I finally got an MDD G4!

[dandeco]

Well, my 2001 PowerMac G4 QuickSilver was starting to have a few issues, i.e. with the PCI cards and one of the RAM slots, along with the slower 867 MHz speed, so I started to keep an eye out for the next step up. Then last week at my workplace's satellite warehouse, I saw it!

A PowerMac G4 with the Mirror Drive Door case, the mid-2003 model made for those who still want to natively boot into Mac OS 9! This is the model I was specifically looking out for!

It's got a 1.25 GHz G4 processor, one of the fastest systems that'll natively run Mac OS 9 (only behind the dual 1.25 GHz processor model). It came with the stock configuration of 256 MB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive, along with a Combo Drive and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card with 64 MB of VRAM. I also plugged a Mac-compatible USB 2.0 card into one of the PCI slots (it requires at least Tiger to operate; more on that soon).
Among getting it, the PRAM battery was so depleted it was often preventing the Mac was starting up! So of course I ordered a new one, and it came in last Saturday.

Wiping the original stock hard drive using my Mac OS X Tiger install DVD, just to be safe. For the time being I'm using my 2004 Apple 20" Cinema Display as a monitor. I'm thinking of maybe getting an Apple LCD display using the ADC connection, since the PowerMac G4 has such a compatible port, and it'd be a little less wire clutter in the process; plus I like their sleek early 2000s design. (I'm eyeing either a 17" Studio Display or 20" Cinema Display.)

Last night I downloaded the Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Installer disk image from Mac OS 9 Lives and installed that onto the hard drive, and it went successfully. Once my RAM upgrade order comes in later today (I'm gonna max it out to 2 GB), after work I'm going to install the RAM and install Mac OS X 10.4.6 Tiger on the drive, to make it a dual-boot configuration (along with using some OS 9 apps via Classic if need be). This should make for a much more interesting retro Mac experience than my 867 MHz G4 QuickSilver or my 400MHz Indigo iMac G3 (the speakers in that still need replacing).

 

[Hrududu]

The fact you got one with a power supply that hasn't died yet is impressive! I'm 2 for 2 on MDDs and dead PSUs. They're really slick machines with the dual ODD bays and 4 internal HDD bays. Enjoy your new PowerMac!

 

[dandeco]

The RAM upgrade arrived today: two 1 GB PC2700 DDR modules. I popped them into the PowerMac and installed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. While the install went pretty well and left me with a nice dual-boot Mac OS 9 and OS X setup, I've run into a snag...

Only one of the 1 GB modules is being recognized! Either it's an issue with the RAM slots, or that one memory module. I will try moving them around in the slots and see what that does. If a bad module is the case; I will order another pair of 1 GB PC-2700 DDR RAM modules, that way I'll be crazy prepared!
It even detects my USB 2.0 PCI card very well, unlike when I used the same card on my QuickSilver! Now I'll also be looking out for another internal IDE/ATA hard drive to install in the second hard drive bay, while I also transfer my files and install the different applications.

 

[Nermal]

Neat. That's one of my favourite Macs; I had one when they were new, but couldn't afford to keep it. By the time I sold it I'd maxed the RAM, put a Radeon 9800 in it, added a DVD-R drive, and I think I had a second HDD in it too. I also have a memory of installing at least one PCI card but I can't remember what...

 

[dandeco]

UPDATE: It was indeed a bad RAM module, as I suspected.

Browsing the web via TenFourFox!

 

[dandeco]

Photos of running old software...

iTunes 2, with my playlist of 1980s songs.

Look, I can even capture video into Adobe Premiere 6.5 on Mac OS 9, too! (It'll also run on Mac OS X 10.4, but usually crashes when I try to save or anything.)

The editing interface. This was the last Mac-compatible version of Premiere until 2007, and thus was the last PowerPC-compatible version of Premiere and the last version before it got branded as Adobe Premiere Pro and had more fancy new features added (and a more consumer/hobbyist-aimed version named Adobe Premiere Elements came out). It used an A/B timeline for the first video track.

Running "Sammy's Science House," an Edmark "Learning House" computer game I enjoyed playing in school as a kid.

Playing around with iMovie 2. I can even capture and edit standard-def MiniDV footage from my Canon Vixia HV40 HDV camcorder on Mac OS 9! Of course, if I'm using the old iMovie, I'm limited to 4:3, compared to Final Cut Pro and Premiere being able to work with 16:9 footage.

iMovie 2 also had a unique "Water Ripple" effect that was not on subsequent versions of the "classic" iMovie (versions 3 to 6).

Playing around with Final Cut Pro 3.0. It's noticeably more complicated than Premiere 6.5 and the current Final Cut Pro, and even more than the current Premiere Pro version is!

 

[dandeco]

I ordered a 200 GB PATA hard drive for the PowerMac G4, and it came in today!

I'm not sure how to work Cable Select on this model, so after a little trial and error, to be safe, I arranged it so my boot drive was hooked up to P2 and the clips inside arranged so it works as the master drive, and the new secondary drive hooked up to P3 and configured as a slave drive.

Preparing to initialize the new drive into a compatible Mac OS Extended format. Thanks to the Mac OS 9 Disk Driver, I can even access it in the Mac OS 9.2.2 system, and it reads the full thing instead of just 128 GB or whatever!

Playing another childhood computer game, "Mercer Mayer's The Smelly Mystery: Starring Little Monster, Private Eye". Ten years ago, I was the first to do a "Let's Play" commentary video of the game on YouTube, followed by making a YouTube Poop video of the game and then a straightforward no-commentary playthrough video (it especially helps that the culprit's true identity is different each time you play the game!)

In addition to iMovie 2.1.2 on the Mac OS 9.2.2 system, I've naturally got iMovie HD 6 installed on the Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 system as part of the iLife '06 suite. As I've often said, it's a really good video editor when you're running Tiger on a PowerPC Mac with at least a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. Even HDV works fine, though of course the capture isn't in real time, so you have to time things right, but it's doable. (Real-time HDV capture on iMovie HD 6 is most effective on anything greater than an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and with more than 2 GB of RAM.)

 

[Nermal]

I'm not sure how to work Cable Select on this model, so after a little trial and error, to be safe, I arranged it so my boot drive was hooked up to P2 and the clips inside arranged so it works as the master drive, and the new secondary drive hooked up to P3 and configured as a slave drive.

If my memory is correct then all drives should be set to CS on this machine. Then just plug them in.

 

[MysticCow]

Congratulations on your new hair dryer! I mean, uh, MDD G4.

 

[rampancy]

Congratulations! The MDD was my daily driver for several years when I was in university, and I loved it. It was such a great machine for early-mid 2000s Mac games. When I was really into upgrading and hot-rodding Sawtooth G4s I'd often look for MDD owners getting rid of their stock Radeon 9000 Pros when they'd upgraded their graphics cards; they were cheap, easy, and very effective upgrades for the Sawtooths in my collection.

To help with the noise issue I'd hearily recommend applying sound dampening foam to the inside of the case.

 

[rampancy]

The fact you got one with a power supply that hasn't died yet is impressive! I'm 2 for 2 on MDDs and dead PSUs. They're really slick machines with the dual ODD bays and 4 internal HDD bays. Enjoy your new PowerMac!

Indeed, that's the main concern I have about the longevity of the MDD (along with other Power Macs that supported the ADC connection), since sourcing replacement new MDD PSUs is extremely expensive, if not difficult.

I have seen someone on eBay (Mods: Not my auction) selling MDD PSU-ATX PSU cables that would allow you to use a standard 24-pin ATX power supply with an MDD - I wonder if it's the same person who first started making and selling them. Nevertheless, you'd also have to contend with modding the case to accomodate the ATX form factor.

 

[840quadra]

Congrats.

Just got my Quicksilver cased Digital audio going recently. I really want a MDD, but I have so many older devices that it just doesn't make sense.

enjoy.

 

[dandeco]

It's been a while, but last week at my workplace's satellite warehouse I was finally able to pick up an accessory for my MDD G4 I've been looking for for a while!

A 17" acrylic LCD Apple Studio Display with ADC connection! It's missing the back stand, but I'm sure I can find a replacement stand. Until then I've got it propped up against a few things when it's hooked up to my MDD tower. There's also a couple scratches on the screen I can easily overlook.
ADC is pretty convenient, how I don't need to plug in an extra AC power cord. I remember it from when my college's video editing lab had such displays used with their old PowerMac G4 QuickSilver towers.

Browsing Macintosh Repository via Classilla! I love seeing that message of the site saluting me for running it on an old Mac.

Adobe Premiere 6.5 on Mac OS 9, on the kind of display it may have been used on at the time it was out (2002). Like I said, this was the last version of Premiere to work on PowerPC Macs, and was a a decent less-expensive alternative to Final Cut Pro for multitrack Mac video editing, until Final Cut Express came out. (Though some things on pre-Pro versions of Premiere were harder to do, like panning and cropping and chromakey.)
What you see there is a fursuit vlog I shot early last spring showing off the MMD G4 and demonstrating its' video production abilities on Mac OS 9, shooting the video on MiniDV and importing and editing it on Premiere 6.5. It did take somewhat longer to edit and even longer to export compared to a modern Mac video editing setup, even a late 2000s Intel Mac. Then I had to re-encode the finished file using QuickTime Pro on the Mac OS X Tiger system so YouTube would support it, but here you go...

Final Cut Pro 3 on the ADC Studio Display. The older versions of FCP that ran on Mac OS 9 were also considerably more complicated, but I can see why this was so popular with professional video editors in the early 2000s. Even the current Adobe Premiere Pro often isn't as difficult to use as the early FCP versions!