I'm an expert on the Beige, which is about as hard as they come for
Macs. It has a lot of little quirks and just plain voodoo behavior,
but problems with PCI video cards isn't one of them. I'm assuming the
card is an ATI card, hopefully a Radeon, but perhaps a Rage? I'm
guessing you didn't get the card fully seated in the slot? You could
try another slot.
One problem specific to the Beige is the problem with the NVRAM/PRAM.
There's some capacitor in the power supply that can leak voltage back
into the PRAM/NVRAM, so when you zap the PRAM using Cmd-Opt-P-R or
reset the NVRAM using Cmd-Opt-O-F and commands "set-defaults" & "reset-
all", sometimes these don't work, and won't clear the PRAM/NVRAM. The
only solution is to Shutdown, open the case, remove the PRAM battery,
remove the cable from the power supply to the motherboard, and press
the CUDA reset button. I usually wait 5 or more minutes, and press the
CUDA again, and then reassemble in reverse order. There can be times
that you can get the PRAM/NVRAM screwed up so that a Beige will refuse
to boot from almost anything, but if you pull the PRAM battery & cable
from power supply, and press the CUDA, and then let it sit overnight,
and press the CUDA again, I've never had this fail to revive any Beige
that won't boot. Whenever you change a CPU or add or remove a PCI card
it's a good idea to start over by pressing the CUDA reset button (near
the 3rd PCI slot) with the PRAM battery and power supply cable
removed. You might not need to wait, but I've not had great success
with instant reassembly, and feel that a 5 or 10 minute wait has some
value.
As for PCI cards, you'll want a Radeon card so you can enable Quartz
Extreme using PCI Extreme 3.1, which works in all versions so OS X
except for one specific version (10.4.3 I think?), so if you load
10.4.11 you can have full Quartz Extreme support. My Beige has a G4
450 and a Radeon 9100 (Mac 8500) w/10.4.11 and full 768mb RAM. It's
nice, but times have moved on, so I rarely boot my Beige any longer,
although I did boot it yesterday for a while.
If you need specific assistance, I can help off-list. If the PRAM
battery is dead, I strongly suggest getting a new one ASAP. The dead
PRAM battery could be part of the problem here. After you get the
video card working, you might want to disable the onboard video using
Open Firmware commands. The instructions can be found on the
XPostFacto forums under the Beige category. If your Beige has a Wings
AV input/output personality card, this card shares VRAM with the
onboard, so it's possible that a poorly seated personality card might
effect the video output somehow? The Wings card only works well in OS
9, although there was an OS X driver that didn't work too well.
A Beige can be a fun (and hard) project Mac. Best luck!
--
You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for
those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs.
The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette
guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
