The Warp Core Engineering Upgrade

by John Martellaro

June 4, 1999

"It is human nature to take delight in exciting admiration."

-- Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad)

It all started when I decided it was time to augment "Aquarius". That's the PowerMac 8500 that I've had since September 1995. Last summer, I wasn't too thrilled with the beige G3s, so I went ahead and did a system upgrade. I replaced the 120 MHz 604 card with a PowerLogix 300 MHz G3 with a 2:1 ratio on the cache bus and one megabit of cache. I also upped the memory from 80 MB to 144 MB. That memory, by the way, was bought from MacGurus, possibly the the finest place on the planet to buy Macintosh memory. I can't say enough good things about these guys. Just go there.

The trigger event was WWDC, naturally enough. I came back with MacOS X Server and the first developer release of MacOS X (client). I had also, somehow, acquired a copy of Final Cut Pro (don't ask, don't tell). So here I am thinking to myself that I'd really like to get into some digital video, run Project Builder, and have MacOS X Server as my primary working environment.

The Adventure Begins

The first thing I tried to do was load MacOS X Server on Aquarius. Wouldn't install. No way. I had previously installed Rhapsody, Developer Release 2 on the same (G3) system, and it worked fine, so I hoped that Server would also load. Later, exchanging email with PowerLogix in Austin, I learned that there was a change in the way X Server uses the cache, and it is incompatible with my system. They'll have a fix Real Soon Now.

Rats.

So I prepared to smoke a credit card into Super String fragments. I was tired of waiting.

Now, I really didn't want to do this. I was planning to stall and buy a "Sawtooth" system when they are released, so the rumors go, in September. These are the G4+AltiVec machines. I was thinking along the lines of MacOS X Server on a G4 with 512 MB RAM and an Ultra2 SCSI hard disk and -- maybe -- a flat screen display.

But that presented a problem. I estimated that it would be some time before things settled down, hardware bugs were worked out, and prices became realistic. The G4 is a somewhat larger, hotter CPU and might well be positioned in a slightly more expensive system. And I didn't want to spend a lot. So I decided that I needed a B&W G3, 400 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Ultra2 SCSI now, and I'd ride things out until next spring. Besides that, my wife and I have an agreement. We alternate buying our systems. Since it was my turn, I was simply holding my wife back from getting her next system. (She's gone over to the dark side. A Windows NT type. But she's also a Java and Perl guru. Hope endures.)

Awhile back, I had written about Best Buy Stores and iMacs over at MacOPINION, and one of my faithful readers sent email to tell me about a great new computer store on the east side of Denver. It's a MicroCenter. Mary invited me to come over and see their Apple section.

Wow.

Now you have to understand why I'm telling you this. Each year at WWDC, I go to the Apple Company Store at One Infinite Loop and geek out. It's a very nice store. A lot better than any Apple store I have ever been in. In addition to a 15 meter wall of floor to ceiling Macintosh software, there are all the hardware items, PowerBooks and desktop systems that you often can't get in many home town Apple stores.

Denver's MicroCenter is better than Apple's Company Store.

The Apple store-within-a-store at MicroCenter is not just a corner with a poster of Amelia Earhardt hanging on the ceiling. They have their own closed off, but nicely sized section with the best assortment of Apple stuff you have ever seen. The store manger, Skip Dwyer, should be a candidate for sainthood.

If you live in southern Wyoming, eastern Colorado, or western Kansas, you need to stop by this store. Ask for Nate. You won't be sorry. (8000 E. Quincy Ave., Denver, CO, 80237. 303-302-8500)

Okay. Moving on.

I went to MicroCenter and came home with a beautiful B&W G3. I named it "Vega." I thought, rather optimistically, that my problems were all over. Not quite.

The first thing I did was to attach my APS external 4 GB drive to the Adaptec 2906 SCSI-2 PCI card. I bought this because I want to attach my slower SCSI-2 drives to a separate bus. I had read that attaching one to the Ultra2 SCSI bus would slow that down to the speed of the slowest system, and I certainly didn't want that.

But the external drive wouldn't mount.

So I tested it with FWB Hard Disk toolkit and it gave me a level 3 error. Yikes! Had I banged it disconnecting it from Aquarius?? The obvious thing to do was move it back to the 8500 where it had worked so well. And it did. Mounted and ran just fine. So now I have to talk to Adaptec. Not fun.

I can still get to it via AppleShare.

No Matter Where You Go...

The next thing I noticed as I adjusted the new system's position in my desk was that the USB mouse cord that comes with the G3 is way too short. Not just too short -- excessively short. Whose ideas was this? But I didn't worry too much because I had long ago switched to a trackball and had picked up a Macally USB trackball with the G3. The Macally trackball is astonishingly beautiful, all translucent blue with a cool blue translucent ball. Unfortunately, I don't care a bit for the mechanism. The action, compared to my Kensington TurboMouse on Aquarius, is sluggish in the extreme. I hate it. It's going back for a refund. Before I made that decision, I tried downloading the driver from Macally's Website. The first time I went there, their driver page was a broken link. I sent them email. Two days later, I found their Website in order and downloaded the driver that I hoped would give me acceleration control, just like the TurboMouse.

It locked up the Blue Box in MacOS X Server. I don't need that. Back to Kensington.

So. Back to MacOS X Server. It was a breeze to install. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes to complete after you boot from the CD. After the instal is finished, there is a very nice network setup Assistant, just like the regular MacOS. The look, feel and the style of MacOS X server are really quite classy.

So I decided to try upgrading the Blue Box from 8.5.1 to 8.6 with my 8.6 update CD. Some people had told me they had done it, and an Apple engineer said he saw no reason why it shouldn't work. Arrrgh! The Blue Box file space for my account toped out at about 170 MB, so I had to remove a bunch of stuff to make room for the 8.6 updater. I started with 29 MB free and needed 50. (I have heard that there is a way to assign more file space to the MacOS Blue Box -- I just haven't discovered out how to do it yet.) When I was finally able to run the updater, it generated an error and suggested that I either abort or try again. I decided to abort. Then the updater forced me to reboot -- no choice When the Blue Box came back up, it was MacOS 8.6, but the install log said there was an error and the install aborted. Huh? I've been running that half-baked 8.6 for about a week with no problems, keeping my fingers crossed.

Of course, if you have another HFS+ volume on the drive which I do, then it's visible on the Blue Box desktop, and you can run all your applications out of it. But a colleague pointed out that the installation of MS Office really hogs the System Folder, so it's important to find out how to increase the file allocation for the BB.

One of the things that annoyed me was that the Blue Box would not let me set a screen resolution higher than 832 x 624. Of course my Radius monitor will handle much higher resolution. And since I was stepping down to a single video card, I needed all the screen real estate I could get. No joy there.

...There You Are.

My favorite QuickTime movie of all time is the big QT4 Star Wars trailer that Apple has posted on their Website. The view of the Naboo capital with birds flying overhead is breathtaking. I noticed, however, when I ran it on Aquarius that there was an occasional stutter or skipped frame. It only has a 5,400 rpm drive, and there's only so much a 300 MHz G3 can do sitting on a 40 MHz bus. But on Vega? Purrrfect! It's like watching the original movie. Hey folks, if you want to move into the digital age and do really cool stuff with digital video, this is the setup you want.

I am greatly annoyed that Apple has moved away from systems with NTSC video in. I know that FireWire is all the rage, but 99.9% of us in America still have NTSC TVs, and I delight in sending a video feed from the TV into the 8500 so I can write these articles in one window and watch La Femme Nikita in another window. Eventually, I will move the Rage Pro card out of Aquarius and into Vega since that card has NTSC video in. But the ATI Rage Pro acceleration software seemed to be the culprit in crashing MacOS 8.5 for me. After I blew it out of Aquarius, I had no more problems. Unfortunately, I had to drop back to thousands of colors to get acceptable scrolling speeds.

I'm still getting accustomed to the small Apple USB keyboard. It's nice because I have a limited amount of desk space, and most keyboards are desk hogs.

As advertised, the B&W box is astonishingly easy to open. Unlike my previous two Macs, the 8500 and a Centris 610, there were no loose cables that had to be reattached after unpacking.

The next step is to install MacOS X (client) preview on a third partition I set aside. But unlike MacOS X Server which is a shipping product, I cannot say much about the Developer Preview. If MacOS X Server is any indication however, I think MacOS X (client) will be really nice.

Vega will last a long time (or maybe a year), and I'll keep you updated as I go. Since you asked, I'll tell you. If you have anything equal to or older than a 604e system at any speed, you may want to consider a new system. Today's Apple is moving the technologies along at a much faster pace than earlier years, and I don't think it makes sense to hold back much longer.