Carmine's MiM News Feed

• AppleTIL Updates (Monday_02.15.99)
   MOD 58201 Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White): Speech Recognition Not Supported
   MOD 30892 Apple Studio Display 15-Inch LCD: AppleVision Error Under Mac OS 8.5.1
   MOD 20663 LaserWriter Printers: Renaming & Turning Off Startup Page
   MOD 10390 LaserWriter Family: PostScript Versions & ROM Sizes
   MOD 17103 Security Lock Ports On Apple Displays
   MOD 30906 Mac OS Runtime for Java 2.1: Read Me
   MOD 30902 MacDNS 1.0.4: Read Me
   MOD 60050 Mac OS Runtime for Java 2.1: Known Issues
   MOD 60047 Mac OS Runtime for Java 2.1: Files Installed
   MOD 60049 Mac OS Runtime for Java 2.1: About This Version
   MOD 60048 Mac OS Runtime for Java 2.1: Installing on Localized Mac OS
• Mac OS Runtime for Java 2.1 [Mac OS Runtime for Java (MRJ) 2.1 is Apple's implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), based on Sun Microsystems' Java 1.1.6 specification. MRJ allows you to run Java applications and applets.(Running applets also requires a Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, or an applet viewer such as the Apple Applet Runner.)] (Apple)
• Apple Unveils [Major New Release of Java for Macintosh] (Yahoo)
• MP3 No One-Hit Wonder: Record Industry Fumes [The hottest thing going on the Internet music scene is MP3. No, not a rock band or a new indie record label; it is a music format that makes it easy to download and play near-CD-quality music on a home computer or Walkman-style portable player.] (Yahoo)
• Apple outsourcing assembly work Company's initiative is one of several aimed at improving operations and lowering costs (TechWeb)
• Off The Shelf [As the the Pentium III is wheeled to the launch pad in the world's largest processor introduction, along comes one of those upstarts to give consumers a choice that may be entirely out of the blue.] (TechWeb)
• Associates Have the Tools to Add on Sales 10 Ways to Increase Profits on PCs [It's undeniable that sales associates are the key link in building profit into a sale. Following are 10 suggestions from industry experts that store-level employees can use to enhance their PC sales techniques.] (TechWeb)
• Like Magic Old Pcs Reappear A $6 Billion-And Growing-Market Buoys Refurbishment Industry [New York-It is not the pretty side of the channel, but it is profitable.] (TechWeb)
• Space Museum or Scrap Heap? [NASA goes begging for spare parts for its space shuttle program. Pieces of solid rocket boosters on display at an Alabama museum may find a new use in the international space station.] (Wired)
• More than Words Display [The newest weapon in the fight to protect copyrights is a search engine that scours the Net for photos, logos, and other images instead of words.] (Wired)
• Now showing on the Net near you ... [How a little-known technology could bring you movies and TV-if economics and industry inertia will only let it.] (ZDnet)
• Should Java go open source? [Sun says no; community source license is the way to go.] (ZDnet)

G3 Upgrade Price Cuts: As expected the axe fell today at Powerlogix and Sonnet. PowerLogix cut prices up to 32% on PowerForce G3 upgrades. Their 400/200/1MB ZIF upgrade is now $899, and the CPU card slot version is $959. The value leading 220/110/512K model is now $309. For complete pricing on all models see their Product Pricing page. Sonnet also announced price cuts on their new G3 ZIF CPU line with the 366Mhz/1MB model now $699.95. I suspet these price cuts are to make way for faster models to be introduced soon.

B&W TCP/IP Settings Tip: John Bales wrote with a suggestion that may help some of the reported networking problems of the B&W G3:

" Mike,
Could it be as simple as deselecting "Load only when needed" in the TCP/IP Options dialog from the TCP/IP Control Panel? This is enabled by default.

When I first set up my B&W G3 I noticed some very irritating behavior with my Motorola CyberSurfer cable modem when "Load only when needed" was enabled. The link light would go out and I would experience long delays when attempting to access resources.

I have not taken the time to find out what the time out is before TCP/IP is unloaded, but the time it takes to load seemed to be very erratic and the loading was sometimes unreliable. Since turning this "feature" off I have experienced no problems.

The CyberSurfer model that I have has a 10BaseT Half-duplex interface to which I connect directly, but it would seem to me that once the ethernet adapter has negotiated the correct connection, which Dan Baldwin indicated that it does after a cold boot, all would be fine as long as TCP/IP is not unloaded and thus forcing the interfaces to renegotiate when TCP/IP loads again.
I hope it's that simple.
Regards,
John Bales "

Apple must be getting ready to roll out the new PowerBook line I suspect from the lower prices at the Apple store on existing models.

Mike Diaz reported that MacZone has two Rage128 based cards listed at: http://www.zones.com/Mac_Zone/Hardware_Mac/Boards/Video_Boards/.
M 10481 ATI Nexus 128 32MB - $269.98 Stock due in 03/15/99
M 10481 ATI Rage Orion 16MB - $179.98 Call For Stock

I spoke with MacZone (Lee x3535) and neither are in stock yet, but he said they are only scheduled to get 5 Nexus 128's (3 left, 2 on backorder). They did not have an expected quantity or ship date on the Orion version. My info has always said the Nexus would ship first, but that could change.

548MHz has been achieved by PowerLogix based on this screenshot (466MHz CPU ZIF Upgrade I resume). Yeah, Macworld was right, overclocking is just a 5 or 10% boost at best... ;-)

Ken Wehr reported a 50% increase in sustained write speed on his Ultra2 Cheetah using the SoftRaid Cache Tweaking Tip.

I just received an Apple Press Release on their new release of the Mac Java Runtime. Version 2.1 is reported to be 5x as fast as the current version.

David Metzger wrote that the slow scrolling issue with the Rage128 is caused by one of the inputsprocket extensions. He's not determined which one but said that disabling them all solved the problem.

Thad Brown sent Issue 34 of our Mac Audio column that discusses which hard drive to use for Audio (and other tips), more on B&W G3 audio capability and DVD audio. The current issue and links to back issues are always available at http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/audio/

The 3D Gaming News page has another daily update that includes a humorous look at the games of the future, info on Lag (network play latency), a preview of Bungie's ONI, an overview of Quake III/Arena, an update on the freeware Parsec game, an offical confirmation of a Mac version of Unreal Tournament and several sources of the best Unreal maps on the Net.

I noticed in the Sunday sales flier that Staples has the Maxtor 10GB IDE HD kits for under $170 (after $30 rebate) now. That's quite a bargain especially if you're lucky enough to find one of the 'Y80xxxxxx' serial numbers that has often contained the faster 91000D8 (Diamondmax Plus) drives. [Thanks to Jon Patterson for the reminder]

I've been getting a lot of returned mail lately (most cases DNS errors). I'll never be caught up on email but please verify that your email address is correct, and please check the existing site contents (incl. topic links top and bottom of the page here) and FAQ before sending mail that requires an answer. Thanks.

Tips for Rage128 Owners: Chris Bentley of ATI sent the following suggestions for those experiencing problems:

• turning Virtual Memory _on_, even if just by a bit over the built-in RAM. We're working to fix this problem as quick as possible.

• remove the Microconversions (Game Wizard) RAVE driver from the Extensions folder - there's some incompatibility between their RAVE driver and ours.

I'd like feedback if the above helps those that have experienced problems with the upgrade. Note that many people seem to forget to disable Antivirus extensions during the upgrade. I suggest booting with extensions off (shift key) before applying the upgrade.

Photoshop 5 Tests - Dual PII 450 vs. Macs: I've updated the Photoshop 5 Performance page for results of tests with a dual Pentium II 450MHz system running NT 4.0 (w/service pack 4). Adobe says Photoshop 5 supports symmetric multiprocessing under Windows NT, and the PC was running the MP kernel. The results show the Mac is still the king at Photoshop, as the PC total score trailed most of the faster G3 Macs listed in the table (it scored just a bit better than a G3/333). Although the PC was faster at most shorter duration filters, the more time intensive ones were where it really lost ground to the faster Macs (none of which were running at the same clock speed). The PowerPCs fixed length instruction set and larger backside cache (1MB vs 512KB) were also factors I suspect. The Dual PII 450 placed 4th of the 7 systems tested, besting a G3/333/222 system by less than 2%. It seems the fact that a Mac running a slower CPU speed outperformed a dual PII NT machine did not sit well with some people. Sorry about that.

Newer Tech G3 333-400 Upgrades Review: Brian William Jones sent a detailed review of Newer's latest line of G3 upgrades for both the CPU card slot and ZIF based Macs.

SoftRaid HD Cache Tweaking: Ryan Dumperth reported that Softraid Cache Tweaking delivered a 44% improvement in sustained write performance on his Barracuda drive. As noted last year on my Ultimate Mac page, SoftRaid works great for single drives as well, and if your drive supports it, this tip can dramatically increase performance.

More B&W IDE/DV comments: Tai Kahn reports an IDE drive works great for video capture in the new G3s:

" I saw your article about adding a [Ultra]DMA drive as a slave to the new Blue G3s.

Well, I went a bought a cheapo 200$ western digital PC drive (UltraDMA/IDE interface of course) and it works flawlessly, much more than I can say for a 9 gig Quantum SCSI Atlas II I had in there....

Its fast too, I use a DV cam via Firewire and I can watch and edit and playback and juggle 30 FPS 720x540 video off the hard drive not the camera... Crazy fast!
Tai Kahn "

As reported last week, I saw no dropped frames in limited testing on my G3/400 connected via Firewire to a Panasonic DV camcorder. Print to video worked fine as well.

Nik Friedman reported an Drive Setup v1.7 would not install a driver on an older WD IDE drive:

" Just slaved a Western Digital IDE (not UDMA) drive in my Yosemite. Installation was painless, but when formatting the drive, Drive Setup 1.7 (which, as far as I know, only ships with the Yos) repeatedly reported that the "installation failed." The fix, simply enough, was to use Drive Setup 1.6.2, which as far as I know fixes all the critical issues.
Nik "

I suspect he could now install DS 1.7's driver (after previous versions were installed).

Rage128 Update/Colorsync Conflict Feedback:

" I'm no guru, but I have solved many similar installation problems by using CC or renaming new extensions to change the load order. What's inexplicable to me is that, in probably over half the cases, I can return to the original load order after at least a few successful boots with the altered order. Worth a try-if not already done- :-)Mike S "

Mac Quake Mod: This is really a year of improved Mac game support. John Matthews sent a note that Planetquake's Mod of the Week is Paroxysm 'an open source Classic Quake Conversion developed on MacOS.' Check out the home page on it at: http://www.planetquake.com/paroxysm/. Note - at 2:30am this morning the N.Y, Penns. and Utah D/L links did not seem to have the file - I used the Cdrom.com link.

More AudioCatalyst Feedback: The first negative comments I've gotten:

" Excellent site. On my daily 'must visit' list.
While the speed of AudioCatalyst is awesome at first, for me, it is actually longer in the long run. There are skips and errors (not the decoding incompatibilities that sound like squeaks in SoundApp, but ripping and/or encoding errors that sound like you just bumped your non-anti-skip cd player) in about 40% of all tracks I've encoded. This happens even when the ripping speed is set to "more compatible."

These errors didn't come up when I used Mpecker, so it isn't due to a scratched original source cd.

Once these errors are corrected, AudioCatalyst will definitely be an awesome program.
-Marc Galang "

B&W G3/Apple PC Card Tip: This weekend's news had a report of problems booting to dos or windows with an Apple PC 166mhz Card in a new B&W G3 (thought to be due to the lack of that evil floppy disk we all need to stop using ;-). Louis Duhon asked if the card has a Bios (like a real PC), which would normally allow setting the floppy drive (A:) option to none. I've not owned an Apple PC CPU card so I can't say if there is an option to enter the bios at boot or not.

B&W G3/Raid Issues: Robin Kurz reported being unable to boot his new G3 if the Raid array was on and spun fully up before booting. Only by turning on the array after the 'happy mac' was he able to boot normally. He was not trying to boot from the array, but just having it on froze the mac at the initial gray screen. He says ATTO and Adaptec have not been able to solve the problem and the latest firmware from both companies does not help (the problem is evident with both his Adaptec 2940UW and ATTO ExpressPCI card). Note that on some drives like the Quantum Atlas series, the 'enable spin' jumper must be properly set to have the drives spin up without a specific command from the controller (not normally done), however I've not had to do that with any Seagate drives. Comments are welcome from other Yosemite/Raid owners.

Thad Brown sent a new Audio article that will be published later today.

Other Net News:

• So You Want To Be a Visionary? (MacOpinion)
• Blue and Ice and Everything Nice? (B&W G3) (MacOpinion)
• Best Buy Follow-up: They're a mixed bag (theiMac.com)
• Forward Migration: That Special Feeling (theiMac.com)
• Readers LOVE the Cafe -- bring on more (theiMac.com)
• Exploring Myth II [review] (theiMac.com)
• Microsoft IE 4.5 [review] (theiMac.com)

Weekend News Summary

• Carmine's TIL Updates and Net News Feed
• OS X - hope for 8x/9x00 Owners
• Powerlogix Cache Control 1.4.2 feedback (OS 8.6a ATI extension conflict)
• More owner reports on TurboMax PCI IDE Card (drive support issues?)
• Sonnet Cresendo 1.3.2 extension feedback
• Powerlogix ZIF pricing
• Rage128 Update/ColorSync Conflict
• More on Rage Pausing in 3D/Games
• B&W G3/Apple PC card problem report
• PowerLogix releases new 1.4.2 Cache Control for G3 cards/systems
• Other net news
• Summary of prev. days news

For other recent site news/features links, see the Recent Site Features page.

Note: Before sending tech support related questions please check the Freq. Asked Questions, Site Contents, CPU Card reviews/articles, SCSI reviews articles, Graphics card reviews, Tips/Misc, Message Boards and Help pages - in many cases the answers to your questions are there and they have far more detail than I can list in an email. For Apple G3 system info - see the G3-ZONE. For links on recent articles, see the Recent Features page. Please try the Men in Mac Help page as an alternative on requests for tech support to help me be able to spend more time on reviews. Thanks.

Recent Software
Updates:

B&W G3 Related:
Rage128 Update 1.0 (485K bin)
or Binhex (660K)

ATTO ExpressPro-Tools [2.1.1]

Adaptec 2940UW
Bios v4.1b1 &
2940UW Control 4.0

Formac PowerRaid Updates
[get hqx version]

ATTO ExpressPCI 1.3.3

Jackammer v1.4 Update

VirtualGameStation 1.1

Plaintalk Enabler
[For B&W/iMac]

Other G3 Models:
PB G3 Modem 1.0.2

G3 Modem Update (V.90/56Flex)

See VersionTracker's G3 page for others...

G3 CPU Cards:
XLR8 Cache Cntl 1.2

PL AutoCache Beta

Misc/General:
Java Runtime 2.1 (7.9MB Bin)

Apple Displays Software 1.7.1

GV V.90 Flex Preferred Script

IE 4.5 Plug-in Updater

Farallon NIC Update

Lightwave 5.6D GL Update
(7.9MB Download)

MacTell Vision3D Pro/Lite 5.4.0
(ROM update also)

Formac GA 5.4.0
(Graphics Card Driver)

Virtual PC 2.1.2

Stuffit Expander 5.1

Games Related:
Unreal 1.02B4

Descent 3Dfx 1.09

Check VersionTracker
for other updates.

See also Apple's Software Updates

Check here for cool Sherlock Plugins