Power Mac G3 on its feet

For some reason, I was not motivated to take pictures of this, but I've now cleaned up the Power Macintosh G3 machine, pictured here "before," and brought it both up to the office and back to life.

It was really very dirty. I completely disassembled it (and, again, was reminded of how much I really like the "outrigger" cases), washed off all the plastic, scrubbed out the scuff marks, blew out the many dust bunnies, and then put it back together. I also took the opportunity to put in the Wings personality card, which adds more A/V options. I'm pretty sure I also have a USB card that I can add to this machine, somewhere.

It took a bit of fiddling to get the monitor displaying properly, but I ultimately succeeded in installing MacOS 8.5 on the machine. I think, however, that I will move the machine up to MacOS 9.2 at the next opportunity. The machine seems to work just fine, though. Probably the next thing I'll do is try to run a full system diagnostic on it.

Once I get the system software up and running, I plan on running this machine mostly remotely, with the assistance of the Vine VNC server (though I may need to get it a dedicated IP address for this purpose), and setting it up to be a LocalTalk-EtherTalk bridge to allow communication (and netbooting) for the IIgs and platinum //e. And then we'll see what happens. I have a number of things I'd like to get the Wings card involved with, including serving as a display for my Timex Sinclair 1000, which I have yet even to power on for lack of a usable display (it needs to be run into something with a TV tuner, so I'll probably send it into a set-top DVD burner I have, which should be able to then send S-video to the Wings card). I'm not sure if the video signal will be too degraded by that point or not, though. I'd also like to hook up the audio in/out to the TS1000 for use as a "cassette recorder." And when the Bell & Howell's power situation gets resolved, I have a fairly elaborate plan to connect that up here as well. There's still a fair amount of tinkering left to do here I think. But there's some progress at least. Though maybe not enough to be worthy of posting this.