hi guys.. been ripping macs apart and stuff since about.. last year.. starting with LCIII's up to 6100's to a 7100/80.. my latest little gift being a beige G3.
Bought off trade (NZ's answer to eBay) for NZ$30 the guy sold it as not working.
on getting it home, i opened it up, put in an empty formatted hdd set to slave, the cdrom set to master, plonked in the OSX cd and turned it on.. to my suprise there was actual sound, it clocked away and had a read of the CD... however.. no video.

im wanting to know is this a common problem and is it fixable..
is there a list of PCI video cards that will work just by installing for me to at least see something (even if it is a disk with a flashing question mark)
i think ive got a voodoo2 card and an S3 Virge card around somewhere, but.. should i even bother?

Any assistance will be GREATLY appreciated :lol:

Have you reseated the personality card on the board? After that, check battery. Then look for video cards, because it has onboard ATI and would hate to see you waste any money. Just concerned about your wallet.

Your existing video cards can be flashed w/ a Mac ROM. I'm banking on the S3 card, though someone a little more "video friendly' would be able to tell you because they are more experienced w/ flashing. The VooDoo should be flashable as well because they were on the market long enough ago that the drivers exist for Mac.

Now for a cheap card that you can use to see if it actually gives display, you're gonna have to hit up trade, or eBay and suffer the shipping. Luckly enough, PCI cards are light, so the battle damage won't be too bad. At the very least, you'll have a good PCI card!

now that the radeon 9200 pci cards have been out for a few months you should be able to find a 7000 pci quite cheap on ebay. I have even seen a few on ebay that are pc versions that have already been flashed for mac. seems that some understand there is still a demand for cheap mac pci video.

I bet you won't have to spend over 40 US.

I would try to check up on this, but when I put my Radeon 7000 in my G3 it was not plug and play; no video showed through it until I installed the drivers. Also don't forget to take the mac video adapter off the onboard video or the pci video won't work.

to get video back on your G3 you may have to reset you PRAM and dump your display preferances... i've had this problem trying to load jaguar and panther on my beige G3 333Mhz
It will try to load and then suddenly no video at all..

start your comp up. and after the first chime press and hold the command+option+R+P keys, after the 2nd chime hold down the shift key to turn off extensions, when it boots up. go the preferances folder (it's in the system folder) find the "display preferance" file and throw it away. restart your computer with extensions on and things should be back to normal.

it's worth a try

and even with Xpostfacto installed (offered from OtherWorldComputing) and a good amount of RAM i am still not able to install any version of OSX on my beige g3 so you might have the same problem as me...

Beige G3s can have issues with OS X and video. I have two running 10.2.8 which have a tendancy to switch the video off a few seconds after they finish booting. They never did it when booted from CD though. You could probably get a Rage128 from a Blue & White G3 to work. They are way less than any of the Radeons to buy.