Restoring a Power Mac G3 Beige Mini Tower - Printable Version

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Restoring a Power Mac G3 Beige Mini Tower - Irinikus - 05-10-2025

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:

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - Irinikus - 05-11-2025

Here she waits for her ADB keyboard and mouse!

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - RetroGamerFred - 05-11-2025

Always love seeing your projects. You provide meticulous notes about each and every step.

Well done!

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - Irinikus - 05-11-2025

(05-11-2025, 02:14 PM)RetroGamerFred Wrote:  Always love seeing your projects. You provide meticulous notes about each and every step.

Well done!

Thanks!

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - protocol7 - 05-12-2025

It's a long time since I messed with this, but IIRC there should be a CUDA reset button on the logic board. When you replaced the CPU and the machine wouldn't power up the first thing to try would be to reset CUDA.

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - Irinikus - 05-12-2025

(05-12-2025, 12:13 PM)protocol7 Wrote:  It's a long time since I messed with this, but IIRC there should be a CUDA reset button on the logic board. When you replaced the CPU and the machine wouldn't power up the first thing to try would be to reset CUDA.

I tried hitting the PRAM button as soon as I experienced the problem.

I'll try it again at a later stage.

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - Shiunbird - 05-12-2025

Man, the memories...

My first acoustics and recording professor at university (RIP) studied with Stockhausen. Crazy old man. During our classes, we developed and built our own rudimentary speakers, microphones, edited through tape (crossfading by literally cutting tape at an angle and then gluing it together) and also did digital recordings straight to CD (no room for mistakes!). Our big master studio room was still 32 channels of full analog goodness, except by the CD/MD recorder.

But we had a smaller room with a 6 audio DAW and it was powered by a G3 just like the one you have, and it was in service until 2010, after I had left already. The only difference was that we had an external SCSI burner instead of the internal one.

The professor still mostly emailed from his Macintosh SE/30 and he was such a well regarded professor that he had his own separate VLAN with his own university-managed private email relay and an older postscript printer. He would not change his workflow for anything in the world.

A true legend.

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - Irinikus - 05-13-2025

(05-12-2025, 03:19 PM)Shiunbird Wrote:  Man, the memories...

My first acoustics and recording professor at university (RIP) studied with Stockhausen. Crazy old man. During our classes, we developed and built our own rudimentary speakers, microphones, edited through tape (crossfading by literally cutting tape at an angle and then gluing it together) and also did digital recordings straight to CD (no room for mistakes!). Our big master studio room was still 32 channels of full analog goodness, except by the CD/MD recorder.

But we had a smaller room with a 6 audio DAW and it was powered by a G3 just like the one you have, and it was in service until 2010, after I had left already. The only difference was that we had an external SCSI burner instead of the internal one.

The professor still mostly emailed from his Macintosh SE/30 and he was such a well regarded professor that he had his own separate VLAN with his own university-managed private email relay and an older postscript printer. He would not change his workflow for anything in the world.

A true legend.

Cool Story!

I just committed to purchasing this M1242LL/A Apple Adjustable Keyboard for this system:

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - Irinikus - 05-14-2025

I just managed to get USB support working on my G3 Beige!



https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os-922-universal

I downloaded the third file "USBSupport_BeigeG3", copied it to floppy disk using my Pentium II Overdrive system and then copied it onto my G3 beige from the floppy, uncompressed the file and then copied the two USB extensions it contained into the Extensions folder, rebooted the system, and now I have USB mouse and keyboard support!





It's still going to get its Adjustable Keyboard, but this just means that I'll be able to work on setting it up before the keyboard arrives!

It also has mass storage support, which will help significantly in setting it up!

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RE: Restoration of a Power Mac G3 Beige - mosca - 05-15-2025

(05-14-2025, 05:54 PM)Irinikus Wrote:  

A bit off topic... I know this sun keyboard color scheme matches the blade100/150 color scheme, but they look dirty/wrong when out of context

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