These notes last updated Feb 22 2005. (c) 2005 Herb Johnson I make no guarantees or warrenties WHATSOEVER regarding these notes. No guarantees of completeness, fitness for use, or accuracy. Use them at your own risk. Herb Johnson http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/m_imac.html G3 revisions and upgrades -------------------------- A very informative site about all the G3's, among other Macs, is "low end Mac". Their G3 pages are; "http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g3.shtml" for early G3's and "http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g3b.shtml" for later G3's. Specific Apple page links are listed below in the discussions. Revisions ----------- A useful Apple tech note on G3 "platinum" or grey systems is: "Power Macintosh G3 Computers: Technical Specifications" at: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=28049 Apple Technical article "Power Macintosh G3: Technical Information Guide" is at: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24213 That document describes most of the features offered on Apple's G3 systems. Features of the G3 which support multiple ATA or IDE drives depend on the logic board (motherboard) revision number. (See below.) To determine a revision number, Apple says from their site: "Use the Apple System Profiler, located in the Apple menu, to help determine which logic board revision you have. Open Apple System Profiler, click the System Profile tab within the window, and then look at the Production Information section. Compare it to the table below to determine which revision of the logic board is in your Power Macintosh G3 (platinum) computer." $77D.40F2 revision 1 $77D.45F1 revision 2 $77D.45F2 revision 3 Apple says "Typically all platinum G3 300MHz and 333MHz are revision 2 or 3." Video support ------------- The G3 series uses either the ATI 3D RAGE II+ or RAGE PRO 64-bit graphics and multimedia accelerator chip. The ATI RAGE PRO is on Revision 2 motherboards. Later motherboards may have the ATI RAGE PRO DVD chip. ATA/IDE support ---------------- Further discussion by Apple about ATA or IDE support is documented by "Power Macintosh G3 and G4: IDE Master and Slave" which is at: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24342 "Master/slave" refers to supporting two ATA (IDE) drives per cable. The document says that for master/slave "feature" support: "Original Power Macintosh G3 Minitower and Desktop computers with a revision 2 or later logic board support this feature. You can use the Apple System Profiler application to determine which revision of the logic board is installed in your computer. If the logic board has the ATI RAGE PRO chip, the computer has a revision 2 or later logic board." Low End Mac comments on their G3 Web page: "Early beige G3s could not support slave drives, as these machines (generally) utilized Rev. 1 motherboards and Rev. A ROMs. Later beige G3s with Rev. 2 motherboards and Rev. B or C ROMs do support slave drives. Although the inability to support slaves under the classic Mac OS is inherent in the Rev. A ROM, OS X has a mechanism for supplementing the beige ROM code and allowing the use of slave drives." Apple upgrades for G3 --------------------- Apple provided a few upgrades to their G3 systems. One of them was an upgrade to a "Ultra/wide SCSI" controller and hard drive. Another was to add video I/O to the G3's audio card. The "A/V option" upgrades the audio card to an audio/video "A/V personality" card. Another upgrade was a DVD-ROM drive. The SCSI hardware consisted of an Ultra/Wide 4GB hard drive, and a Ultra/Wide SCSI PCI card. Cabling to the drive was from the PCI card. The SCSI connectors on the card and drives are narrow D-shaped 68 pin connectors; not the usual Apple 50-pin retangular connectors. The A/V upgrade was a replacment of the G3 audio card, with an audio/video A/V personality card. This card has connectors for sVideo, video, and audio; an input section and an output section. These are on the rear of the card. Apple said the G3's "optional internal ATAPI DVD-ROM drive supports CD-ROMs at 20x speed (maximum) or DVD-ROMs at 2x speed (maximum)."