I've been thinking... And that's always a dangerous thing.

Is it possible to run System 7 (7.5 or 7.6) on a beige G3?

I think it might be possible. The Disk Tools floppy that ships with the beige G3 has a system enabler for the G3. The DT floppy is a really stripped down OS 8 which means it requires a special enabler to run on the beige G3. Do you think it might be possible to install that enabler on a 7.6 system (installed on a 9600 or 8600 or perhaps with Wish I Were indicating the G3 is such a Mac) and boot the G3?

Any takers?

Peace,
Drew

According to MacTracker, the the Beige G3 series originally shipped with Mac OS 8. Thus, i would imagine it is not officially supported. Short of that, the last time i have personally seen system 7 is on my old 'pizza box' mac. It may be possible to install that system, with the enabler, on something like an 8600, then move the drive over to the beige. I will say that, in my experience with my beige G3 minitower (which i have had since 1997, and recently rebuilt), they can be a bit picky about booting oddball OSes.

I realise i've not given you any hard info, but, the long and short of it is; i have no idea, but it might work. try it.
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Mac Freeware! CLICK

I remember a discussion about this once before that concerned some sort of story/rumour etc that someone had installed 7.6 on one, but no-one seemed to know whether it was true, and if so how you would go about doing it. It's certainly not supported so I am pretty sure the Installer wouldn't work, nor would a normal bootable 7.6 disc (whether an install CD or a hard drive). You would probably have to do something similar to the method for getting OS8 to run on a 68030, whereby the installer is hacked to make it work, and you also have to hack some of the files that it installs so that it will boot. I can't really imagine seeing OS 7 on a Beige G3; such a world away from 10.4.9! 7 always reminds me of little LCs
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

Heh, there is a System 7 theme for OS 8.5+. I can tell you it's pretty odd seeing any modern Mac (especially a G4) running that UI...

Peace,
Drew

*BONG*

*Happy Mac*

*7 seconds pass*

*Finder is loaded and the comp is ready to use*


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PPC Macs:

• Power Macintosh G4
  
• B&W Power Macintosh G4
  
• Power Macintosh 6500/225

Or:

*CLICK of power key on Extended Keyboard II*
*BONG*
*grey Apple*
*Spinny Thingy*
*Cool futuristic (in comparison to Vista boot screen) pulsating blue bar*
*Just 70 seconds having passed from the start, 10.4.9 is completely loaded and we're ready to have some G3 fun!*

G3s are awesome
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

And there's anything wrong with that? Anyway, I'm afraid it's not all Mac for me: I'm thinking about installing my copy of Vista very very soon... I just installed it in a virtual machine about half an hour ago and am testing some stuff ready to install it for real
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

No! I mean on my Acer, I was just saying I haven't been converted to Mac completely! Though Vista in an emulator on the Mac, hmmm I do have enough hard drive space in the G3, a DVD drive and a copy of MS VPC 7 for Mac...stop giving me ideas you! A project for one day I think...
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

Unfortunately, Vista will not install in Virtual PC for Mac.

Yes, I tried.

what happened when u tried?

When I tried it wasn't possible to allocate enough memory to the virtual machine, but I only have 512mb of physical ram on that computer, which is Vista's minimum.
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[Insert Cool Signature here!]

In my case, the Vista installer said something about not being supported without some piece of hardware. Sorry I can't be more specific, I'll try it again sometime and let you know.

It wasn't lack of RAM, in my case, though. IIRC, it was something about the BIOS emulation in VirtualPC it didn't like. Maybe VirtualPC doesn't emulate APM correctly or something.

Macs are designed so that you cannot "downgrade" the user experience by using a version of the OS that shipped prior to the introduction of the machine. You can probably go into the files on the disc and look where the allowed machines are listed and alter that file to include your target machine but I can't guarantee that will work. Some owners of 601 upgraded Quadras have gotten 8.5/8.6 to run that way even though Quadras aren't included as supported machines. It's also been done with OS X installs to get Tiger to install on Macs without Firewire. I am not sure if that works with downgrading the OS, though, as the examples above are clearly upgrading the OS beyond what Apple intended not down.