As per the advice of MacDoc I bought the Pioneer A05 (one of the last remaining at the local Future Shop) instead of the more current A06. I missed the sale earlier this week but I still managed to get a 10% discount from the current $299 price (full retail box). Plus, just in case it worked, I bought a bunch of Memorex dvds (5-pack for $9.99).
Installation was straight-forward. Using advice from xlr8yourmac.com I set it to Master, installed on its own ide chain and, by golly, it's recognized in both Jaguar and OS 9. The system profiler shows it as "fully supported" and that it's Revision 1.30 (some reported problems with earlier versions)
However, I had two problems that I spent the evening solving:
1) Could not install DVD Player (OS X version). Warning said it could not install on my particular machine. I think this is what MacDoc was warning about but xlr8yourmac had a nifty solution. And, I'll be damned, it worked!
2) Made a couple of toasters. "Sense key" errors or some such thing happened. Burns quit after a few minutes. I did some searching on the net but couldn't locate a solution. Finally I decided to check my Toast preferences and realized I had about 1GB free on the partition I was using as a Disk Cache. So I changed that to a partition with about 10GB, plus adjusted the RAM cache and... perfect burn.
I just made my first dvd and it looks gorgeous.
I'm now having second thoughts about upgrading to a G4, which I've been pondering all summer. Sure, I could use increased speed, especially for all the rendering I do in iMovie, but as I do this for fun, not profit -- hence no deadlines to worry about -- I think I'll hold out a bit longer.
I've never been the type who felt compelled to get the latest/greatest toy and -- especially right now -- I'm proud that an increasingly devalued machine like the beige G3 can still rock
Installation was straight-forward. Using advice from xlr8yourmac.com I set it to Master, installed on its own ide chain and, by golly, it's recognized in both Jaguar and OS 9. The system profiler shows it as "fully supported" and that it's Revision 1.30 (some reported problems with earlier versions)
However, I had two problems that I spent the evening solving:
1) Could not install DVD Player (OS X version). Warning said it could not install on my particular machine. I think this is what MacDoc was warning about but xlr8yourmac had a nifty solution. And, I'll be damned, it worked!
2) Made a couple of toasters. "Sense key" errors or some such thing happened. Burns quit after a few minutes. I did some searching on the net but couldn't locate a solution. Finally I decided to check my Toast preferences and realized I had about 1GB free on the partition I was using as a Disk Cache. So I changed that to a partition with about 10GB, plus adjusted the RAM cache and... perfect burn.
I just made my first dvd and it looks gorgeous.
I'm now having second thoughts about upgrading to a G4, which I've been pondering all summer. Sure, I could use increased speed, especially for all the rendering I do in iMovie, but as I do this for fun, not profit -- hence no deadlines to worry about -- I think I'll hold out a bit longer.
I've never been the type who felt compelled to get the latest/greatest toy and -- especially right now -- I'm proud that an increasingly devalued machine like the beige G3 can still rock
