I am happily typing this out on my 7600 based "Xbox" after a fresh installation and update of Panther on Old Reliable here...
7600 with MaxPowr G3/400/1MB
350 Megs of RAM
A Promise ATA/66 card with a 40 gig WD HD partitioned into 7.9 gigs and All the Rest
A Rage128 card
A USB card
After accidentally using an older version of XPF <blush> I was blessed with a boot hang and a black screen upon reboot with the KB being unresponsive to PRAM zaps. Later I determined that for some reason the Rage card was making my machine unresponsive. I took it out and rebooted into 9.1 using the built in video. I also tried a spare 7600 box lying around my office to see if the Rage card was shot. That's when I found that the PSU in my spare box had died. 15 minutes later I had stripped the 7600 of it's wires, drives, and MB and chucked the rest! Not sure what I am going to do with the MB--but I will think of something.
Anyway...I reflashed the ATA card based on messages that I saw in verbose mode of Panther's installation and tried again. I also popped in my old Voodoo3 card still suspecting that my Rage card had packed it in. The boot process still hung.
I decided to bite the bullet and back it all up, and reformat with a fresh 9.1 install. This time the installer for Panther got me a gui but it was lousy and almost unreadable. Luckily I had updated my iBook so I knew it was most a no brainer. I figured that the OS would behave better after the installation. Again, no joy. I decided to bite the bullet, power down and retry the Rage128 one more time--and it works.
I have no idea why it was cranky at first but all seems well. Perhaps it was the clean installation that helped. My backups are restored and all seems well.
The 10.3.1 update went quick. Strange though...I did not have to work through Apple's whole Welcome / Setup process upon first boot. I was presented with Admin's home folder and that was it. With the same CDs I did a nuke 'n pave to my iBook and went through the whole Q&A and bouncing blue blob thing.
I made a new user account to avoid utilizing root privs all the time and here I am. Video is snappy enough with the Rage128 card. Frankly I can't see spending $80 - $120 on a Radeon 7k as that's halfway to a B&W G3 with full compatibility. I have not tried mpegs or avis. Fruits of Dojo's freeware Wormhole screensaver (GL based) runs pretty smooth at 1024x768 and I don't have to use Shadowkiller.
All in all, worth the short term annoyance, plus it got a piece of bulky computer junk out of my office much to my wife's delight.
Scott
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