Apple should really bring back the dudes that delivered the Mac Anniversary in a limo once they bring out the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. It’s gonna cost your soul so might as well make it worth it.

Dude. Your camerawork on the TAM's LCD is ON POINT. For awhile, I forgot that I was looking at an LCD panel and thought it was a direct capture.

A Descendents shirt two TAM episodes ago, now a NOFX shirt? This is my kind of channel.

Just when I thought the insanity had reached its peak. This is one of the coolest Macintoshes I've ever seen. Too bad the CD drive has given up.

I say go for the triple boot option just because you can. Besides, down the Linux path at least, you may even find a GUI environment with lower processor and memory overhead and get even more performance out of it.

The worst part about BGA chips: Before you can solder them on, you have to reball them I believe. Reballing BGAs is the devil.

Plenty of PPC chips were mostly pin compatible: BGA 603, 604, 740; 750, 7400, 7410; 750fx, 750gx. They may need voltage adjustments, or a few pins may need to be pulled up or down to get new chips to work in older boards, but otherwise they fit on the same grid. The 750 is basically a reworked 603e with more L1 cache and built-in backside L2 cache control (the 740 was the same but without the L2 cache, hence its 603/604 grid compatibility). The 7400 is a 604e with the same treatment (more caches and onboard L2 cache control) but its big improvement was AltiVec. However, unless you're running Mac OS 9 (or X, which the TAM never will) and apps that are AltiVec optimized, there's not a ton of benefit to going with a G4 over a G3: the G4 is hotter and more power-hungry than the G3 while performing only marginally faster at the same MHz. You also usually have to reinstall OS 9 after putting in a G4 upgrade, or the AltiVec libraries aren't available to the OS or many apps.

Don't you need to install the Sonnet G4 Enabler 9 in the system folder to activate the AltiVec instructions? I'd also try rebuilding the desktop file if you're not seeing the performance increase you would expect. Maybe try using included "Metronome" utility to see if it's reporting the same wonky clock speed as the system profiler. It should also show things like bus speed, etc to help you figure out if your overclock is working as intended.

If you use OS9Helper, XPostFacto, and LeopardAssist you can get Leopard or the PPC beta of Snow Leopard running on this. Imagine running the OSes of the original metal iMacs on a machine that inspired them. Especially with the space background one always saw in those ads. If you use InterWebPPC, you can actually browse the modern web on that TAM in that OS.

I had no clue that they sent an expansion cover for the back of it. Thats literally just so cool because I didn't even know you could do that!

Excellent upgrades!! Would love to see the double boot or even triple boot!! Thanks for sharing

Could you do an upgrade of an original G3 iMac? Would be very curious to see what the upper limit for upgrades on one would be.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, I have a TAM sitting in the garage with a G3 upgrade new in box and a 4 port USB card. Maybe when I have time I'll see if it still starts.

Triple booting you say... Potentially terrible idea you say... You should totally do it! Thanks for all of the fantastic shenanigans.

It's a terrible idea, but I'd really love to see it! ;-) Actually what I'd like to see is FreeBSD 13.1, in this release they finally removed GCC and fully replaced it with Clang/LLVM, if you do an optimized recompile expressly for the G4 ISA you should see a significant performance boost.

Love the NOFX shirt! Also love the descendants shirt in the last video! Punk and Old Macs! Awesome combo!

Pushing the boundaries of personal computing.... twenty years after the fact. Love it!!

I think tripple booting the Tam with BeOS is a terrible idea, AND I would like to see it. 😅

I think you should do a segment where you 3D print a custom back with built in fan mounts and air flow solution.

9:10 I don't know if you fixed it, but it appears you have the fan mounted the wrong way around. As it's fitted there, it'll exhaust air out from the case to the outside. You can check on the fan shroud, but for 99.99% of fans (and all Noctuas, AFAIK), the intake side is the one with no obstruction and the exhaust side is the one with the fan hub label on it.

Having the fans pointed outward as exhaust fans was definitely the best idea.

Thanks for the saturday morning shows, this one was awesome, as always!

Apple secret police open up!! Oh its just a TAM never mind

Congrats on this great video!! I do have an old 6500 Mac with the Credcendo G3 upgrade sitting for years without booting. I will give it a try now!!

This design held up so well, IMO. If they reintroduced this today with modern guts it wouldn't look too out of place.

11:26 The 50 MHz bus on the TAM is probably hindering the performance of that G4.

I've spent a lot of hours using my Performa 6360 which has a very similar logic board, but with a 160MHz 603ev on a 40MHz bus. I suspect the slow screen drawing when you booted with extensions off was because accelerated graphics extensions weren't loaded, not because the stock 250MHz 603ev was too slow to draw the desktop/Finder in OS 9.1.

apple system profiler displaying a highly improbable clockspeed is just your TAM saying "I AM SPEED!"

Thumbs up for bringing back the tam, AND nofx!

About the slower speeds at ~11:30, I ran into this on my G4 PowerTower Pro as well (also with the g3 upgrades). The system bus and memory speeds are what are killing you. To put in as a car analogy, you can put an LS block in a fiat, but you are still going to deal with an undersized transmission, poor gear ratios, small wheels, limited suspension and brakes, etc - and it will never perform like a Corvette. It will however, be a beast of a FIAT.

Welcome to the G4 TAM Party, Sean! Big fan, long time viewer! 😎

pcb way also cam make flexible pcbs, you could probably make and replace the broken cd drive cable

I love your videos. Just love them. -SuperYosh from Unprepared Films

Crazy build. The tiny fan was facing the wrong way. Your blowing out not in.

With as smooth as some of these crazy updates seem to be going through on this machine, maybe it's a blessed macintosh instead of a cursed one.

Absolutely do the triple boot. And bonus points for the NOFX shirt. I got to see them in concert about 25 years ago here in NJ at a really small venue and it was a really great show.

G4 has better internal cache and pipe-lining algorithms if you're wondering why it can beat a g3 clock for clock... Also, sonnet clocker was programmed in RealBasic because it uses the RealBasic Default Application Icon. Pretty Fun Rapid Development toolkit. Maybe, something you could do a video on. The processor speed is wrong because the Sonnet Clocker probably wants the default speed of the upgrade card and not of the processor you're installing. Since the processor doesn't set it's own clock speed.

that fan you put in was actully blowing out of the back of the case and not sucking cool air in

I'm just now realizing the TAM stands for 20th Anniversary Mac... if you'll excuse me I have to go sit in shame for a few moments.

Best episode t-shirt choice ever.

I think a triple booting TAM would be amazing to see! Or at least an attempt!

You are a crazy man and I love it! Keep making these fun retro tech videos.

I’d like to see how a triple boot setup would work nice job!

This has been a great series, I subscribed off the back of it! Looking forward to future series.

Some 25 years ago, when a man in a tuxedo delivered this TAM to its original owner, if you had told them about what would happen to this machine in the future they would have said "What the hell is a KZfaq?"

This video needs more Tim Tams.

Linux and BeOS are cool and all but I think installing Leopard would be a better achievement.

I say go for a triple boot system. No guts no glory 😁

Action Retro is the TRUE Mac Daddy

Sean you never cease to impress man! Love to see the triple boot!

This was Tamrrific!!!!!! Loved It!!!!

Would love to see this running BeOS and Linux certainly. I used to run Ubuntu on a clamshell iBook G3 years ago.

Loving these TAM vids, many thanks!

That big umbilical cord on the TAM is really a big oof and shows how bad the overall engineering was with this machine. Even worse than the special display cable they had for the Apple Studio Display back then, where you needed an expensive adapter and PSU if you wanted to use it with a different computer.

Yep, please do the BeOS thing.✌

I wonder if you could order a new custom flex cable for the internal cdrom through one of the chinese pcb vendors, if you take photos of the broken one and get it scaled correctly it shouldn't be too hard to draw a new gerber on top

I dunno, I really like the TAM design. It's pleasing to look at, so I dig the form factor and I wish companies still made interesting computers like this.

I think it's a great idea to triple boot 🌞👍🏻

cool keep pushing it farther !!!!!

@Action Retro , My guess is the PCBs you have in that box at 3:30 are to be populated with both a CPU and Coprocessor for a 68020 or 68030.

I also love NOFX and old macs. :)

we need the TAM to boot OS X even if its only 10.0

TAM + NOFX = Hell yes!

Triple boot, triple boot! Also, maybe upload it on a Tuesday.

I really think you should triple boot! If you're using Linux and BeOS, maybe you should upgrade the ram to 256mb. Either way, it'll be crazy!

@19:40 - YES, make it tripple boot. And run WinXP as Virtual PC. That should be able to stress the processor.

When you boot with extensions off, it turns off the graphics acceleration extension too. That's why widow redraw was so slow. It wasn't the 603e.

Your channel is a hidden gem.

That Noctua fan is back to front, it's blowing air out of the case, not sucking it in.

Silly, and I love everything about it !

fantastic and consider painting the screen bezel black

I'd love to see some more detailed benchmarks as I've never heard of a L2 upgrade being swapped with a G4 CPU. Sonnet made G4s for PCI Powermacs and even made one for the x100 series of Nubus Powermacs, but there was never a retail G4 upgrade for L2. I wonder if it was a heat/power consideration. Or perhaps it wasn't worth the cost. Or 603e machines that topped out around 128MB of RAM weren't worth upgrading that far. Or maybe the L2 slot was too much of a bottleneck for the more demanding G4, or couldn't handle it well enough, similar to the faster Sonnet upgrades that would downclock the B&W G3 bus. Maybe we can now find out! I'd suggest something that can utilize Altivec as it seems MacBench doesn't, or does so insufficiently. Maybe Altivec Fractal Carbon?

That random Apple employee is Sir Jonathan Paul Ive! But I’m sure you knew that.

When action retro says he’s going to make a modification to a system without any hardware shenanigans all I can think is, “what other shenanigans can someone pull?”

That fan is so janky.. and I love it!! Awesome

It would be really nice to 3D print a cover for the side of the Mac. Now it looks very hacky. Anyway, great job!

Loving the Nofx t shirt there!

I think you're referring to my TAM running BeOS. Let me know if you have issues with the BeOS hard drive image. I was never able to get my functional CD drive in my TAM to recognize the legitimate or burned BeOS CD-ROMs. So I installed it on my PowerMac 6500 onto a BlueSCSI, then booted from the external BlueSCSI. You may have better luck with your external Superdrive, but BeOS is very finicky. Also, I've heard of others with success booting a G3 processor card upgraded Mac into BeOS, but never G4. Might be a first. However, BeOS did support 604/604e CPUs, so I'm hoping it will work. And if you're looking for a place to send that G4 upgrade card when you're done with the video, I'd love to continue testing it for you. :)

Great G4 Upgrade Sean Herd Is tHe Man

Sonnet Crescendo software comes with "Metronome" which is their own readout software for the system extension

Nice shirt. I got to see NOFX live in Halifax.

I'm not a Mac person (have a particular distaste for Apple really), but I do find these videos interesting, especially the hardware upgrades, BeOS, and Linux installs. I noticed there appear to be 2 cache slots. Is it possible to add extra cache even with the G4 upgrade installed? Would it even make a difference? Or would a dual G4 set up be possible?

Cokie the Clown is one of my favorite songs.

I think you're the only techtuber that actually uses ArctiClean😄

The question is could it run OSX

Love the shirt, your content is fantastic. Keep up the good work!

I really want to see you make a triple booting TAM!

best youtube channel

I think XPostFacto supports the TAM. I'd love to see it running OS X!

Let’s see that Action!

Huh i never knew you were a NOFX fan :) the man i killed is a good song

Someone may have allready posted this concerning the Flex connector on the DVD drive... Since apple used existing stock parts it had to create the TAM, wouldnt that connector be in one of the CD-rom units out at that time, specifically the top loading one? Maybe there is a non working unit out there that has that cable? Just a thought.

*Sonnet wants to know your location. *

I think that shirt is a great idea

This is a true frankenmac. It is both one of the most ridiculous and most awesome things I have ever seen. 🎉

The only advantage I can think the 300MHz G3 would have over your upgraded TAM would be the increased bus speed of 66MHz vs 50MHz on the TAM. Unless it's not recognising the cache? The TAM has external cache, whereas the G3 and G4 had "backside" cache, which I think means it's integrated into the CPU module (i.e. on the opposite side to the processor). Obviously you had to remove the TAM's external cache to use the upgrade card, but is there actually cache on the Sonnet CPU card? Something tells me installing the cache card in the other slot alongside the CPU card wouldn't work.

Love the NOFX Shirt!

Triple boot it! You might be able to update the yellow dog as well!

Pcbway could make a replacement ribbon cable for your dead drive too.

Is USB 1.0 (I assume the USB controller is USB 1.0) to Ethernet faster than the other Apple proprietary slot above the PCI slot? I think the ethernet card you showed previously for that slow would fit without the riser card with the expansion cover. Also, for the optical drive, there are ways to repair the ribbon cable, but maybe a laptop optical drive would better than trying to disassemble and modify the Apple "superdrive". I don't think the manufacturer of the optical drive should matter as I would think any sort of modern optical drive would conform to generic industry standards, though an Apple OEM device might mitigate any possible compatibility issues.