As of 8/13/98, my card is DEAD!
It warned me that it was disabling itself, I called Newer, they told me to send it back and they'd send a new one, but I opted to return it for my money, instead. I'm back to poking around at 60mhz again, but hey, I got enough money back to pay a month's rent, and I can wait for actual G3's to get butt-cheap, as well as see what platforms OS X will run on before I buy one. :(

Sorry if you came here looking for advice about getting a newer card for your 6100. All I can say is that it was good while it lasted, but I just don't feel like risking $700 on something that might work for a month or two. And I don't feel like playing the shipping back and forth game with Newer. And, truth be told, there's nothing I really do that is so cpu intensive that I can't live without it. As a side note, I just picked up 2 32mb simms for $58, including shipping, so I've got something to appease me.

This page is to answer questions people have e-mailed me about my Newer Maxpower 240 card that I have in my PowerMac 6100. For more info about my 6100's configuration, click here.

Okay, so it wasn't truly seamless. For one day, I had a few problems. Here's some excerpts from e-mails I exchanged with a couple of other 6100 owners.

7/14/98

When I ran the Quakedemo, my monitor got all these little vertical lines all the way across and took on kind of a yellowish tint. The same thing happened for Simcity. I didn't investigate it further because it was late and because the problem went away as soon as I quit the app.

I called newer's tech department this morning, and that while my configuration was interesting and the first they'd heard of anyone doing this, it wasn't supported. He actually went to talk to an engineer, who said that it could a power supply issue, because the power supplys in the 6100's were weak. Didn't make much sense, but about all they could tell me was sorry, try running at different bit-depths or different apps.

Well, when I got home today, I played around and discovered that it's not any one app that causes it, but when I set the monitor to 256 colors. As soon as I switch to thousands or millions, it's fine. Along that line, Civ II works great because it doesn't try to switch to 256 colors. Doesn't bother me too much, since I don't play that many games, but I kinda want to get Real or Virtual PC and I'm worried that they may want 256 colors.

The Newer tech guy did say that worse came to worse, I could get an AV board, which is supported.

7/15/98

Well, I don't quite know what did it, but it's working now! After reading your mail, I went into the extensions manager control panel and clicked on display enabler, which wasn't selected. I don't have an audiovision monitor, but a 19" Rasterops, so never used it before. Well, right after I checked it in EM, I switched to 256 colors, and it worked! So, I fired up Quake and ran around some. (btw, anybody know how to see how many fps you're getting in Quake, or in Marathon?)

Well, I don't know if Display Enabler wants you to restart for it to take effect, or if the fact that it was in the extensions folder did it. So, without restarting, I deselected display enabler and switched back to thousands of colors. Worked okay. So, with DE still deselected, switched back to 256, and all pixel hell broke loose. Did that a couple more times, and I was locked up tight. That was all without restarting.

So, I restarted, and now am using display enabler, have switched to 256 and back a few times, and things seem to be working. I'm still not sure if that was it, or if the Newer card itself is just handling things better now. Maybe it's "broken in" now? I know, that sounds stupid. Any thoughts?

I don't think it's the power supply, it was only happening with games. I was running Quicktime movies at fullscreen size with no problems, as well as viewing images in millions of colors. I think it's just certain applications that accessed the screen in certain ways, which I believe to be a software issue. Also, I have 2 internal hard drives, cpu fan, and I used to run a 14" display off my motherboard video and its power off my 6100's supply, as well, and never had any power issues.

• I can now play mp3's, which are pretty cpu intensive, and move the mouse at the same time without causing the song to skip, like the old days. Actually, I can't observe a cpu hit at all, it's completely in the background.
• Quake runs smoothly at the largest video setting with the most details, etc. I have now run the Quakedemo's timedemo feature and I get 13.7 fps at 512x342 pixels doubled, but not skipped. On timedemo 2 with the same settings, I get 16.7fps.
• Marathon runs at the 100% screen at full detail in millions of color with all sound channels, 44khz, at greater than 21fps all the time.
• Things launch so damn fast. Word 98 launches in less than 1/2 the time it used to take, and launching it again takes 5 seconds.
• I run the RC5 challenge program. I used to get 102k keys/sec before the upgrade--now I can do 780k keys/sec when my mac is idle!

Answers to other questions people have asked me:

Yes, this card works fine with all my scsi devices. I haven't had any conflicts or freezes with any of my internal or external devices. List of my devices here.

I don't know how it works with an AV card, since I don't have one. But it works flawlessly with my High Powered Video card (the 8100's video card) with 4mb of vram. I've been running for a couple weeks now with the G3 upgrade and my 19" monitor at 1024x768 at millions of colors, with no problems.

Installation was not hard at all. It took me about 10 minutes. First, you install 2 system extensions off a floppy and shut down the machine. Then, I did remove my 256 k cache, since the instructions recommended it, and pulled the rom chip next to the cache and put it where the cache was. I have heard people worrying about having to do that. It was painless. Pull one chip out, pull the other out and plug it back in. 1 minute, tops. After that, I just swapped the newer card with the circuit card that is built into the PDS->PDS right-angle adapter that you need to use a pds card with a 6100. That was a matter of 2 screws, I think. If you're not using a pds card, you wouldn't even have to do that, just plug the G3 card in the pds slot and put the top back on. Then, plugged my video card into the newer card, the newer card into the pds slot, popped the top back on, and was in business.

No, you will not fry your motherboard installing this card. Newer even includes a grounding strap, like electronics techs use, to wear while you're doing the upgrade.

I do not know if it supports MkLinux or not. I haven't tried it.

I don't know if my machine gets really hot with the Newer card installed. It was pretty hot before, because I have 2 internal drives and a video card, but the case cools itself adequately. I have never had my machine overheat, except when I tried to use a clock-chipper, back in the early days of the nubus powermacs. My cpu would just freeze at any given time with one of those 40mhz oscillator crystals bumping it up to 80mhz. At 60mhz it always worked fine, and that has also been the case for this Newer card.

The very first time I booted with the card, I noticed its presence right away. It takes a little while for the first extension to load, and it's the newer one. After that, the rest of them just race across the screen. Then, all my startup items started launching and slamming onto the screen faster than they ever had before. I don't play many games, use photoshop, or other cpu-intensive apps much of the time, but I still notice a vast speed improvement over my stock 6100. Windows just open faster, apps launch quicker, even surfing the web seems more responsive because I'm not waiting around on netscape so much to chunk through all the data it gets. Overall, life is sweet.

I don't run 2 monitors anymore, though I wish I did. I bought my mom a used 6100 and "lent" my 14" monitor to her to use. When I get another one, I will post results on running 2-headed with the G3 upgrade.

That's about it, I guess. Any other questions about my mac on the newer upgrade, feel free to e-mail me.