I Built a WORKING Mini PowerMac G3!

these days it seems like adorable miniature versions of classic vintage tech is all the rage from the commodore 64 to the nes to classic 70s and 80s arcade cabinets there's a mini for almost every enthusiast except us where's our miniature max well thanks to a long time viewer of the channel our fortunes might finally be turning so stay tuned so this incredible 3d printed case was sent in by long time viewer and supporter of the channel taylor who funny enough sent it in in this cool vintage griffin i curve box the invisible stand that's perfect for holding up your titanium power book next to your apple cinema display and remember when every company was just putting i in front of literally everything and he also included this super nice note inside of the box where he says i'm such a fan of the channel i have to say thank you please enjoy the pie case and action retro inspired macintosh both of which i've 3d printed cheers taylor and here is that action retro inspired compact macintosh which is in my favorite color is purple and gray and i have to glue it together but it also comes with this cool little keyboard and a little mouse too so yeah that is absolutely adorable thank you so much taylor i love all of this stuff so much all right so let's take a closer look at this incredible 3d printed blue and white power mac g3 case which is actually a functional raspberry pi case and it's absolutely spot on the raspberry pi mounts right here just like the motherboard on a real one of these things and it has the mechanism to open and close the case with a little rubber band there to make it go and the quality of this print is it's really incredible i mean it's got the translucent plastic that you it's really translucent and it has the opaque blue which to my eye really looks like the blue of the real one of these i mean i had one of these way back when and yeah this really looks like it it has a place on the bottom for a fan and kind of a cool grate where the original fan went which i guess you could kind of glue a fan there too for extra authenticity it has a speaker grate here which actually even has the holes in it which i guess i could find a tiny speaker and put that in there but really cool it has a power button on the front here which passes through and there's a rubber band here now which could give it some kind of springiness to spring back out but i think you could actually fit like the raspberry pi original power button in there if you take that thing apart and i might try to do that it even has an optical bay which opens and you could put like a card reader or something in there and there are some holes on a little shelf back there to mount something so all in all this is an incredibly cool case it's very well balanced it's not going to tip over and yeah i'm extremely excited about this now being that this is action retro we have to bring this case to life so i found an equally adorable 9-inch 4x3 lcd screen which looks quite a lot like any random 4x3 lcd monitor that you might have seen in the mid 90s in a random office and it's got 1024 by 768 resolution and a pretty nice tft display so yeah i think it's pretty cool and of course like many of you i have a bit of a problem with buying raspberry pi's for projects and then promptly abandoning them this is a raspberry pi 3b one gigabyte which i originally used as my pi hole network ad blocker until i upgraded that to a raspberry pi 4 gigabyte pi 4 and this has been sitting in a drawer ever since but i think that this might be just powerful enough to make a working emulated macintosh although it may feel a bit more like a performer than a power mac and i really love just how much this functions like the real deal original blue and white g3 case with the motherboard in this case the raspberry pi mounting right there and the cables for usb come to the bottom and then the i o plate back here is actually where hdmi and power and audio out kind of pass through and let me get some screws and we'll just mount this in there next i do want to put a fan in there and i have this little tiny fan which surprisingly is not for a raspberry pi this actually came off of a sonnet upgrade heatsink where i had to remove two of these fans to fit it into my g3 beige desktop which i'll link that video right here because that's one of my favorite computers ever but this will also fit in the space here although it's kind of a very whiny fan so we'll see what it sounds like but yeah it should connect just fine okay well unfortunately this fan is not gonna work and uh let me show you why yeah that's pretty loud uh i don't think that's gonna cut it okay and while unfortunately i don't have any other fans this size on hand i did find some of these fans which are actually meant to fit certain raspberry pi cases where they go directly above the processor but i think this fan will actually fit back here where i can mount this without having to drill any additional holes in the back i can fit at least two screws through the little fake vent here and turn it into a real fan vent but yeah i'm also gonna have to make these cables longer so i guess i'll have to break out the soldering iron again because i definitely want to do this case the right way there we go fan mounts in there rather nicely with two screws and that's not moving at all and this fan also has something else very special about it which i'm really excited for let's see if you can guess what that is put your guess in the comments below and then for the power button i've disassembled the kind of standard raspberry pi power connector which has this little button inside which is one of those clicky on off buttons and as you can see it's pretty big on the inside so what i did was i ordered some smaller ones which are those again clicky buttons and i think this is going to fit in the front of the case perfectly and all we have to do is connect this between here and then connect this to the pi and we'll have a clicky button in the front of the computer yeah so if we just pull this back and we'll re-glue that later and pull out this power button our little clicky button fits right in the front there and can be held in by this bracket and then there we go we have a white power button on the front of the computer and then we can kind of maybe even cut this and glue it so it sticks out a little bit more but yeah clicky power button so what i'm going to do is solder some extra wire onto here so that just the one red wire runs through that clicky power button and these can come out the back because of course one has to plug in here and this one has to take power from the you know wall outlet or whatever you have your pi plugged into so yeah let me solder this stuff together all right i've got power connected back here and the power button up here with a penny to bridge that wee little gap right there and everything's connected so i'm gonna try to power it on via the front button so here we go it worked check it out our blue led fan which should make nice use of this translucent case all right why don't we take a look and see how cool this blue light from the fan looks through the translucent case so let me shut off a couple of lights all right well that's pretty cool especially the light up in the front here glowing blue while the machine is on yeah i think if i put a second glowing fan in there that will look super cool okay let's talk a little bit about the software side of things because honestly i'm pretty proud of what i did here so my main goal was to have this feel as much like a macintosh as possible which means that i want it to never really show that it's booting raspberry pi os which is a variant of debian linux so i wanted to boot straight into the emulator and i've even gone a little bit further so let me give this power we'll let it boot up and i'll show you what i mean that's right it chimes not only does it chime but it also loads a happy max screen immediately upon booting instead of showing all that crazy linux stuff that normally flies across the screen and then it goes into q emu immediately afterwards without any user intervention and that's this black screen that you see here but instead of regular q emu what i did was i took the q emu screamer fork which is what gives us sound on q emu in mac os in here and i dug into the source code a little bit and removed a lot of the messaging that normally comes up saying waiting for connection to screen and stuff like that and then i compiled it so that it's completely blank before it boots into open bios here which is now booting into my mac os 9 disk image so a completely seamless boot experience that really mimics mac os and i got to tell you on this tiny little machine with this appropriately sized monitor the effect is really there it really feels like it's a macintosh booting and not a raspberry pi okay now it's going into the happy mac for the second time which is actually the real first time the emulator is starting up in mac os and booting into mac os 9.2 and if you want to try this out on your own raspberry pi i'll include an image of my sd card that i've made and you can flash that to an sd card put it in your own raspberry pi and you'll have a raspintosh of your own alright so here we are booted directly into the mac os 922 desktop straight from power on with no intervention from the user just like a real macintosh and for a quick overview of all the stuff i've done to get it to this point i have disabled all of the startup scrolling stuff in linux i installed fbi which is a frame buffer image viewer and i have that load immediately upon boot to cover over the screen and make it look like a happy mac screen i also have a play which plays that chime as soon as the raspberry pi boots and then it loads q emu immediately and boots into mac os 9 and the other interesting thing i have here is a script watching to make sure cue emu is running which means that if we go to shut down on the virtual machine that's actually going to shut down the whole raspberry pi so this thing literally operates only as a mac os machine and i just want to give a special thank you to the people my discord who actually helped me with some of this stuff and figuring it out and making it as seamless as possible especially user velada who had some really awesome ideas okay so the default desktop looks pretty good but this background is just not going to cut it so let's pull open my 12 inch power bulk g4s shared folder there we go that's much better and this keyboard that's not going to cut it either there we go and no matter how much all of mac yak really hates this puck mouse i feel it's just the right mouse to use with this machine all right now i know this thing is slow but why don't we try a little bit of light gaming on here so we have doom 2 but before we run that i think we might want to lower the screen resolution just a little bit let's try 640 by 480 instead of 1024 by 768 to give this rather slow emulation on this extremely slow last generation raspberry pi a fighting chance of doing something within doom 2. all right well there is a bit of lag here even trying to navigate the menu but let's start a new game all right well we're we're in game and yeah it does work um i'm gonna say that if you're looking to build a retro gaming machine this is not the way to do it yeah actually i think something has gone wrong with the game because the enemies are ignoring me all right well that doesn't really work i mean it works technically but practically it's not really worth playing so cool to see doom running on this fake macintosh but yeah not gonna run well okay so i got the second fan in that fits in this bottom compartment here and while i give it a 10 out of 10 for being blue i have to give it a 2 out of 10 for this horrible whining noise although i guess technically you're not really supposed to just power fans directly off of the gpio pins but eh we're doing it and that whining sound i guess technically is kind of authentic for this machine in real life all right while mac os 9 was fairly usable on here i've also put 10.2 jaguar on here so let's see how well that runs all right well it's booting but it is going extraordinarily slow just look at how slow this loading spinner is actually spinning there's that lovely jaguar loading screen that we all know and love and is it just me or is this kind of shifted slightly downwards why is there so much more space up here than down here i hope that doesn't carry through to the actual desktop so it took the raspberry macintosh about eight minutes to boot into the os 10 desktop here and unfortunately the dock is cut off at the bottom so i don't know what's going on there but yeah let's see how much of a slideshow this is well it's not great now look how slow that bounces good lord all right opening system preferences any day now all right let's just change the desktop here to our favorite wallpaper all right well that was incredibly painful all right so i'm going to go ahead and say that if you really need to run mac os 10.2 jaguar doing so on a raspberry pi 3b with one gig of ram is not the way to do so okay so that'll do it for the miniature power mac g3 blue and white which i think came out great and like i said in the description below i'll include a link to an image of the sd card with everything that i installed to make it do this so you can make your own and i'll also include some details about the various things i installed and tweaked on raspbian here to make it act this way and yeah i'm super excited about the result here i think this is super cool once again thank you so much taylor for sending in this 3d printed case and i'll link to the case on thingiverse as well so yeah if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more miniature and full-sized macintosh shenanigans please subscribe and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to justin chris rocky mods sword eclectic and spike who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping make these videos possible [Music] you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 64,664

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

Id: wLh7c6KQAT4

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021