Gotchas to watch out for
Loss of mouse or keyboard - 2/8/99I've had this happen several times, usually when playing a game like Myth II or Quake. Either the keyboard or the mouse will cease working. In either case, unpluging them and plugging them back in fixes the problem, but its highly annoying!
Fan Noise- 1/23/99
My kingdom for a silent Mac again. Scully is definately louder than Thurl (my 8600/300) in terms of fan noise. I don't know if the case is less insulated, or if the smaller fan just has to work more. Thurl was very quiet, even with two SCSI drives inside.
Sensitive DVD-ROM tray! - 1/20/99
Be careful if you get the DVD-ROM drive. I was placing my Mars Attacks DVD onto the tray and my hand barely bumped the tray as I placed the DVD down. The tray closed, leaving 1/4 the DVD out and put a nasty scratch on the disc.
The Apple DVD player said it could not play the disc, and I think I lucked out and had put the pan and scan side in that time by accident, so the all important letterboxed side is ok.
Be careful!
Connectix Virtual Game Station - 1/17/99
VGS will not work if you have the ATI 128 3D Acceleration extention installed. (Thanks Mac Fixit!) Disabling this extension and rebooting will let VGS work, but it will disable all other 3D applications that use the ATI card.
There is a fix coming, from either Apple or ATI, not sure which.
Joystick wierdness - 1/16/99
While flying the demo of x-plane 4.6, we noticed that sometimes with my CH Gamestick 3D (beta 14 drivers) that the joystick would not be recoginized by the system.
Quitting out of the game, unplugging the joystick and plugging it back in would solve the problem.
I also had the mouse stop working once. Unplugging and plugging it back in solved the problem.
Connectix Installers crash - 1/16/99
The installers for both Speed Doubler 8 and Virtual PC crashed at the "Register your product now" dialog. The mouse would not move, nor would pressing return press the default button. I had to reset in both cases.
Sound skipping - 1/16/99
We were noticing the sound skipping while launching apps, etc. Turns out this was Virtual Memory related. Guess even Scully is not fast enough to make up for the MacOS. Oh well, I'll wait for OS X to have real VM.
Installing Quake wipes ATI drivers
After running the Quake installer from the CD, in order to get the Rave version of Quake installed, Quake Rave nor Myth II would recognize the Rage 128 card.
I looked in System Folder:Extensions and there were some older ATI files installed, plus not all of them had "Power Macintosh G3 2.0" under the title in the Get Info box.
If this happens to you, do the following:
- Insert the G3 CD that came with your G3 and open it
- Open the folder titled "Configurations"
- Double click "Power Macintosh G3 HD.img" to mount an image of your hard disk as shipped on the desktop. It will be called "Macintosh HD"
- Open your hard drives Extension folder, view by list, and do the same with the Extensions folders on the new "Macintosh HD" image
- Compare all the files that start with ATI in both folders. If there is a file in your Extensions folder that is not in the disk images Extensions folder, trash it.
- If there is a newer version on the Macintosh HD disk image, copy it over to your hard drive, replacing the old version.
- Finally, compare Quickdraw 3D Rave. The one on your hard drive is too old, so replace it with the one on the disk image.
- Reboot, your Rage card could be working again
Bad Quake installer, bad!
© Copyright 1997-2002 Steve Riggins. Graphics by Andrew Duncan.
