We installed the card tonight, and there is absolutely, no go. The Asus card *does not* work with the Cube. We see some vertical lines, and that’s about it. I have the latest ROM installed in the Cube, the system profiler reports: 4.1.9f

Personally, I am a bit dissapointed… There goes $85 USD. 🙁
It seems that either the card only works on G4 PowerMacs, but not Cubes, OR, Asus now sells a different revision which makes it incompatible with Macs again.

And as for the Envision monitor, it seems to have MORE problems (even before we did the gfx upgrade) in addition to the bad quality and the non-crispiness. It was flashing in and out today… 🙁
Save your penies for a better monitor. Envision just doesn’t deliver.

Yay! The card is here!

Of course, I feel stupid for not waiting 24 hours and get the news that the only $12 more expensive card with the 64 MB onboard also works on Mac. 🙁

Anyways, we will be installing the card in the Cube this weekend.

I tried the AsusDVD software DVD playback that came with the card on my XP (with the Voodoo5 card) and it is a really nice product. Everything works really smooth and stuff and with nice sound quality.
And Linux still struggles with that out-of-sync, slow and unreliable VideoLAN, Ogle, mPlayer and Xine. I tried them all, none of them is as good as the worst Windows DVD player or the Apple one.

Duh!
I just got an email from a Mac user that he says that he was using the 64 MB TV-Out version of Asus V7100 with no problems on his G4/400. 🙁
I wish I had waited a bit more before buying the 32 MB version.

I mean, this new technology needs lots of memory and lots of bandwidth. The more memory you gfx card has, the better.

So, both myself and Jbq spent the whole night trying to find a solution for the Quartz Extreme goodie/curse by Apple.

We found out that there are only three GeForce2MX PC cards that work without BIOS flashing under Mac. We went for this one:

ASUS V7100 Pure Pro GeForce2 MX400 32MB AGP

Bear in mind, that only the specific model works. The 64 MB model or the one with the TVout or the MX200 equivelant, even if they share the same product name, will not work under Mac. So, as long you have the latest 4.1.8 or 4.1.9 BIOS for G4s, you should be able to use this card with no other modifications. We bought it for $64 USD +tax/postage.

I just hope it will fit on my Cube…

Thing is, that the technology that Apple wants to introduce will be very slow EVEN with the latest GeForce4 Ti 4600. JBQ said that the Desktop will feel like a TNT-1 in terms of performance with this new technology on big resolutions, even if you have the very latest GeForce4. As for the 2MX-400 we just bought, it will be dead slow on 1280x1024x32bpp at 85Hz. But at least, it will be able to utilize “Quartz Extreme”. No other cards except the GeForce2MX or OLDER Radeons (not 7500/8500 and above) fit on the Cubes.

Now I know. They suck. These people just get on my nerves.

Just two weeks after I got the Cube, now I will have to spend the whole day to find on the Net for replacements for its graphics card, because MacOSX 10.2 has a new GL rendering for 2D stuff that requires 32 MB of VRAM. This means, that the standard ATi Rage Pro 128 16 MB AGP 2x, won’t work with this new thing, named “Quartz Extreme”.

And it is so funny, Apple still sells the Classic iMac (which has the same Rage Pro card in it), while the iBooks are in even worse fate, as they have 8 MB of VRAM.

I tried to find second hand or new Mac cards. The only ones that fit on my Cube are the OLDER Radeon cards (now named “Radeon 7000”) or the GeForce2MX ones. No other card can go in the Cube. Problem is, both are not selling anymore. And the second hand ones, are selling for more than $130 USD +postage, which is stupid. The exact same cards in the PC world are selling for $40. The ONLY difference these cards have over the PC ones, is that their ROM is Mac-based.

Stupid Apple and their legacy ROMs. They do that in order to sell more cards in such prices. Technically speaking, normally, there should not have been a single issue why a PC graphics (AGP or PCI) card wouldn’t work on a Mac. Apple has tinkered with some stuff, just to make them a bit out of spec, in order for its users not to be able to purchase everything they want.

With $45 for a 1 minute battery fix, we had the car running. We went to Frys, bought some PS2 games, went to cinema, watched Spider-Man and then had dinner in a restaurant around.

Spiderman was a pretty good movie. Not without its flaws, but possibly a must-see, especially if you like action movies or you happened to read the comics.

After tweaking the JIT, now AmigaOS emulation is _really_ fast. Cool. 🙂

I was checking the ATARI ST emulators again. I had Pacifist running with some games 2 years ago, but I will reinstall WinSTON.

I love all these arcade/platform games of the 88-94 era, these are my favorite games.

Duh.. 🙁

Jbq was cleaning his Camaro this morning and he was having the doors open for 1-2 hours. Later, we decided to go to our favorite Indian restaurant in San Mateo and then watch Spiderman.

The battery of the car is off, so we are staying in. As I am writting this, we are waiting for some people to come and recharge the battery.

So, the monitor is here at last. But I am not so happy about it, as its quality is extremely bad. It is very blurry for anything above 1024×768. It is a flat 19″ CRT, so the idea is to use it at 1280×1024 at 85Hz or 1600×1200 at 75Hz. Works fine, but it is just blurry at big resolutions. But will be just fine for the MacOSX, I guess.

My Net friend Howard helped me install AmigaOS 3.9 inside WinUAE, the Amiga emulator. It took me 1-2 hours, but I finally figured it out, so I now have OS 3.9 running at 800x600x16bit. A bit slow on my dual Celeron 533, but it runs ok.

I tried to run RiscOS 3.70 the other day under the Squirrel emulator, but it just doesn’t run. This RiscOS thing, is really-really weird… 😛

Hmm, what other news? Not much really… The weekend is ahead, we are going to watch SpiderMan tomorrow, in the night we will go to a Greek church to celebrate the Orthodox Easter, and hopefully, we will find and buy a relevant desk to put next to the other desks, so I can put the Cube on it.

And of course, as always, I am SO behind schedule for the articles I have or want to write for OSNews. Sometimes I wish I did not have to write anything, but I just had to record what I had to say and then upload it as an mp3. It would have been so much faster and direct. 😀