Accelerating an iMac G3 like it's 2003

today's Bandai blue Shenanigans are brought to you by Squarespace but more on that in a bit this is an obscure bit of early 2000s technology which I've been trying to find for years to power a really ridiculous build it's a sonnet Harmony and it's an accelerator for the earliest of the G3 iMacs and it's meant to double this thing's speed but buying this was actually a huge gamble for kind of a weird reason if it works though we're gonna get some crazy performance out of this Pokey machine and we might even be able to overclock this thing so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy looking back at a simple and innocent time in home Computing and then defiling those computers with ridiculous upgrades I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel so this is a build that I've wanted to do for a very long time but the accelerator needed to pull it off is really hard to come across and even when it does come up for sale chances are it's not going to work in your machine we'll talk about that more in a bit when we take a closer look at this card itself but first let's go over what it is we're actually going to build today this machine is a Bandai blue iMac G3 revision B is one of the very first iMacs that Apple released in 1998 at the direction of a newly reinstated Steve Jobs the original iMac G3 in its original configuration only existed for a very short time in January 1999 it was updated rather significantly for revision C and it actually removed some features like the infrared port and more importantly the mezzanine upgrade slot inside now one of the really cool things about these original iMacs is that the CPU is on a daughter card with the RAM and Sonic took full advantage of this by just making a whole new CPU card with a much faster processor and it's just a drop in replacement but this is actually more than just a CPU this sonnet daughter card has a daughter card of its own which adds firewire and it has a new side panel to accommodate the New Port it's actually a pretty radical transformation but there's kind of a weird catch Sonic couldn't use Apple's proprietary ROMs on their new processor cards so there's a clever work around there's special software you have to install before you install this card that makes a copy of your original ROM and then flashes that ROM to this card and that's pretty cool but it also means that the card is now tied to your revision of iMac moving a used car to a different revision of iMac won't work at least as far as I've read but I have another revision iMac G3 and we can test that later right after this word about today's sponsor Squarespace create a fast beautiful and Rich web experience for your business or brand using squarespace's powerful all-in-one platform it's really easy to get started like say I wanted to build a website all about the history of Macintosh acceleration a topic I'm quite fond of not only could I build it in minutes with Squarespace but I could do it without a single line of code there's a ton of beautiful templates that I could choose to start from and from there it's simple to build a great looking site that's also fast responsive and works great on mobile devices with squarespace's extensive built-in tool set I can also optimize for SEO manage a mailing list check my analytics and much more all geared towards managing your entire web presence so check out squarespace.com action retro today for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use code action retro to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain okay so let's take a quick Gander at the card itself still inside it's incredibly 2000s packaging just look at this early 2000s clip art amazing this is the 500 megahertz version of this card it also came in a 600 megahertz which uh yeah good luck finding that because I sure haven't and yeah this should be overclockable if uh my friend in Japan is correct and well he is correct because he has one of these and he overclocked it [Music] important information read me first yeah so this is saying that you have to install this software and run it first because this is what takes a snapshot of your ROM for the card and yeah it's not going to work if it doesn't have the ROM from your original card flashed onto it and voila look at that still sealed the two boards we have the processor board and the firewire daughter board here still sealed at least it certainly looks that way this feels Factory fresh yeah the glue is still intact folds are still intact no stretching I really think this is brand new here is the new side panel with the cool Sonic branding on it oh that is so awesome yeah and space for the firewire to come out because of course the revisions a through D did not have firewire and some other cabling here uh I don't know what that's for I guess we'll have to read the instructions not something I normally do this is so exciting I can't believe I found one of these now I currently have Mac OS 10.3 installed on here but it's on the original spinning hard drive so I want to take this apart and actually install Mac OS 10.4 on an SSD and I guess Max out the ram it's going to be a little bit of a process because we have to put X post facto on there but I'm just going to fast forward through that maybe do a little bit of a montage now it is a little Annoying to get down to the hard drive in these because it is underneath the CD-ROM here it's actually these two little hooks here that hold the uh hard drive cage in place you have to pull them we'll push back so that they disengage and then pull up very annoying all right good a time as any to use our unfortunately numbered a55 drive and yes that's totally how I read that a55 and a totally normal combination of two adapters here one to go to IDE from SATA and then one to go from laptop to desktop all right I forgot to put the optical drive back in because that's just how I roll but let's fire this thing up and see if there's anything installed on that drive already nope doesn't seem to be anything we can boot from but hey I guess it works all right booting Mac OS 921 installer from an external LG DVD ROM drive I did not expect that to actually work but here we are and install all right so we're gonna need the CD out of here to run that software and uh yeah I don't actually know what to expect let me just double check in the old instructions here none of this actually talks about the software yeah interesting this guy just goes through taking the computer apart no mention the software I guess that's why they had to include this little purple sheet here so yeah let's run this software solid simply fast all right Harmony installer 1.1 power on the computer wait 30 to 45 seconds during this time you'll hear a series of tones that sounds frightening all right okay so these instructions are slightly confusing but I think I have the general idea it wants us to of course replace this card here with our lovely Sonic card the part I'm not quite sure about is how the daughter card comes off this daughter card to be the firewire port I know we replace this with this but I think we'll figure it out as we go I reuse our Ram of course ah here we go breaking out our minty fresh Sonic accelerator I'm shaking oh look at it daughter card still sealed that certainly looks New Old Stock never opened to me yep look at that break in the seal oh look at it oh it's beautiful uh there's the pins for firewire it's just so weird to see such a prominent IBM logo going into this iMac G3 but anyway let's do it get some Rams in there oh there he is all right I have this thermal pad here though now I worry if that's a little too tall let's see I know it fits great awesome all right now the instructions want us to remove this side panel here look at this brand new never before seen oh it's beautiful all right this makes much more sense now that I'm looking at this together so a few alterations needed in here first this screw comes out and in its place goes this standoff [Music] oh how cool is that okay one last step we need to run this little parasite wire here which Taps into HD power like so and then runs all the way across into the firewire card nice oh look at that it's beautiful ah all right so on first boot here we should get some uncomfortable beeps as it flashes the ROM to the new card hey all right well I was certainly sweating while it was making all of those beeps I had no idea how many it was gonna make but it chimed and it's booting into Mac OS and it's going pretty fast uh sweaty Palms why do computers give me sweaty Palms ugh okay the installation of the processor upgrade card was successful thank god oh this is exciting let's see apple system profiler says 500 megahertz oh yes not in harmony it works it's alive such an impossible upgrade to get because it can't be used here it is it's alive I'm so excited all right well I did take some benchmarks using this totally legitimate version of Mac bench 4. before the upgrade here let's take some post upgrade benchmarks and see just how much performance we've gained all right look at that that is a heck of an improvement the processor 50 faster floating Point more than doubled disk speed even this hundred percent here on the stock Bondi is from the SSD so this processor has vastly increased the disk speed as well graphics performance 32 percent increased CD-ROM access seven percent increased that's amazing this this is so cool so incredibly cool oh my goodness we might as well make sure that the firewire works all right I've got the old firewire SSD here which we can plug in and I'm curious if this will provide enough power out of that sonnet upgrade to power this or if I need to plug it in oh yeah although there oh no there's power look at that oh there it is all of my firewire partitions they're all here oh my goodness I am so excited I cannot believe it it just works it works great so I guess next step is let's see if this will now boot into tiger nicely so we'll just X post facto here I'm gonna boot into Mac OS 10 which is already installed let's do it okay well it's just been spinning like this for like 15 minutes I don't think it's gonna actually boot into tiger so probably I should try reinstalling tiger from here now that we have a reasonable processor speed so let's reset this all right clear the P Ram we'll go back into Mac os9 and let's see if we can actually boot from the firewire Drive okay so this install CD here is on the firewire SSD let's see if we can boot from it nope it does not seem to like that okay well apparently it also doesn't want to boot off of my totally legitimate CD set of tiger which it definitely booted from before so I'm wondering if it's just a setting on the SSD adapter maybe it's set to master or something and it shouldn't be uh but I can fuss with that off camera most important thing is the accelerator works and it is darn fast [Music] okay so that was freaking awesome not only did we install this nearly unobtainable upgrade but it performed as promised this thing is more than doubled in speed I mean raw processor speed is up 50 floating Point performance is more than 100 improved that's exciting and if you like those kinds of shenanigans check out the action patreon because I do full bonus videos there now and uh yeah for the next bonus video we're gonna do two things actually we're gonna try out this upgrade card in a different iMac G3 this lovely grape revision D and see if it's really true that the upgrade card is tied to the revision it was installed in I'm really interested to find out we're also going to do a little bit of a repair job because I saw this flickering again during filming and uh yeah I'm pretty sure that the fixes that we did in the last video on this thing didn't hold so I'm just gonna go ahead and replace the flyback Transformer so we'll do that in the bonus episode too but if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more Shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to Alex Hoffman Andrew Nicholson Camilla noseda Chris allegreta Chris Biggs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson Control Alt Reese Daniel Hubbard Frodo Jedi Gaspar Heller Greg rutkay Harris Brody Jason papaz Justin Hemmings Justin Reed Lyle Truitt Michael mulhern Paul Spencer Ryan Scott cederbaum Scott Thompson Sue Tech Tom Woodfin Unknown Soldier 41 who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these Shenanigans possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 37,363

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: MxtAh9xkgxo

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023