Case Tweaking

A reader writes "I don't know what they were smoking, but these guys decided that the G4 case makes for a great LAN party box. Of course, without the G4 and all that yucky Mac hardware -- just the aesthetics. They go about hacking and modding the case, turning a low power (aka, weak) x86 box and toss it into the G4 casing, and don't end up destroying the case to make everything fit. Lotsa pictures and explanations of every step in the process"

Comments

Re:G4 is by far the nicest consumer case I've ever

[Rand Race]

The problem in the x86 case area is the noted chintziness of PC buyers. Just look at anything Apple related that gets posted on /., it inevetibly devolves into "Macs cost to much, I can get a PC for $300!". Yea you can, and the case will be like the Bene Gesserit human testing box; "What's in it?"... "Pain!"... keep a lot of Neosporine and Band-Aids handy when you add internals and don't have anything planned for a while. Nobody is willing to lay down the investment in the PC market because the vast majority of the DIY propellerheads are cheap bastards and the industrial designers will never recoup their investment and be left hiding out in shanty-town flophouses with bottles of cheap rotgut clenched in their palsied hands moaning incesantly about their great ideas for easy-access case designs.

Excellent.

[beowulf_26]

Props to them for coming up with a quasi-creative case mod. In a time where stealth-mods, case windows, and neon lights are no longer creative but norm in the case mod scene, anything different is welcome.

My personal favorite is the case mod that throws a computer inside a case of beer. Thanks for the "light" news every now and then /. readers.

Re:Floppies

[No Such Agency]

Ok, yeah, floppies do suck, but they're a commonly used medium. Anybody with a slow modem at home or no net connection at all probably uses them a lot. I use them to back up important data (2 copies, because floppies aren't 100% reliable, true) cheaply, and without having to buy a CD burner/tape drive/Zip drive for my old steam-powered Pentium 233. Remember, not everyone has a PIII with a brand new CD-RW. And let's be honest, the drives cost what... twenty bucks new? It doesn't kill you to put one in. You may need to exchange files with unfortunate wretches like myself on occasion.

zdnet-ization.

[gagganator]

Of course, without the G4 and all that yucky Mac hardware...

yes, i dont know what is with the recent zdnetization of /. first the which-is-the-greatest-laptop-in-the-world story, then the antimac rant story, now these comments. seems like they are subscribing to the flamewars-generate-hits school of thought *sigh*

My G4 / How many FPS do you want?

[green pizza]

My machine at work is an older G4/533... (533 MHz PowerPC 7410, 512 MB of CAS-3 [slower] PC133 SDRAM, and the stock OEM nVIDIA GeForce2 MX). While 95% of my time (ok, 85%, but don't tell my boss) is spent in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Cleaner 5, I have installed and played with some of the latest wizbang games. Quake 3, FAKK2, DeusEx, and UT all play very smoothly. "Timedemo" benchmarks show numbers in the 50 - 75 frame-per-second area. Just how much better does a game player need? I would imagine that the GeForce 3 gives even better performance, as well as the CPU improvements in the current G4s (733, 800, and 867 MHz PowerPC 7450). And who doesn't replace the stock mouse with a real one? Just like I did with my old Dell, the first thing I did was buy a nice 3 button scroll-wheel mouse. Works great in Mac OS 9.1 and OS X.

Sure the Mac is no gamer's dream, but it plays games as well as I would ever want. Plus it's a great workhorse.

Yucky hardware?

[chaoskitty]

"without the G4 and all that yucky Mac hardware"

Let's see... 64 bit PCI, gigabit ethernet, Altivec... Even story submitters can post anonymously so as to make stupid, stupid comments like this with no responsibility for answering to them.

Ah... Apple

[Dancin_Santa]

The Apple tower series designers were really onto something when they came up with the G3. You gotta hand it to Apple, when it comes to aesthetics and the melding of form and function, they've got the monopoly.

Dancin Santa

What a waste!

[talonyx]

To take that beautiful Mac hardware and replace it with disgusting PC crap? Just to have a nice case?
You can BUY imacky cases.... why ruin a G4 to do it, I don't know.

Re:What a waste!

[Aqua OS X]

I do agree that tossing out that G4 hardware is a waist (send it to me). However aside from only having 1 full size drivae bay and 1 Zip/Floppy sized bay, the G4 case is one of the best case designs ever. I wish my Athlon had a door and such a great hardware layout. Even Apple's laptops are easy to get into. It is a shame the rest of the industry is not catching on. (however compaqs slide out drive bays are kind of cool).

You must be mistaken.

[rbruels]

Yucky Mac hardware? Like what, the oh, RAM? Hmm... no, that's standard PC133. Oh, the hard drive. No, shit, that's ATA. DVD-ROM? ATAPI. Hm.

Perhaps you mean the 128-bit-path PowerPC 7400, which has this terrible tendency to rock the Pentium right off the scale. Or the board, with its firewire interfaces, Gigabit ethernet, and 802.11 capabilities?

Nope, don't see any yuckiness there. Now why you would spend your time and money on violating a really great machine to put a sub-par low-tech x86 box in there is absolutely beyond me. I would love to have that kinda extra time and money. And you probably put Windows on there, for Pete's sake.

Now, I'm no biased Mac fanatic, I'll look at all the sides (and I merrily use Linux), but... why destroy an awesome machine like that? Why?

Re:Uhh...wait a minute..

[repetty]

Oh, great... now I'll have to cancel the LAN party I had planned for two weeks from now AND apologize for all the fun we've been having at the dozens fo LAN parties I've hosted since around '95.

They were all Mac-only shindigs.

I've got to mention the most amazing thing I saw in all that time, though. It was something so brief that I might have missed it since I was busy setting up systems and greeting people...

This guy shows up to the gaming session with a green iMac. He walks in carrying every damn thing he needs, plugs in, and is booting in about ten seconds. Within a minute of arriving, he's gaming!

My other buddies still drag around CPU boxes, cables, monitors, towels to wipe sweat from their foreheads, etc., etc., etc.

I learned that day that the iMac is one MF'n great game machine.

--Richard

Re:Floppies

[hearingaid]

Anybody with a slow modem at home or no net connection at all probably uses them a lot.

I bought an ATAPI Zip100 drive precisely to stop the endless flow of sneakernet.

it just really sucks having to cart back like six floppies from school just to get the new netscape (and that's with browser download only).

for a few years, splitfile was on every floppy I owned. then I got a zip drive.

floppies suck. zip and cdr are the ways to go.