ... need to fix that ASAP

 

The RAM

For now 128Mb+32Mb. I understand the max for Revision A is 128Mb+256Mb, correct?

Ordered a 256Mb on its way ...

 

 The Harddrive - Backup strategy - Qemu 

Currently this is I believe the original 4Gb hardrive which contains the whole history up to today in Macos 9.2.2 swedish version from the previous first owner! I would like to preserve it in an image form usable in qemu before messing around with hardware and software.

I have been able already to install 9.2.2 from scracth in Qemu, so getting familiar for this part but I have to say I more uncertain related to the steps before.

Is it as simple as?

- format a usb stick in HFS

- drag the complete harddrive there 

- make an image from usb stick 

- boot the image in QEMU

 

Replace the harddrive

Learning from Action Retro I have ordered a 16Gb industrial disk straight ... on its way!

 

The fun 

The "secret" port which can be used for extension .... sounds fun!

 

The keyboard for dummies

I used it mostly with keyboard on my legs .... need to learn how to navigate the menus from there! Any Macos 9 keyboard shortcut reference for dummies?

Is MacOS 9 flexible enought to be set with one lnaguage and the keyboard from another one? I would be surprised not ....

 

Let me know if there is any more fun to investigate in the original iMac!

 

 

 

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Congrats for finding a Rev A iMac!

You may have to use something like Disk Utility to image the hard drive. Boot sectors don't exactly get copied over just by dragging files to a USB drive. Unfortunately, seeing as how this predates FireWire iMacs, it'll be difficult to copy stuff over.

As for that "secret slot", that was internally known as the Mezzanine slot, and the original Bondi Blue iMacs are the ONLY ones that have it! Upgrade cards were sold for these iMacs and even a Video card upgrade, probably a 3dfx Voodoo if I recall correctly. One upgrade card I do know of is the Sonnet HARMONi G3 cards, which upgrade the system to a PowerPC 750CXe (at 600MHz?) and also give the system a FireWire port. Unfortunately, like with almost every 3rd party Macintosh CPU upgrade card in existence, they are practically unobtanium.

Yes, the max RAM in earlier iMacs is 384MB. I think it may be dependent on PC66 RAM, however.

The Industrial Disk is a great choice, but unfortunately these old Macs can only address up to 8.1GB of storage. Be sure you partition your drive to be 8GB or less!

Also, you're lucky your PRAM hasn't leaked onto the board. Some of these iMacs use the dreaded Maxell batteries that plagued pretty much every Mac made before 1999.

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I have one that looks exactly

I have one that looks exactly like that except it is a Strawberry model.  I need to pull it out and make sure it still works so I can put it out on eBay.  The one I have has MacOSX 10.3.9 on it.  I've still got that install media.

 

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found that about the disk

found that about the disk backup/copy ....

Backup disk under mac os 9

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The batteryDead dead ....

The battery

Dead dead .... probably the original one! But no leakage, lucky me.

 

Mother 

No obvious leakage also there 

 

 

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kamelie wrote:The batteryDead
kamelie wrote:

The battery

Dead dead .... probably the original one! But no leakage, lucky me.

[[{"fid":"34125","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","alignment":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"default","alignment":"","field_file_image

Good catch. The extermination of Maxell half-AAs goes further!

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softwarejanitor wrote:I have
softwarejanitor wrote:

I have one that looks exactly like that except it is a Strawberry model...

 

Actually the Bondi Blue was the original iMac and Strawberry was one of five colors released (Blueberry, Grape, Tangerine and Lime) in the next updated version of the iMac about one year later, with a faster CPU from the original 233 to a choice of 266 or 333.

Also a 6MB internal hard drive was optional to the original 4MB one.

 

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'The original memory 

'The original memory 

 

Memory max out (... but I am willing to test with another 256 to see if the bareer was due to orginal 66 speed ... now 100 speed RAM)

 

The cpu/card

2 questions here:
  • Does it help to renew the thermal paste for G3?
  • Any plug and play cpu card options from another mac model?

 

Mother back side 

No priority is to find out how to make an image of current harddrive .....

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For hdd backup (and use in

For hdd backup (and use in qemu ...) I will try that

Disk Copy 6

Unless someone as better idea

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