Hello. my name's Pete and it's good to see so many sensible and normal people who believe that OS9 is the best operating system ever ...
I bought my G3 400 B&W (with 128MB RAM upgrade, external LaCie 20GB FireWire drive, SCSI CD writer, SCSI scanner, Miro capture card and matching B &W Mac monitor - bit of a luxury that one, as there was a cheaper Formac alternative. Sadly the scanner and monitor are no more) in 2000 as a mature student in the final year of my graphic design degree.
I'd used Macs at work previously but the (hideously expensive) G3 /OS8.6 seemed amazingly fast and capable.
I used it for moving and still image projects (Adobe Premiere 5.1c and Photoshop 4) and loved it. As a hobby I became interested in sound & music production, bought Cubase 5 in 2002. So began a year of fun and frustration.
Several issues appeared - mainly lack of power to run VSTs and intermittent boot failure were irritating, while lack of cash had forced me to buy the Soundblaster Live! soundcard, which although OK for audio and having onboard soundfonts was hopeless with MIDI. This was probably due to the crap driver, I concluded. No-one could help me, everyone who had Cubase 5.1 (as we called it then) was running it on a PC.
In 2003 when it failed to boot at all I bought a Pentium IV PC on the advice of a friend , and the G3 went into storage.
Fast-forward fifteen years and I realise that despite owning modern-ish PCs and laptops I'm not actually making much music. I'm tired of online validation and the constant urging to upgrade! upgrade! and buy the latest thing. I have the Zone crack of VST 5.1 for PC but it's missing the Universal Sound Module and quits out erratically on anything later than W2K.
( have Sony Acid Pro, which isn't bad at all and in some ways the most similar to VST 5.1 (I've trialled a lot of DAWs) but I don't find it as easy to use. After starting to build a W2K machine and searching in vain for a pukka copy of VST 5 for PC I realise I'm barking up the wrong tree. And, I'd like to review my University video and stills projects, all saved in "Mac files and folders" format on CD, maybe put some up on You Tube.)
Somewhere, I have a pukka Cubase VST 5 install CD for Mac. And a dud Mac.
So begins a week of intense focus. Amazingly the G3 boots up. Blank screen, a call to the very helpful I.T . Centre in Bristol and I re-set the P-RAM - I've forgotten so much stuff. The intermittent boot failure seems to be a sticking power button which is an interference fit in some places, it requires a gentle touch.
I boot up into OS 9.1 and the year 1956 ...
It's like the return of an old friend. The Logic board turns out to be the Rev. 2. The memory issue is possibly due to an assorted collection of RAM, so I take out the two mismatched 128MB cards.
After a frantic search I find the Cubase 5 retail package - but no "Getting Into The Details" book, OR THE CD. More searching and the CD turns up in a stash destined for the charity shop. It seems this is indeed, the Last Chance Saloon.
I scour the web, find this site and others.
With help from this site, Mac Help, and The Book "Sad Macs, Bombs and Other Disasters" book I now have DieHard's OS 9.2.2 installed, a 250GB HD (effectively 128 GB), M-Audio Mobile Pre USB soundcard interface, Cubase 5 installed , and it's all working. I have a Logic board battery arriving today, and 768MB of matching RAM arriving this week. What fun.
Of course, it's not that simple. It's taken a while, a lot of effort and the postponement of other priorities to get here and the Big Lesson to learn is not to hurry. I'm so used to multitasking on a modern PC that the Mac seems slow. If I go at it too hard and fast, it locks up.
But slowing down is a good thing. It helps to focus on what is required. The extra RAM should improve VST performance, I'm hoping.
I'm going to follow DieHard's installation instructions for reinstalling Cubase 5.1, I probably should reinstall OS 9.2.2 first. I foolishly installed the Soundblaster Live! software in my excitement. It didn't work and I've little interest in finding out why. The card is junk, although I have all the packaging, literature and CDs. Maybe it's worth a few quid on eBay.
I have probably many questions to pose of the macos9lives forum top expert-specialist OS9-wallahs, but it probably would be a good idea to go slow and actually try and produce some recordings, after all, that's why we do this, innit.
Thanks to the Top Brass on macos9lives, if only you'd been available for advice in 2003 I may have followed a different path. But at least I "got there" in the end.
