The World's First G3 Swapped TAM

[@dosdude1]

This was definitely a sweet upgrade to perform! Hopefully I can resolve the weird cache card upgrade extension issue. As for OS X, you’ll definitely want to connect an external display, especially during the installation, as Open Firmware does not show any video at all on the internal display of that machine. Once the installation is complete and you select the correct display resolution, in theory, OS X should begin working on the internal display. Also, when you install, ensure that OS X is installed onto the first 8 GB partition of an IDE drive, otherwise it won’t boot.

[@DGgraphicsNY]

Amazing!! You are the man.

[@LovelyAlanna]

Hello, I'm curious, what is that lamp thing you used to heat up the chip to be able to remove it? I've never seen one of those before

[@dosdude1]

@@LovelyAlanna That’s just a BGA nozzle for my hot air station. It’s sold as an “Aoyue 4545W”.

[@NaoPb]

That was so cool!

[@miguimau]

You are a legend, Sir. :)

[@sjgrall]

I knew the G3 was based on the 603e, but I didn’t know it (740 specifically) was “pin” (ball) compatible per se…fascinating. If only my soldering skills weren’t awful….nah, I’d just use an upgrade card

[@TradieTrev]

Dosdude1 is such a legend! By far one of the most superior electronics techs on youtube!

[@forbiddenera]

Not just youtube! I don't even know if I've seen him on here, much if at all, but he's still a legend in my mind!

[@LabCat]

Shenanigans like this are a breath of fresh air for those of us who grew up in an era of "Why not? Try it and see if it works" hardware hacking and computer modding. I don't even think that you'd be able to do the same thing between, say, an M1 and an M1 Pro (although it'd be awesome if you could).

[@boomers_pb]

M1 to M2 or M1 Pro to M2 Pro seem more likely, the die carriers between the Pro and base M series chips are a different size. Knowing Apple, they probably move around data and power balls just to fry anyone's hardware who attempted such a thing.

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

I want to put a Xeon in a Thinkpad T470P.

[@johntrevy1]

It amazes me how flexible macs can be with CPU upgrades.

[@raven4k998]

or the g3 is compatible with that old cpu in terms of the socket

[@tomshotdogs6645]

This is what makes it so frustrating to me that Apple takes such a strong anti-consumer, anti-repair stance. If I could just swap parts out when they break; or just.... run the code I would like to run on my devices without the machine fighting with me... I'd still be a dyed-in-the-wool Apple user. Hell, even now, I just got an M1 macbook by chance; even with all the frustrations I have with modern Mac OS, there's a lot about it I REALLY like... It's just that the stuff I don't like is so unpalatable, I feel bad using the thing.

[@johntrevy1]

@@tomshotdogs6645 The only problem I have with the AS systems are the soldered storage. For those not made of money and prefer Apple you are essentially forced to use an external storage solution to extend the life of the machine.

[@ZeroHourProductions407]

@@johntrevy1 it feels blatant, that apple went with arm specifically to spite the hackintosh movement, where it was possible to use AMD CPUs and have a resulting build that performs better. That and time and again, arm silicon can't multitask to save a literal life. Source: every phone, ever.

[@johntrevy1]

@@ZeroHourProductions407 In today's energy crisis it makes sense to go with ARM. ARM is rapidly catching up with X64 in performance. As regards to the Hackintosh, well Apple sort of created it in the first place.

[@AnthonyDD]

Ok, I need to start going to VCF. This is so cool. I would love to see this kind of thing happen live. Colin did such an amazing job.

[@billkalwite728]

Amazing, Dosdude1 fixed my Dauphin DTR-1 at VCF east

[@billkalwite728]

If you want to do video on DTR-1 I will loan you mine. It was also from Tom’s collection

[@RetroHoosk]

My experience with the XPostFacto 'bricking' the 6400/6500 (and I imagine the TAM due to its similarities) is purely because OpenFirmware on these machines defaults to using the serial port, you have to set XPostFacto to use the keyboard for input and the internal video for output manually.

[@solsburian]

I have run OS X 10.2 on my 5500/225 years ago (it was painful) and IIRC you need to enter a few commands on a seemingly blank screen (the OF prompt sets the screen brightness insanely low for some reason). The version of OpenFirmware used in these series of Macs is apparently buggy too.

[@LightTheUnicorn]

I love how unique and characterized your various machines have become, from the misbehaving clones to the cursed SE/30 and now the absolute chaotic beauty that is the TAM G3. Totally wild, love it!

[@10MARC]

It's interesting that almost the entire market for accelerators on modern machines has totally dried up. I suppose in theory people still upgrade their CPU's directly, but going from one generation to the next with a card is just not done anymore. Modern computing is rather boring, actually.

[@common_c3nts]

Thats because a 10 year old laptop works the same as a brand new top of the line computer for 99% of the people that use computers.

[@Jaxermd]

Enjoyed seeing this done live. Wasn’t easy. This is definitely a singular TAM.

[@raven4k998]

makes you wonder can he put a g4 into it and will it work?🤔

[@gymnasiast90]

You got yourself another subscriber! I love these kind of shenanigans - making stuff do ridiculous things, just for the fun of it. Nice to see dosdude1 appear as well, I used his method to install macOS Catalina on an unsupported MacBook Pro for a friend.

[@Krutonium]

Fancy seeing you here! Yeah he does quite the videos, it's always interesting seeing what he gets up to

[@2dfx]

Not surprised that the CPU swap performs better than the cache card seeing as the cache card is ultimately going through a separate translator/multiplexer which will ultimately hamper performance. The cache card upgrades were always a bodge.

[@bbishoppcm]

Nice!! I was watching DosDude build this - history in the making!

[@HughJeffreys]

Absolutely loved this!

[@æœç]

No replies and 3 likes bruh

[@MrAlan1828]

In Therory one can "Build" a TAM , 3D Printing a case, IPS screen 6500 Logic, some good imagination and good 3D Printer. Hmm maybe...

[@sbrazenor2]

I finally got around to VCF East. I had a good time. I need to get into the consignment earlier, as it was picked pretty clean by my trip through. You gave me hope that I can get my Mac running BeOS, since you told me 4.5.2 world, while the 5.0.8 image is basically trash. (I burned a copy and it doesn't function.)

[@ilovemyhonda250ex]

was great listening to you and the other panelists talk at VCFE! Thanks for coming!

[@kid.forever]

I friggin love this channel. Keep up the shenanigans!

[@steingat]

I feel triggered by the word shenanigans

[@gregoryburzy468]

Most excellent shenanigans sir, I'm honored to have seen it in person. Great times, it was very cool to see your enthusiasm and share some laughs. Thank you.

[@wallyhackenslacker]

At this point that poor TAM is probably the single most frankensteinian beast ever shown in this channel. If it hasn't surpassed the Cursed Macintosh in quantity and drastic-ness of upgrades already then it's still giving that one a good run for it's money. I would never have the courage to try and mod a machine this much!

[@jaybutler]

It was great to meet you at VCF and to see some of your machines.

[@StevesRetroFunzzz]

Another great video! I remember playing the original wolfenstein on an apple //e back in the day at high school, they then sold them all and bought 16 BBC micros eco'netted together. Those were the gaming days!

[@Obie327]

Very cool chance upgrade Action Retro! A super slim and sleek power house! Can't wait to see the next video! Thanks for sharing the adventures!

[@dgpsf]

Have you ever considered that you are the only person in history to have ever played Wolf3D on a TAM running MacOS on top of BeOS?

[@ActionRetro]

hahaha might be true

[@davidwatson2919]

I did this last year with my gazelle mlb from a 6500. Since that is the same board as the TMA, I knew it was possible for that. I have been laid off from work for a long time, and just after finishing it, and set my sights on my TAM, I got a new job and ended up having to relocate to Florida, which I just completed at the beginning of April.

[@Drmcclung]

If I remember correctly, about 19 years ago we old old Mac users were using a piece of bodgeware called xpostfacto to boot OS X 10.3 on 604e and G3 beige boxes that took care of all of the open firmware problems getting it to go. I've had a few 6-packs since then 😜

[@malcontender6319]

That - right there, is the peak of 90's Macintosh aesthetic. Have a sub.

[@DavidStahlOLDHAPPyMACs]

WOW Sean that is mind blowing G3 upgrade OSX you will figure it out it nice to see you put the liments of that Tam

[@onigvd77]

hey Sean thanks for this one, it’s amazing you could get a G3 TAM! hail DOSDUDE1! love these videos and have had a great interest in the TAM for a long time and these videos about it :)

[@adventuregamer6499]

almost at 100k! im happy to see how far you have come since i started watching the channel at 9k!

[@Jake-23]

We were so preoccupied about if we could, we never stopped to think if we should...

[@tuerry]

i wish i had known vcf even existed, i dont live too far away and i wouldve loved to see this in person!

[@georgeh6856]

I bet you're glad now that you didn't just throw your TAM in the wastebasket.

[@sedrosken831]

I forgot the speaker cloth thing was even a thing -- I thought they all had black cloth. Goes to show how well it goes together.

[@AmigaofRochester]

Black lipstick! lol, hey brother. Was great seeing you at VCF East.

[@blairwigley]

Oh I missed that you got the optical drive working. Awesome stuff.

[@dmacpher]

Oooooo shenanigans

[@nticompass]

I was there, too! I think I even saw myself in the video for like a split second 😀

[@DatBlueHusky]

dosdude1 is amazing holy crap. I also got him g4 cpu swap my crescendo cache upgrade but still need to pick it up from my friend that was at vcf (who brought the card there for me). I cant wait, its gonna be a screamer in my macs now.

[@dosdude1]

Funnily enough, I tested your G4-swapped cache card upgrade in this very TAM (pre-740 swap).

[@DatBlueHusky]

@@dosdude1 yes i was very excited to hear that it worked! I was pretty stoked.

[@Mrbubzie1993]

I have a TAM, but I like living dangerously through Action Retro :P

[@TheJonathanc82]

Such a beautiful thing to see. Keep up the amazing work!

[@iViking90]

I wonder what Woz would think of this.

[@scottharvey-davies1607]

once again, you deliver the Mecca of 'nobody asked for this but we can' ..... I salute you sir ;)

[@m1kr0kosmos]

I didn’t realize Johnny Knoxville was so handy with computers.

[@haramaschabrasir8662]

Just coming from Luke Miani's video. What's going on Dosdude, that dude's unstoppable!

[@kommandokodiak6025]

This is so cool and making history to boot. Great times!

[@aegisofhonor]

I mean, even the IIVX/Performa 600 had a G-3 upgrade option, so you'd think a TAM would also have an upgrade option of that antiquated lemon like the IIVX/Performa 600 could become a G-3 with all it's 16mhz bus glory.

[@owenrichards1418]

I'm impressed that you have taken mac modding to this level. I'm a bit dismayed in that Wolfenstein 3D and Doom ran 'buttery smooth' on my old 386DX way back in the mid 90's. They should be running on any PowerPC processor like effluent off a soil removal implement. I'd love to find out why this is. Is it that Mac OS just isn't game friendly in how it allows games to get to the hardware? Lazy programming? Might be an idea for a future video.

[@monkeyman767]

It's the first one, certain versions of Classic OS just don't support the calls properly and are translated instead. There are later versions of doom that run flawlessly but there's no real way to identify what version is what, they look the exact same

[@owenrichards1418]

@@monkeyman767 Marathon ran well and it was doing essentially the same thing. So It’s definitely possible to do a Doom style shooter on the Mac and get it to run with usable performance.

[@monkeyman767]

@@owenrichards1418 yes, but marathon was built exclusively for Mac at the time. Doom wasn't, and as I say, there are later versions that run just fine, but some earlier versions are essentially just poor ports that do some tricks to get it to run

[@andersenpeters]

Ah shoot, I was at VCF East but spent Sunday mostly at the museum and in talks, little did I know what I was missing out on in the exhibition hall. 😅

[@four20team]

Super troopers comes to mind with the word shenanigans so many times. O'Hagan saying I swear to God I'll pistol whip the next guy who says shenanigans 🤣😉🤣😉

[@Shaggy0f138]

Top-tier shenanigans! Way to go guys!

[@jeremytoms5163]

Love it. Love the upgrade videos, just trying to get motivated to upgrade my G4 'Sunflower' so that its usable today. Already updated my 2009 Imac but that was easy seeing as its intel based. Now running Monteray on it,pretty smooth on 8GB of ram. Just wish They was an easy transplant for the sunflower apart from making it a hackintosh :(

[@oldguy9051]

Finally: a new video of PC/Mac/monitor slapping!

[@tombarber8929]

That’s so cool! Makes me wish I was there on Sunday too.

[@PedroM125]

Dude, both of you are freeking amazing! Damn!

[@iHusk]

In my "good" timeline this is a weekly PBS show. The presentation is so accessible and friendly. People who know nothing about anything made before 2010 can experience retro mad wizardry that frankly suits the best Wozniakian qualities. And Woz is a personal hero so I guess this is me lavishing praise? I don't human very good so, best guess.

[@StevenIngram]

It's crazy how much this machine has evolved since you got your hands on it. LOL

[@Plarndude]

I love your shenanigans.

[@MegaManNeo]

Steve clearly didn't know how much potential his old computers had in them.

[@speedsrj]

I had issues with Debian 11 on the install process in my Powerbook, surely will try it now

[@JoshuaBoyd]

Do you think you will ever be able to upgrade the TAM's display to a higher resolution one? I believe there have been some 12" 1600x1200 panels made for instance...

[@leenevin8451]

This is a very collectible machine bro

[@Nitro2030ce]

Ah, BeOS.. I actually have Haiku installed as a triple boot option, I love it!

[@s6edge7]

It's a bit hard sourcing 180c parts in Aussie land

[@morecrappysketches]

I remember getting 10.2 running on a Powermac 6500/225 way back in the day. It worked, but it took 10-15 minutes just to boot. I imagine the slower, unsupported architecture and the paltry 128MB of RAM had something to do with it. I think I had it booting up faster on old 604-based Macs.

[@DistrosProjects]

Love the BeOS love! Has to be one of my favorite vintage Mac operating systems :)

[@timothyp8947]

Absolutely bonkers, absolutely love it 😊

[@The-i-Shakk]

I need a Tam in my collection. Will get one eventually.

[@zeekaos7795]

I can't believe this works! That is amazing! I have a feeling that OSX is saying the hardware is incompatible because of a lack of open firmware? Does the TAM actually have an open firmware like a G3 does? Its like... the rom of the motherboard doesn't match the real hardware. And the OSX installer is reading the ROM file and seeing that this is .. not a G3 lol. even tho it is. ANYWAYS STILL AMAZING! AND I HAVE TO SUGGEST THIS! Can you please change the background image of your BE and MacOS installs to the HACKINTOSH logo? THIS FULLY DESERVES IT! haahaha

[@BlackHoleForge]

Well hot TAM. I've seen it all now.

[@upgrade1373]

Totally Awesome Machine

[@bryans8656]

I'm looking forward to your "bonus feature" on installing OSX.

[@brookemels]

Action Retro? More like Shenanigans Retro! Stay wacky Sean ♥

[@leenevin8451]

So 4 years later it was defunct ooof

[@Nymunariya]

I wonder if the OS X not booting/installer not being happy is due to the list of acceptable macs. That reminds me of e trying to install Jaguar on unsupported macs. There is however a special version of Jaguar 10.2.7 for iMacs that might not check the model id? I'm pretty sure I used that to install Jaguar on a G4 MacMini. That could be worth a short, but IIRC the 6500 and TAM are still old world. So maybe it should be the same process as getting OS X on your beige G3?

[@pmc_]

IIIRC, at least with Leopard, you can edit a plist somewhere in the installer to make it ignore the supported system list. But if anyone can figure it out, it's probably dosdude1 himself - he maintains patchers for more modern macOS versions to allow them to run on older systems than technically supported.

[@WildkatPhoto]

that is insanely cool.

[@EhodgettYT-jp1fn]

I thought the g3 and g4 were also pin compatible? Could you theoretically do the same swap with the g4 like you did for the upgrade card?

[@stgigamovement]

Yes

[@charliekahn4205]

Was there ever a pin change within these generations? It seems unlikely that they would have kept the same pin setup from the 603.

[@rmcdudmk212]

That's an awesome upgrade. Glad it worked so well

[@drewzero1]

"Our friendly neighborhood Tam." You mean Simon?

[@moz2186]

Shenanigans. 🤣 I absolutely love the hardware hacking!

[@DystopianOverture]

Holy shit that’s awesome! Looking forward to the more tinkering to be done! You are in uncharted lands 😂

[@ctrlaltrees]

Totally normal as always

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

It was a very good year.

[@agamemnon8163]

Wibble wobble wibble wobble! action, I love all your jiggle intonations when you monologue ❤❤❤

[@georgesenda1952]

Is there a West Coast equivalent to the shows in Chicago and where you went to ?

[@BartechTV]

I used to use a 603E in my Amiga. I wonder if it would also be possible to replace the CPU on an Amiga BlizzardPPC card with a G3?

[@mrlithium69]

cool collab!@ just found both of you

[@mechabee3575]

You will need a system extension for Osx to get the back light working.

[@francesquare8708]

is it possible that it has been done before and just was lost to the internet or was just undocumented outright?

[@lemagreengreen]

It has always struck me as a little funny that Jobs hated this machine so much yet the design cues are very evident in Apple products even today. Clearly the designers thought more of it than he did. More on topic though: this is cool, it's amazing how upgradeable these old Apple machines are even if it was never officially supported. Something really cool would be to upgrade the display, given the expansion bus... running a better video card is surely possible?

[@creepyhobo5211]

Hey how about putting the mic EQ back where it usually is. There's too much at the very lowest and highest frequencies, and it quite shitty sounding.

[@soyomonke6148]

Bro this is way faster than running on my school chrome book

[@AiOinc1]

Still sad that this is basically a laptop made to look like a freak. Extremely cool upgrade though

[@sendark001]

that's super cool!

[@BluePlanetMedia]

After watching this, I recognized it sitting on Jerry Seinfeld's desk in season 9!

[@milescarter7803]

I may not MAC, but I really appreciate a good hack, especially if it is a BGA swap 😂

[@seth8629]

Amazing and wonderful

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

BeOS was designed from the ground up for video editing.

[@Biomancer81]

Hey Farva, what the name of that place you like to go with all the crazy sutff on the walls? Shenanigans? You talking about Shenanigans?

[@rootbrian4815]

That's almost like upgrading the CPU (and possibly the GPU) on a non-apple laptop. Has anyone ever done this without a FUBAR?