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By Ruffin Bailey Published: 5/18/99 |
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I know a little about shade tree mechanics. I've replaced the engine in my old CJ-7 once, the transmission three times, and I've got one heck of a *ahem* custom wiring job. The name "shade tree" comes from the shade tree mechanic habit of slinging a chain over the top of a giant oak limb to use the tree as an engine hoist. The bottom line is that these guys are just hobbists, but pretty serious ones. They can take what looks like a bucket of bolts, and turn it into one heck of a roadster. With a little patience, you can turn a pre-G3 PowerPC into one heck of a gamer. Over the next few months, this series is going to take my old StarMax 3000/180 Macintosh clone and turn it into a fairly formidible machine. We're starting with the PCI slots... |
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With Rev. B iMacs selling for $900 (usually with an enticement bundled in the deal, like 32
megs of RAM), those of us with pre-G3 PowerPC's have to start dreaming about trading up. The
promise of OS X support is alluring. Quake 2 is promised to work on an iMac so the built-in
video card is robust enough to make for some impressive gaming. Built-in ethernet allows for
fast networking, whether with other PC's in your home or for a LAN party. All this and that crazy
see-through case, and it's hard to resist the temptation. Even so, the iMac is no prince of a machine. Without the extra RAM, complex games like Unreal just cannot run fast enough for serious gamers on the iMac (see Mike's Unreal Performance Scores page for the end-all of Unreal framerate data). Even Apple agrees, according comments from this years E3 (they stated that the iMac is a consumer machine and that 'hard-core gamers' will want to get the G3 tower for expansion purposes). To trade up to a G3 tower, however, is going to cost you nearly $1600!!! Maybe it's time to take another look at the pre-G3 that's sitting on your desk right now... The first upgrade I'm giving my 603e-powered machine will be a few PCI cards. Even though this series of articles revolves around pre-G3 Macs, these PCI instructions and considerations can be extended to brand new G3 towers and all Macs back to (but not including) the NuBus equipped models. There are a number of PCI options available. Internal drives can be hooked up to some cards. USB outlets can be added. OrangeMicro even makes Pentium PC's on a card that can make your Mac "swing both ways". I'm adding two PCI cards to my StarMax. One is an ethernet card from Farallon so that I can go to LAN parties, and the other card is a 3-D graphics acceleration card. RAM is often the first upgrade for any computer. My StarMax came with 16 megs, and it wasn't long before I added another 16. But even though I could use more, I'm putting that purchase off until after I've installed these PCI cards. Quake, Unreal, Myth, Descent... these games and many now in development like Quake 2, Madden 2000, and Unreal Tournament all have or will have the ability to take advantage of a 3-D acceleration card. Quake 3 Arena and the recently released Quake 3 Test demand some sort of acceleration. Because I can't LAN without ethernet and couldn't even think about playing 3Dfx Descent or Quake 3 Test without 3-D acceleration, I've decided 32 megs is going to have to make do for now. There's really no downside to installing a 3-D acceleration card. The card's going to take much of the work involved in rendering the screen off of your computer's processor. At the same time, the card will make the graphic quality of these speedier games better by leaps and bounds. So installing a card makes games both faster and better looking. The hardest part of installing an acceleration card is choosing which one you want to purchase! To go through each card and discuss their individual merits is simply too tremendous a task to attempt in this article. When you have some time, browse the xlr8 site; there's info on many of your options. In brief, here are some of your main considerations: These two considerations aside, I opted to get a Voodoo 2 from MicroConversions which doesn't do 2-D and isn't from ATI. Why did I choose it? The Voodoo 2 has an excellent history in the PC gaming world, and has been the standard for quite some time. In spite of the fact that MicroConversions has yet to release SLI-capable drivers (see Mike's excellent "Devil's Advocate" article on SLI for the Mac), they do have a solid reputation that's been built by their hardy Mac Voodoo 2 drivers. MicroConversions is furthering that reputation with their innovative iWizard line of Voodoo 2 solutions for the iMac! Not to mention that I have a real weakness for Descent, and there's a new 3Dfx version available for download (though playable only if you have the originals, which can be found for under $10 online) that I wouldn't have been able to play on a non-Voodoo card. For ethernet, I simply got the cheapest Farallon card I could find. Farallon has been around for years providing quality products for the Mac, and numerous good reviews had me sold on them from the start. Since I'm not looking to move terabytes of data to and from my StarMax, I didn't have to worry about getting anything faster than a "ten base ten" card. One word of warning: Don't look at the prices of ethernet cards for WindowsPC's. Just grab yours from a Mac vendor, and keep on truckin'. ;^) So I phoned in my order, and a few days later I had my Voodoo 2 (pictured above) and ethernet cards in hand. All I had left to do was sling the chain over the tree, and install them. PCI cards really are easy to install, but there are a few tricks and tips to keep in mind. I'll try to clue you in to as many as I can in Part 2. | |||||||
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