G3 All-In-One Mac: Alric Lopez sent a couple of images of the AIO Mac (Side view and RagePro chip pix - 50k each). I really like the look of this machine. I think it would be a great general consumer/home user Mac. If they could sell this one for $1300 or so, I think it would be a runaway hit. Currently it's only available to the educational market.

Mini-Cad Benchmark: If you own MiniCad and a fast Macintosh, I'd like to know your scores. A reader sent the following forwarded message about the benchmark:

" I ran Julian Carr's MC Speed Test on a Pentium II/300 machine with 96 megs of memory running MiniCAD 7.0.1a under Windows NT. It managed a new record 14.0 rating, easily besting the old record of 11.1 held by a G3/233 machine with 90 megs of memory. We have at least one PII/400 and I believe several G3/300 machines around here, so maybe I'll see if I can talk their owners into running the test.

The test is available from Julian Carr's website: http://www.zeta.org.au/~jbcarr/ under "Free Commands".

Andrew Bell"

The Direct Download page is: http://www.zeta.org.au/~jbcarr/Download.htm, which also lists the performance of many machines in MiniCad. If you have a 300mhz G3, 300 or 350mhz Mach 5 604E and MiniCad I'd like to know your scores. Not sure if the benchmark macro will run with the MiniCad demo version, but it might (unless the benchmark does a save, export or print, which are disabled in the demo version). Download the Eval version of MiniCad at: http://www.diehlgraphsoft.com/products/MiniCAD/demo.html

Emailer Tip: Stephen Trujillo of MacGurus sent a tip that I didn't know about Emailer (I never read the Docs). To rebuild a corrupted mail database, hold down the option key when booting Emailer.

If you missed the 7PM news update last night, see yesterday's page for a monitor sale at Macgurus. Free shipping for my readers on their B-stock Micro 15" and 17" monitors.

Apple G3 and mixed SCSI/IDE disks: I've gotten more feedback on this issue, and several readers say that mixed drive types have not been a problem for them. Here's their stories:

" Mike,
I just saw your warning about mixing SCSI and IDE disks on the same Mac G3. I did just that several months ago. I have one of the earlier G3 desktop 266 models. Not too long after experiencing IDE for the first time, I decided to get ambitious and bought a Miles card and a wide 4.5 MB Seagate 7200 rpm Hawk (which seems to be a Barracuda with a different name at half the price). I have partitioned the Hawk into 4 Mac partitions, including the one that is set as the startup drive. This is a tremendous improvement over the Western Digital that came with the computer, though I have not yet done thorough benchmarking to document exactly how much (preliminary gestimate is about a 25% speed increase, but that was before partitioning the Hawk). I like the setup so much I bought another identical Hawk (model 34555W - $300 and change as I recall) with the intention of setting up a RAID, though I have not yet found time to put the other drive in.

I have seen none of the problems Mike Pifer describes, and will probably be motivated to hustle in the other disk now to see how or if RAID works on this machine. I did leave the CD-ROM alone, as opposed to Mike's move to SCSI, but other than that it seems to be a card manufacturer or software issue, as my machine works much better with a SCSI startup drive.

Keep up the great work...your site is always my first stop of the day. It is enjoyable reading and the most informative Mac site on the web in my opinion.
Sincerely,
Phil Anderson"

Timothy A. Seufert wrote:

" I have an Adaptec 2940 UW in my G3 desktop and haven't had the problems Michael Pifer had. Configuration is one Micropolis 3387UW on the 2940, one IBM 8.1 GB UDMA IDE on the primary IDE channel, and the factory 24x IDE CDROM on the second IDE channel.

Now, that's not to say that I've never had problems with a crash on shutdown or restart. However, I narrowed it down to Apple Menu Options, which generally has a *very* evil reputation. From my experiments, it appears that in some situations AMO will corrupt its prefs file every time you boot; the corrupt file causes the crash during shutdown or restart. If you delete the prefs file or move it out of the Preferences folder immediately before shutdown/restart, the crash doesn't happen.

I currently use MenuChoice as a substitute for AMO.

I'm not sure what triggers this bug in AMO. It doesn't appear immediately after I do a system install, only after I've reconfigured with my standard set of extensions. I've never had the patience to sit down and try to figure out exactly which one does it.

BTW, yet another Micropolis comment. The only problem I have with it is that it won't boot from a cold start. The computer starts to access it, shows the Happy Mac, and then it goes off into never-never land. Eventually the Mac ROMs give up and find the alternate system folder on my IDE drive and boot from that. From warm starts, the Micropolis boots fine. This problem appears to be the result of the Mac ROMs trying to boot from it before it's quite ready -- to test that theory, I set Open Firmware to not auto-boot, shut down, turned the machine back on, waited half a minute at the OF prompt, typed "bye" to start booting MacOS, and it worked fine. A friend of mine has mentioned hearing of similar problems on PC clone systems with Micropolis drives."

I've been so swamped with work and mail that I've still not tried my 4 drive dual channel external Raid array with the Adaptec 3940UW dual channel PCI card in the G3/266MT here. I hope to do that at least for some initial compatibility tests in the next week. I'll post the results in the news and at the G3-ZONE.

MacWeek/Emedia feedback: I received a ton of Macweek related feedback, too much to list here. I'll be posting a separate page next week with the reader comments. As I've said here before, personally I hate to see the loss of any Mac-specific magazine.

G-Rex 3D owner Riba writes with his experience with the latest drivers:

" I tried millions of colors too. No change. I just hope they believe you when you report about our problems. If they are unable to duplicate the lockups over there, i doubt we can expect improvements sometimes soon :(. Maybe they should get a Powercomputing clone for testing.

On the brighter side, the card seems to be running a bit more stable overall. I still do see some 'sparks' on my display, and some garbled graphics when moving windows (i'm using powerwindows control panel though). Nanosaur had no display this time at all. Also, with old drivers the card crashed my machine when i tried running those trivial techtool video tests. It does not now.

Anyway, I was always an 'early adopter', and I like to support promising and innovative companies who offer Mac products, so i often expect thing like this to happen, but Phase 5 should be aware they are hurting themselves if they don't fix this problem ASAP.
Keep me posted... "

I think the Permedia2 based G-Rex has a lot of potential, but I still continue to have lockup problems in 3D applications and RAVE. Phase 5 said they are working on a possible fix, involving the monitors preferences file. I really don't think that is the problem, but anything is possible. I'll post any updates I hear of in the news.

OrangeMicro $399 PC CPU Card: Julian Cross send the reply from OrangeMicro on his questions on the card:

" Hi Mike,
Michelle Roy (Michelle_Roy@orangemicro.com), sales rep for Orange Micro just answered a few of my questions about their cheap new ($399 w/o Win95) OrangePC 620 card. Since you've mentioned these cards a couple of times in the news, I thought you might be interested.

Specifically I asked (1) whether the $399 model included an actual Pentium or a "Pentium-compatible" processor; (2) whether the PC card could use the Mac memory bank as opposed to requiring purchase of separate PC sdram, and (3) whether the PC card could make use of a Mac PCI 3Dfx card.

"Q1. I am confused about what type of processor the basic $399 model ships with. On the spec sheet, it is titled the "OrangePC Model 620 7" PentiumÆ card", suggesting to me that it comes standard with a 200 MHz Pentium processor. However, elsewhere on your site I believe I read that it comes with a Cyrix processor.

According to your web site, it has "Support for Intel Pentium MMX and classic Pentium 100-233 MHz processors, including the Cyrix 6x86, 6x86L, 6x86MX, M II PR166-300, AMD-K5 and K6 166-300 MHz, IDT WinChip C6 180-240 MHz processors."

I'm glad that the card is upgradeable to a range of processor types and speeds, but exactly which processor does the $399 card ship with?

A1: Our card has the capability of Pentium processing. The $399 offer comes with a Cyrix PR 200 (pentium rated) processor, which runs at a Pentium speed of 200 MHz. It is still an impressive processor on this board. [The exact processor model is Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX PR200 - J]

Q2: Can the OrangePC card use my Mac RAM for use with the PC, or do I need to purchase/install separate PC-only memory to install on the Orange card?

A2: The Orange PC 620 Model uses SDRAM, the same type of RAM that is used in the G3, so if you have a G3, you may share the memory [Physically move some of it to the OrangePC card-Mike].

Q3: One big attraction of both VirtualPC and RealPC is that they now can use a Mac 3Dfx (3D graphics) card in emulation mode on the PC, by using the PC 3Dfx drivers. This speeds up 3D games tremendously (and looks much cooler). Will I be able to use my Mac PCI 3Dfx card with the PC if I have an OrangePC card?

A3: No. The only other card that the Orange PC recognizes is the Ethernet card inside your Mac. However, our 620 Model with the Cyrix PR 200 works even better than anything WITH the 3dfx card." (end quote)

Disappointing that they can't access the Mac PCI card, but at least you don't have to buy a bunch of duplicate RAM for the thing (if you have a G3 - otherwise you have to pop a dimm onto the card). I don't know enough about x86 processors to know what the performance difference will be between a Cyrix and Pentium. What is cool though is that the card can be processor-upgraded via a socket 7 ZIF. I think the maximum it is rated for is a Pentium-233/MMX. There is also a cpu/bus multiplier adjustment. Not bad for $400, when you consider that SoftWindows95 used to cost almost that much.
regards,
J"

I told Julian that in my experience with Cyrix chips is that they rate them at the equivalent Pentium speed (performance wise), even though they (in the past at least) ran at a slower clock speed. That means the Cyrix chip PR200 chip may not be running at a 200mhz clock speed. The other issues I've seen with Cyrix chips are a) high current use (heat) and poor FPU performance compared to the Intel Pentium (but they make up for it in other ways with excellent business application speed). Also the Cyrix MMX function speed is said to be slightly slower than the Intel version. But since a 200mhz Intel Pentium MMX chip is about $100 or so now at computer shows, upgrading should be easy if the card supports the Intel CPU voltage (which in the past differed from the Cyrix CPU by a small amount).

I'm curious as to the graphics chip and amount of L2 cache on board the OrangeMicro 620 (not mentioned in their 620 specs page). Possibly I can get a card for review sometime in the future. I've sent mail but no response yet.

Apple 166mhz PC Card Details: Michael Pifer send answers to my questions on the Apple PC card and some comments on the new OrangeMicro 620 card as well. Several readers had asked about the Apple card recently, since the steet price is now near $150:

" The Apple card is just a straight Pentium 166 chip, not a Pentium MMX chip. It is soldered in, it does not have a ZIF socket. If I could get someone to give me $150 (negotiable), and even better be willing to wait a couple of weeks until I got my Orange Micro card (not a requirement though), I would jump at the chance.

But before I lead you down the path of thinking this is the absolute bargain of the year, keep this in mind. Apple does not have 32 bit protected mode drivers. And the effort to have Orange Micro write 32 bit drivers for the Apple card failed when Apple refused to release sufficient code to allow Orange to do this. What this means is that your hard disk, floppy drive, CD Rom, and any other drive type of devices run in 16 bit DOS mode, and some programs will not work right without this. Mark Fonneman has a web page at http://www2.bc.edu/~fonneman/apple.html that has a list of programs that people have reported as not working.

For the most part it is games, and high end programs, and if I wanted to really run a high end graphics program I would run the Mac version anyway. This list is not a verified list, it is just one that readers have submitted that claim these apps wonít run. Everything up this point that I use has run, but I now have the need for running Access 97 for several databases we have at work, and alas, it wonít run, hence me buying the Orange Micro card.

To also be fair, the Orange card at $399 does have itís shortcomings. Video RAM is shared with main memory, so if you want to allocate 4 meg for the video card, you lose 4 meg from the main memory-at 16 meg, this leaves you 12 meg free for Windows 95. The Apple card has seperate video memory (2 meg I think)., so 16 meg is 16 meg for Windows 95. Sound is a basic 16 bit emulation via Macintosh built in sound, Apple has Soundblaster 16 support. The 620 series card does not offer the option for the high speed serial and parallel ports that the more expensive Orange cards do. The Apple card can add them via a second PCI serial/parallel card (yes not the best solution as this takes up a 2nd PCI slot, but it can be added). And the P200MMX chip in the $399 ($499 with Windows 95 bundled) packages is the Cyrix 6x86MMX chip running at 200 MHz, not the newer Cyrix M II chip they have out now, so it too is an older generation series ( still MMX though ). But it is a socket processor, so you could upgrade later on, the Apple card you canít.

In the end, it depends on your needs. I donít want to even attempt to sell you something that isnít going to work for you, I enjoy your web site too much to screw you by selling you something that isnít right for you. The "deal" with the Orange card I think came about because of the fall through of Orange not writing 32 bit drivers for the Apple card, and wanting to give them an upgrade option. But since they are also targetting it towards Virtual PC users as well, it isnít entirely that. Again for the most part the true apps (not games) listed that donít work, are those that have a Mac version, so why you would want to run the Windoze version it beyond me.

If Microsoft would write Access for the Mac, I wouldnít have to buy the Orange card either, and would keep the Apple card ( I tried to get the to use Filemaker Pro so we could be cross platform, everything was already in Access, everyone else that uses them are on PCs, so I am the oddball that refuses to change...).

Let me know, and do some investigation. If your apps are not listed, chances are they will run. If you have one in particular you would like me to try, let me know, if I have it, or can get it, I will try it to make sure it will run.
Michael Pifer"

Reader Request: Martin T. Olander wrote in to ask if any readers are running BeOS on a Newer Tech G3 CPU card. If you are, or have tried, please contact me. Thanks!

He aslo suggested I offer to build or upgrade Macs for companies and readers. Sort of "Acceleration Certified".

We need your G3 info! Reader "Oz" has offered to help with collecting data on Apple G3 system compatibility issues (hardware and software) of all types. Please send him any Apple G3 system compatibility info/issues you have or are aware of at: oz@bbdoperu.com

Search Tip! For searches on product names with mixed capitalization, use keywords like PowerBoost Pro (not Powerboost Pro or powerboost pro) and MaxPowr (vs maxpowr or Maxpowr). It seems that capitalization within the word on the site pages is throwing off the engine. Keep that in mind when searching for some of the odd product names.

Need Help? Before you send email for tech support, please check the Troubleshooting page or try searching the site (use quotes for exact matches! i.e. "mach 5" vs mach 5 which will match machine, 5, etc.) and to check the FAQ, Performance Basics, Links, and Forums for solutions to your problems or answers to tech support questions. They have a lot of good info and are a great source of help.

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