Man that OS splash screen takes me back. My elementary school had one Mac and two Win98 machines and the Mac was the only one with SimCity 2000 on it so during recess it became my Mac lol.
They're quite upgradable, these things. CPU can go up to a G4, RAM can go up to 512MB, HDD can be replaced with an SSD. Sadly there doesn't seem to be an upgrade option for the videocard.
So there are a few versions of the g3, the first is the PowerBook G3 Kanga/ PowerBook 3500(this was the worlds fastest laptop for a few months) it had a 250MHz G3 on a 50MHz Bus, it could go up to 160MB of Ram. This are extremely rare and in my opinion are the coolest PowerBooks ever, its essentially a PowerBook 3400 with a G3. Then there is the WallStreet which is what you own, it was completely redesigned and imchanged everything, it has a 233mhz G3 on a 65mhz bus and could go up to a gig of ram, then the wallstreet pdq which only has minor differences, then the Lombard which added the bronze keyboard, increased specs and changed the hot swappable bays. Then the final one, the Pismo, this has a 500mhz g3(there were slower models), this also went up to a gig of ram but was a much faster machine. And then the G4 Titanium was released
Welp, that answers that. Thank you! I wrongly assumed 4MB would be enough to at least _attempt_ running Quake at 256-color XGA resolution, even if it performed badly.
Also fairly accurate. the original 4mb voodoos were designed to tie the resolution to about 640 x 480 IIRC, and we can probably assume whatever passes for an accelerator in this thing is about that ballpark. Unfortunately also it's got that early 2000's laptop LCD panel behavior of not scaling up. Run on an external LCD, you should be able to get full screen 640x480 out of it, I guess.
@@TheTurnipKing Good point. I think my 3dfx experience is what's throwing me off actually, since I can play Quake at higher resolutions on a Voodoo 1 card no problem. Although mine was a 6MB card now that I think about it, so there'd be a bit more to play with for frame buffering and textures.
Interestingly I have a very similar but a bit later, PowerBook G3 mine is the 333mhz the Lombard model with an 8mb rage pro lt. It runs quake very well although there’s actually an issue with the quake Mac soft 1.0 where it doesn’t fully support all of the resolutions you need to install a patch to make it work properly. Once you do that it actually becomes a quite enjoyable way to play the game
@@LGRBlerbs Perhaps I should say that 640 x 480 was the normal default for the voodoo 1 with the Glide API, and since that was about double what you'd realistically be able to get with software rendering, many were happy to leave it at that.
This machine is what we call a "Wallstreet," I have one of them in my collection. The hotswap bays originated with the Powerbook 500 as dual battery bays, which you could swap out a PC Card cage for a battery. They improved them a lot since then. These machines had CD-ROMs, batteries, floppies, ZIP, and LS-120 drives that you could swap into the bays. And yeah, the backlights on these screens weren't great back in the day, and age has only made them dimmer.
@@SuperTed. Apple products had internal code names until the mid-aughts, Wallstreet is the code name for this model. It was preceded by the Kanga (PowerBook G3 Series) and replaced by the Lombard (PowerBook G3 Bronze Keyboard). Even within the Wallstreets the revision B speedbump versions are named PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick) whose differentiation is having a 66MHz bus speed.
I must've owned four of these things back in the early 2000's. They were so cheap. Lombard and Pismos to this day are difficult to find at a good price though.
That sound is surprisingly loud and full, for a laptop. Try Quake with 512 x 384 and with "Double Pixels" checked. This is exactly half the width and height of 1024 x 768, so it should scale perfectly and fit that screen's XGA native resolution. Also maybe try doing the "Easy" install option and see if it detects and utilises the laptop's 3D capabilities. Or choose "Custom" and check "Quake with 3D Hardware Acceleration". Maybe it supports RAVE. Would love to see how it looks, even if it's just double scaled 512 x 384 in software. That would fill the entire screen with perfect 2:1 integer scaling, and should look really good. :)
Arrghh. Joy! Powermac computing and a brilliantly efficient operating system unlike today's bloated behemoths. I used to play Dark Forces on powermac, a doom style Star Wars game, Quake 2 and others. It's a strange thing- in England full powermac desktops of the G3 era are harder to source with keyboard, monitor, mouse. And don't get me started on sourcing the VGA adaptors. Dang! So expensive. I love the Powermac 6100 Dos but again it's incredibly hard to source in a complete package. I feel Apple messed up going to Os X. They can never replace the genius of these slimline operating systems. My modern iMac needs 8 gig ram for it to run smoothly, but back in the day less than 1 gig could have you in retro heaven. Dang. The only issue for me was the ADB port, which really was useless. Macintosh Garden here we come ;)
This exact model got me interested in old computers. It was the first laptop I ever got to play with as a kid. So many memories flooding back watching this
@@slightlyevolved nVidia or not, RAVE works on ATI GPUs. It was the API to use before OpenGL took over. Unreal Tournament for Mac also uses RAVE, and it would be fun to see that running on that PowerBook.
@@desther7975 It will run fine. I have a Clamshell iBook 366mhz with the same amount of vram and a Rage Mobility, likely the same GPU as this Powerbook. It runs UT 99 with RAVE quite well.
I was able to install Rhapsody on one of these as they are from that era where Apple was starting to ship out developer previews of Rhapsody & OS X. Might be a fun idea for you!
^^^ "RAVE" was ATI's early 3d accelerator API, much like how Glide was 3dfx's. Since Apple used ATI for a long time in the early 3d era, nearly all Mac games supported RAVE (until Mac OS X made OpenGL standard.) Many *ALSO* supported 3dfx for desktop Macs with add-in Voodoo cards.
In 1998 I picked up one of these for my CEO boss at my first job from a local Mac shop in NYC. I set it up for him, etc. Was the only time I got to handle it and I was blown away how fast it was. The company paid $3899 for that laptop.
Quake was designed for mouse input. Gamers didn't know how to use mice in games yet, though. (That and mice were unreliable and always skipping around).
Richard Smith Even Doom was designed with mouse input in mind. Just they hadn’t worked out, then, that we only wanted to look and turn with the mouse, not move with it. If you watch any of the demos play back in a vanilla compatible source port, like Chocolate, you can definitely see the variable turn speed and fine grained motion only possible with a mouse.
@@NoobixCube Vertical mouse look was definitely not 'a thing' yet, with 'mouse look' moved to a button you had to hold. That can be seen with the perspective abnormalities if you modify the game to force mouse look always on.
Richard Smith I assume you mean in Quake when you say that, because vertical aiming isn’t something that can be done in vanilla Doom at all. The game compensates for you if you’re in line horizontally and far enough back. Doom looks 3D, but it’s impossible for things to overlap in the vanilla game. I meant turning horizontally with the mouse was part of the originally intended control scheme, but the way mouse input works in Doom, forward and backward movement of the mouse moves the player forward and backward, too.
@@NoobixCube Actually I think I am thinking of Duke3d now that I really think about it. Getting it all mixed up :) The 'fake 3d' a lot of the early first person shooters did, however, was subject to perspective distortion when looking up and down though. That game also did the up/down aiming for you, but you could still look up and down, but it was never intended for you to move and look up and down at the same time. Doing this will make you go cross eyed on the original game.
This is my absolutely favorite laptop series if all time. it deserves a full LGR. I'm still getting utility from it, though parts are getting harder to find.
Back then you had to manually allocate extra memory to it from the "Get Info..." panel. This laptop should have no problem running quake (or QIII Arena for that matter.)
This definitely brings back memories! I had one of these "Wallstreet" laptops, the first Mac I ever bought (but I bought it used in 2000). I used this to design rave flyers and do all sorts of other fun Photoshop stuff. I also remember installing the first early betas of OS X on this machine. It was also the last Apple laptop I ever bought that didn't have a tonne of hardware issues that made me switch back to PCs. This was either the last, or one of the last, to have the Apple logo "upside down" when it's open. Anyhow, these were really great machines. And I believe the screen brightness issue you were having was related to age, because I rmemeber the screen being brighter than most other laptops at the time.
I took one of these old things with me when I studied abroad... in 2008! I ended up buying an iBook while I was there and I still have both machines hanging around. Since I bought the iBook overseas, it has a foreign keyboard!
What program did you use to design the rave posters? I was a DJ at the time and always wondered what people were using to make those cool 3D looking designs!
I've owned four Apple laptops since 2008, must say the only one that gave me trouble was the polycarbonate White MacBook, that was very flimsy. Any of the unibody aluminium MacBook Pro's (have had a 13" and 2x 15"s) have been very solid and reliable.
As for Macintosh software bundles, yes! There was lots. Super maze wars, descent, Eric's solitaire, casualty kid, peter pan and lemmings if u where lucky! Soo many good memories, be sure to check out Macintosh Garden as well :v
I remember the Performa (probably a few years before this) we had when I was a kid came with a big plastic book/wallet thing full of CD-ROM games and art programs. I still remember the distinct smell of that wallet, and the feeling of peeling its pages apart to get the Kid Pix CD out
@@TwoToTheSix yes, yes and yes! Other games to mention. Crystal Caliburn pinball, marathon trilogy, spectre challenge, oxyd and spin doctor. Bonus's: prime target and damage incorporated.
My dad had one of these for his job at the local library, it was one of the first computers I ever used. Lots of memories of dialing into the library's collection of useful links, going to PBS Kids' website for the ZOOM community (anyone remember that?) and Cyberchase, and playing that crappy Magic School Bus shockwave game where you're driving around a map and it's totally not pacman 😂 EDIT: Oh, and going to Apple's website and checking out the brand-new QuickTime VR panoramas of various famous locations!
I wish laptop manufacturers had taken those swappable bays further and created swappable processor and graphics modules so we could upgrade them. A laptop like that would be a real desktop killer. Also, I'm sure you know this by now, but just in case I think that thing has some variant of the ATI Rage II in there (holy moly there are so many different versions of that thing. it's like the P-40 of graphics cards).
Upgrades were already possible with this generation of PowerBooks as you could actually swap the processor out fairly easily (it was on a daughter board) and with the sonnet cards one could even upgrade it to a G4 500 (although OSX support was spotty with those). Out of all the laptops made at this time this was one, if not the, most upgradable all things considered. Post G4/PIII I suspect the reason these types of upgrades went away were heat and power draw of newer chips along with more significant bus changes and integration of systems onto the chips. Things just started moving too fast.
@@pedrofelck You may be correct (I'm no expert), but it's not impossible. It's effectively what graphics cards for desktops already are, just in a different form factor, and if there was a standardized layout (sort of like PCMCIA) card manufacturers wouldn't have to worry about modules not fitting in certain machines and companies could design their laptop cases accordingly. It wouldn't work for all laptops like ultra-thin notebooks, tablets, or low cost ones since it'd probably be more expensive to implement, but if upgrading the GPU in the future is a selling point you're probably getting a bigger, more expensive gaming-type laptop anyways. (It would also make replacing dying fans easier, like the one in my laptop that sounds like an asthmatic jet engine) Come to think of it, I'm somewhat surprised Apple hasn't done that with the iMac. It would allow them to make extra money from people, and it would still give them a new planned obsolescence option, since they could change the interface and force people to buy a new iMac after a while.
That actually kind of happened at least for a short time. Alienware used to sell laptops that had removeable gpu modules that you could swap in new ones as upgrade later on. I don't know how much of it was supported, but they did have it. This was before they got bought by dell.
Play some classic Marathon on there! That and A-10 Attack! from Parsoft were my 90s Mac games of choice. This machine should also be able to run Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 if you want to give them a try. Definitely use RAVE hardware acceleration rather than software whenever a game offers that. Also consider upgrading the OS - you could run anything up to Mac OS 9.2.2 and even early releases of Mac OS X. The cool part, if you do want to put OS X on it, is that it will dual boot, and you can use Classic in OS X to run OS 9 in a virtualized form that will run most software just fine. OH, and if you really want to do something cool with it, install Connectix Virtual Game Station and try some Playstation games on it! You could also emulate a PC using Insignia Solutions SoftWindows or Connectix Virtual PC. A great source of Mac "abandonware" is Macintosh Garden (.org).
It's Happy Mac time! Also: That PowerBook G3 is a very early one. It still has the Rainbow Apple. Since you have a MBP according to your statements, use Mactracker to determine the exact model. And my iMacs came with Bugdom!
IT'S INCREDIBLE! This is the speed in Quake on a 98-year-old processor! P2 233 Klamath could not even dream of such a speed even in 640x480, but here you can play on Apple in 1024x768 !!! ... Although if I found out the price of this laptop in those years, I probably would understand why everything is so good =D
Apple definitely bundled games with their Macs in the nineties and early 2000s. My family's grey iMac and my various Powerbooks and iBooks all came pre-installed with Nanosaur, Bugdom and Cro-Mag Rally, with developer Pangea Software being a long-time Apple partner and Mac game developer. You can actually download several of Pangea's Mac OS games for free from Pangea's website. If you haven't played Bugdom yet, I strongly recommend it, as it's an endlessly imaginative, charming action-adventure and an iconic game for the Mac platform. Our LC 575, which was our first computer, came pre-installed with classics such as Sim City 2000, Spectre Challenger, Super Maze Wars and Spin Doctor. My Nana's Performa came with these games as well, but also had Glider Pro and ShadowWraith, which is an awesome top-down cyberpunk-themed arcade shooter. Our eMac came pre-installed with Deimos Rising (developed by Ambrosia Softworks, which was also a long-time Mac game developer) and - oddly enough - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.
StillNotScaredOfSpiders MACE and Executor are the closest, I’d say. Problem is, Executor is pretty much abandoned, and MACE is closed-source and VERY early in development.
That none-adjustable volume thing is something I deal with all the time with os9 games. Many games, like Redneck Rampage, you have to start and stop the game to adjust the final volume for some reason. And the worst game I’ve found for this is Star Trek - A Final Unity. In that game you can sort of adjust the volume of speech and SF in game, but not really. But then the cut scenes where you jump to Warp are at FULL VOLUME no matter what you do. The Enterprise going warp at full volume on a G4 iMac with Pro speakers at 2AM is not recommended.
Of course Quake is running well, it's only at half resolution! lol! And Quake vinyl?!??!? Totally! One of the best game sound tracks ever! Right along Mech Warrior II and Wip3out soundtracks which just fit their games perfectly. New games just don't seem to put as much effort into music, but I suppose that was probably because it was underappreciated back in the day. Duke 3D's soundtrack was good too though at that time MIDI was not cool anymore - but it is certainly classical music now.
It's not that different from a modern laptop. You go back twenty years from 1998, and there was nothing like this. I think innovation is slowing down. There doesn't appear to be many new ideas, just tweaking of existing tech.
I have an PowerBook g3 pismo with the 500 mz processor which I love so much. I found it at the most unlikely place a small new computer repair shop and I asked them if they recycled laptops and if so can I take a look next thing you know I was walking out with a new laptop.
PowerBook WallStreet, 2nd generation G3. The first gen was housed in a 3400 case, this was part of the new design language at Apple. You don’t have enough VRAM to run Quake at 1024x768, but I think it’ll run in 800x600 full screen. This Mac has both S-Video and VGA out on video mirroring, so you should be able to do your own capture of Yoot Tower and it will run no problem. I have a copy and it runs very well on my Strawberry iMac (333) and my Beige G3 Desktop (266). Apple says you can only put 192 MB of RAM in these, unofficially, you can install 512 no problem. Nice pickup.
Speaking of Quake on vinyl, what turntable do you use? I liked your older video with the Doom soundtrack on vinyl and I've been wanting to put together a modest setup on a spare desk.
Well, here is as good a place as any to mention it: I was watching some very old videos of LGR these days and it was quite nostalgic to hear Clint say things like „So, should you buy this old computer? The beard says yes!“ or „Woopdeedoo for nerdiness.“ ;) Not complaining about the professionalism of LGR nowadays, but still... nostalgia... and the progress of time, I guess... :)
1998, would definitely have used CFL backlighting, and those definitely fade with age. LED upgrade or even a new CFL replacement would make a huge difference.
As a kid I loved playing with KidPix. It was an art software that included some pretty strange sound effects. I know it was often free through Macintosh magazines in the 90s.
Yup, our school had KidPix and SimTower.... until they banned SimTower after 9/11 due to the bomb threat in it. They threw out the iMacs after 1 year anyways.
Apple did bundle games, and even 3rd party apps with their computers. However, if I'm remembering right, they didn't do it on some business level configurations.
When you said 10base-t ethernet I was really surprised but then I realized it's 10 megabit not gigabit... still close to my internet speed though which is depressing
Remember Ethernet "hubs?" 10Mb/s throughput across the entire network, not just from node to node. When everybody's online, you can watch that collision light flare up. Well worth the switch over to Ethernet "switches."
Apple used to bundle games and software with their macs. My 6500 (1997) came with Descent II and Mechwarrior 2. Both had little sticker art on the cds that there were supercharged for the 6500!
I have 2 of these, they were top of the line in thier day, only the rich account executives had these. I had to recreate the PRAM battery an make a new one from scratch because I couldnt find one. also if you put in a bigger hard drive the magnetic pull will put the computer in sleep mode and not wake up. it is a cool vintage machine.thanks for the share
Yeah, RAVE was Apple’s proprietary 3D acceleration API, which your laptop should be able to use. Also, in the Apple menu, there’s an app called Apple System Profiler that will show you all the info about your machine. Upgrading to 8.6 is free, and 8.6 is considered the most stable of the Classic Mac OSes.
Interesting to see that the box specifically advertised the CPU as a RISC processor. With Apple now transitioning back to RISC architecture with ARM processors, I'm curious to see if they're going to promote this fact again in their marketing.
I was 9 in ‘98 and man did I want one of these. It might have been a year or two later when I really got into them because I wanted the Pismo which is a bit newer, but still. The 90’s and early 00’s generation of Macs will always be special to me. Computers were exciting then. They weren’t just slightly tweaked variations on a tired theme... every new generation was really “different”. Our family didn’t choose to spend money on tech upgrades very often but I would go through the Macmall catalog for hours thinking about what I’d get if I could. Thanks for the memory trip.
Wow! I just saw a black MacBook on my local fleemarket last weekend and now you show us a black PowerBook, nice! I almost bought it but they asked too much for it. Are those cat footprints on the top of the case? By the way, I really want a big box version of Quake.
10:21 - YES! I got the vinyl ordered, I saw your tweet about it. Later I saw John Romero tweeting it was sold out 2 hours later. I have all the main albums on CD but I'd love to have them on vinyl, I love NIN.
All 4 versions... or was it 3? Then the role playing game bungee released... then the monster UNREAL and the sequel UT... UNREAL TOURNAMENT... FA18Hornet... so many games back then...
Soooo, 4 minutes into the video, most of my town lose all power. Turns out it was just a fire on our gas plantation that was the cause. Now back to the Blerbs!
I've got one of these (though mine's slightly newer, a Lombard instead of a Wallstreet). Very nice computer, though sadly mine has a cracked LCD so it's not very useful as a laptop at the moment. Got it from my grandma who worked for Apple in the late 90s, and is still running its special Apple-internal version of Mac OS :) It runs OS 9 perfectly and older versions of OS X decently so I'd personally recommend upgrading the OS.
I was given both a Wallstreet and a Pismo back around the time of the Intel switch. Gave me a way to play my Classic games. They were given to me by a family member who was the go-to Mac repair person in the neighborhood, so they always had some older computers that they were working on and they were occasionally gifted retired computers when friends or family upgraded.
I drooled over this computer after seeing in on Sex and The City with the glowing logo! This is still a beautiful device! I hope they bring it back - an updated design would easily fit into Apple's design family this decade.
Ah, lovely old cold cathode screen backlights. Poor things are probably an inch from dying, which explains why it's so dim. That's a rough guesstimate, but probably accurate.
some of the Macs did come bundled with trials of games. When I got my iMac G3 350mhz back in '99, it came with a trial of Bugdom and a couple of other games. There may be stuff in the OS or software discs that came with your machine. I believe OS8 also included a music video to The Old Apartment by Barenaked Ladies(and OS9 came with One Week by BNL). 90's Quicktime multimedia goodness man!
I bought an Apple PowerBook G3 Pismo for £75 ($96) from eBay last week. Absolutely immaculate condition and fully working. I wanted one back in 2000 but couldn’t afford it at the time, so I’m so glad that after 20 years, I finally get to own one! These were outstanding laptops for the time, and everything (ram, processor, hard drive) except for the video card were upgradeable. I think the Pismo can run OSX Tiger, but I’m sticking with OS 9.2.2; brings back memories!
Yea buddy. Been occasionally perusing the NIN store for the better part of the past 2 years or so waiting for them to stock that Quake vinyl. Was delighted to finally have them take my money. Here's hoping it arrives OK. I hear it comes with some goodies.
Jobs also unveiled a new series of professional-level running on Apple's G3 233-, 266- and 292-MHz processors. Pricing start from $2,299 for a 12-inch display unit to $3,499 for a G3 with a 14-inch screen.May 6, 1998
it looks like this is the Powerbook G3 "PDQ" since its 233mhz and it has 512k of L2. where the original "wallstreet" at 233mhz did not have L2 cache on the CPU at all. (only the 250mhz and 292 mhz versions) it has a ATI rage pro LT graphics..like what others said try RAVE mode. I need that on on my (newer) powerbook g3 pismo@400mhz to get good game performance. as for any potential upgrades. max RAM is 512MB and this powerbook has the old LBA issue so meaning it wont like drives bigger than 128gb. Max officially supported os is 10.2.8 oh, and the PDQ stands for this laptops code name. "Pretty damn quick" :)
No doubt you already know this, but the screen is likely dim due to the CCFL lighting in it just wearing out over time; thankfully you can replace the screen easily enough. I got a Sony PCG-F809K (a Pentium III 850MHz with a 15" 1400x1050 display!) and had to replace the display as it was horribly worn out - thankfully it was a cheap fix; yes, old LCDs are cheap now! Anyway, food for thought.
I think you could probably get this up to OS X 10.3 officially and 10.4 unofficially using “Xpostfacto”. Though you’d probably want to upgrade to the “unsupported “ but fully working 512 mb ram (though I think you have to get special ram sticks to make it work, not just any ol ram. Got mine from OWC Computing)
I just picked a 12.1 inch Mainstreet G3 PowerBook out of my works eWaste dumpster Yesterday ( had been sitting out in rain, hail and +30°c weather over the Christmas break), and against all odds, it booted first try (after a good teardown and clean that is). Downgraded from 10.2 to 9.2.2, and it's working unbelievably well - So glad to have saved it from landfill 👍
