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Honestly, thank you for using my project. I was about to leave it abandoned without any updates. That's why the file downloads weren't working, as I had disabled that proxy. But when I saw your video and realized you used what I created, I'm happy and I will try to bring as many updates and fixes as possible. Thank you so much. 🙇
Sleeping in an eMac box under the stairs half a block down the street from Jerry’s Bait Shop? You know the place. (Weird Al Yankovic’s Albuquerque reference)
@@tulippasta The Proctor (guard/receptionist) had retired the previous term and the college didn't think it worth replacing him. It was a very small department so you wouldn't have to walk far as long as you had a getaway vehicle.
I was an Apple service engineer when Apple announced the logic board replacement program, 12 months of my life was solely replacing eMac logic boards....
The eMac was the Macintosh LC of the G3/G4 era. I found them to be surprisingly good when they weren’t abused by pupils in the school. Sadly, the IT technician at that time was a PC/Windows person and didn’t know how to lock them down properly. EDIT: I think I have two or three in the house. Freecycle was a great idea!
I rescued a 1.25GHz eMac last year and I love the bog chunky boy. Fast G4, Pin-sharp Trinitron CRT, and great sound. The later models also have USB 2.0 too! I loved it so much I spent an extra 35 bucks and bought a stand for it :)
I still own a 1.25ghz model. Gave it an SSD upgrade earlier this year using a PATA to SATA adapter and a repaste. Installed Sorbet Leopard. It's now surprisingly useable.
I had a devil of a time trying to get a working SSD in mine. Ended up going with a 250 GB mechanical laptop HD out of a PowerBook G4 instead. Haven't done anything beyond that and swapping the optical drive. The power LED glows amber rather than white though. Not sure what to make of that.
I have my father's old 1Ghz eMac. I didn't have any trouble getting an SSD working in ours. I have it dual-bootting OS9 and 'regular Leopard.' I have "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" on it, and it runs decent. MacOS9 is really fast on it.
@@ericwood3709 FYI, if this thing has the same pickyness the PowerMac G5s tend to have, they don't play nice with SATA III SSDs. You need SATA II or very specific SATA III devices to make it work. Not sure what the technical reason is tbh, but it's definitely a thing.
@@cathrynm Yours sounds like the older model, given that it boots OS 9. Mine is the newer model that only boots OS X, and for some reason it has not liked the solid state options I've tried with it. Last one I tried was this Ebay thing in a white 2.5" case that works fine in my G4 Mini and other systems, but not that one.
@@TopVersnelling No SATA at all in the eMac. Anything G4 only has PATA built in. I've actually had pretty good luck with SATA SSDs on the G5 though, albeit on the latest models.
I scored one of the very last gen eMacs during a curbside e-waste event. It took a while, but I persevered and it now dual boots OS9 and OSX. Updated the CD-ROM to a Superdrive, bought an Airport card for it, maxed out the ram, recapped it and it's 100% reliable now.
Man, I used one of those all the way until 2010. I remember creating flash animations on this bad boy, playing Warcraft 3, Call of Duty 1, Diablo 2. Good times
As a 2000 baby I have a soft spot for these. My elementary school got these after the g3 iMacs. These were the COOL ones. They ran faster. Screen was flat. And way better. Speakers were better too
I always liked these. Came across an empty shell ages ago a built my daughter her first computer using a motherboard I had kicking around and an led panel I secured from inside
When I was in pre-school and kindergarten, the schools I went to were still using eMacs (and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger iirc). I vaguely remember using Kid Pix on them, and while they got replaced the next year, some classrooms still had them (the last room with eMacs was a special education classroom). I've wanted an eMac ever since I rediscovered them in 2019 through a TH-cam video.
I remember the emacs being put in one of the computer rooms at school. I never seen them elsewhere, they seemed really cool and nice looking. What I remember the most was they all had this fluorescent looking screensaver that just was mesmerizing to watch. It was just these beams that moved around the screen and I never seen that screen saver since. I always wanted to have it for windows or linux. One thing I do remember is they had to get an air conditioner for the room because those computers heated it up and kept dying, but seeing this, it looks like maybe it was the capacitors being more likely the culprit.
This brings back some memories. My cousin works in IT for a school system and gave me two of these in 2007 when they upgraded. I found the instructions to tear it down online and upgraded the ram, HD, and CD drive to DVD burner and bought an installation CD for Tiger. I had just fried my home built PC from tinkering with it too much so the two years I used the eMac exclusively converted me to being a Mac user and I’ve owned some form of Mac ever since. That was also right when I bought the first iPhone. It was still slow as Christmas syncing the 1st iPhone over USB 1.1.
Hey, I grew up with one of those as a kid! We (by that I mean my family) ended up selling them off years ago, but I still have fond memories of using them. Good times. :)
I didn´t even watch the video yet.. but read Emac and was hooked... Just bought two of those and overclocked them heavily (7447a and 7447b models) love these machines as my CRT retro machines.
This was the first "modern" Mac I had....I had an Apple II as a kid, then went to Windows but always wanted to own a "modern day Mac". I remember my boss knocking on my door randomly one day and he just said "So, you want to buy a Mac?"....turns out, he had bought one of these used from someone and his wife was NOT happy....he knew I wanted a Mac because when I was at work, he would talk about me about what kind of computer he should buy and at the time, I was an Apple fan boy. I had a Dell laptop but I turned it into a Hackintosh and even put an Apple sticker on the Dell logo that I got with my iPhone. He sold it to me for $250 and I kept it for about 4 years and sold it for $100 after I got an Intel MacBook.
I had been a cert carrying PC/Windows repair tech for a number of years by the time the G4 eMac came out. I could not afford to miss the opportunity to find out what all the buzz was about when I found a 1.25/512/40 G4 eMac on clearance @ Best Buy for somewhere around $500-599 in the 2003-4 time frame. By then, I had experience with PCs and x86 servers from home to enterprise level, but none of that brought me the satisfaction the eMac did. I honestly had more fun over the next 5 years on the eMac than any of the PC headaches. Constantly updating/reinstalling drivers, Windows reinstalls, etc. The eMac "just worked" and I don't remember ever having to work on or repair it for anything that wasn't my own fault. Each OS update was seamless and I never *had* to reinstall the OS until I finally decided I had to do it anyway for no real reason whatsoever. I immediately put 2GB of RAM and a 100GB disk in it after bringing it home because I was already jaded in that regard from prior PC experiences. I brought it out of storage a week ago and put FreeBSD 14.1 on it just to drive it again for nostalgia, though I think I'm switching to a debian based PPC release since I have now been an Ubuntu daily driver for a few years now. Anyway, I'm sorry for writing a novel. The eMac proved to me that stable and reliable systems weren't just a fairy tale and ignited a passion in me that I continue to demand it out of my equipment today.
I've got an eMac with the stand and love it! For a while I had it setup in my kitchen as one of my usable, retro machines, just having it remote into a newer machine. It's very nice!
This is going to be a nice long journey, getting it up to snuff with modern Linux! I helped install a few of eMacs for a law office, they were a great value but after 5 or so years with a lot of heavy use all the screens that started having issues. Probably heat and caps!
Two huge perks with this model aside from the 1.42GHz CPU are the Radeon 9600 and DDR RAM (as opposed to single channel PC-133). The RAM speeds are just astronomically faster than earlier models. I think it unofficially supports 2GB as well. I have had some trouble getting it to run games great that should fly on it, though. Quake III runs rather perfectly at its highest settings, but RTCW and Medal of Honor don't run great maxed out. Have to gimp them a little to make them run smoothly, but they definitely run well enough. Doom 3 runs kind of as you would expect. The 9600 just isn't the GPU for that game. It's playable, but leaves a lot to be desired. Aliens vs. Predator 2 is pretty decent while maxed from what I can remember. Surprisingly, No One Lives Forever gives me some trouble and I would think that game should run flawlessly. Total Immersion Racing runs fine as long as you disable car reflections, which is kind of a disappointment. 4x4 Evo 2 is a blast and runs well. Played it for hours inadvertently. Oh, and Unreal Tournament 2004 runs pretty well on medium settings. I'm sure the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament will run flawlessly because they run great on my 600MHz Graphite iMac, while Quake III really seems to be its absolute limit. This was all running the latest version of 10.4. Whichever exact version was right before 10.5. I read that 10.5 just doesn't run great on it, but I will eventually upgrade to a larger SSD and get it dual-booting both. Hopefully by then someone will figure out how to run OS 9 on it natively by the time I get to that lol. I believe the 1.25GHz model can now run it perfectly thanks to some major community effort. Great video! Would love to see you throw as many games as you can at the 1.42GHz model as you can just to see if you get the same performance I do.
@ 11:22 From what I've heard, it's due to Linux (and more specifically, X11) not respecting available video modes for the eMac's display and so it tries to force 60Hz and the display doesn't work
My dad had one of those, loved the heck out of it. He got his first Mac in 1985 and this was his last one. Was great for his photo editing and amateur photo business.
This was the computer we used for media production when I was in high school many many moons ago. I have a strong fondness for it. Good luck out there, "Totally Fine" eMac!
I owned a few of these to go along with my PowerMacs. I loved the form factor and the speed. Ironically these eMacs were faster than the more expensive iMacs given the same speed because of how the cd rom and hd shared the sane channel on the iMac and used laptop ram. These full fledged beasts had almost been as quick as a single cpu powered powermsc tower for many tasks. Quite competitive, and a fantastic value considering. My first unit I bought (slightly) used at a school auction. The 2nd, 1.25 ghz unit I bought refurbished. Again worth every penny. Kept them both until 2012.
I tried Debian 12 on a Chromebook thanks to the developper mode, churutlbook project and removing the battery to bypass the write protection. Everything went great as was super smooth with the Lxqt graphical environment... except the Wi-Fi. Debian 12 is supposed to have the option of installing the proprietary drivers to fix the issue but i didn't seen it. I settled with the Xfce Manjaro install with the proprietary drivers. Works great for me now but i don't know if you will have the same problem with the Wi-Fi as i did (or if the G4 is wi-fi capable anyway). I hope for the best!
My friend's mom used this computer for graphic design in college. They have since donated it to me, I very much lucked out. Mine is in excellent shape with original hard drive, ram, and capacitors. they only problem is that they keyboard is a bit yellow. She also got the maxed out one back in 2003 1gb ram, the superdrive, 1ghz G4 processor, and the acrylic stand. The only thing she didn't splurge on was the AirPort card, but that was a cheap, easy upgrade.
Used these things in junior high. typed a few reports in office 2004. They ran a mix of Panther, Tiger and Leopard. When they were retired, we got one to mess around with in 2011. The speakers in these machines were killer
One of my favorite CRT all in one machines, the earlier eMac models are the last to run Mac OS 9 natively, great for some late 90’s early 2000’s Mac compatible games!
as a person who grew up in the classic mac era, and never really used osx for games, i was thrilled to get my hands on an emac. ended up being an OSX only model, so i down graded the whole motherboard to an OS9 compatible one. i think its a very underrated machine!
I was still using one of these for music production in school with Logic Pro back in 2010-2011. By that point the hardware was not pleasant to use for the task but they still worked and I think the styling is iconic at the very least!
I loved the eMacs in the computer lab at college. They were more business, more serious, than the goofy iMacs around. I loved the concept too- no frills all-in-one computing ready to go out of the box.
used to have one of those. got it a few years back for dirt cheap, like $5 at today’s rates. wasn’t in the best shape visually (scratches on the case, missing screw, missing speaker grills) and needed a disc drive swap but otherwise was fine. well, the power button fell apart soon after since it was barely working at that point, but that didn’t prevent me from using it anyway. l quite a charming machine for sure. definitely underloved. had my bit of fun with it and then sold it off for the same price i got it for to a random guy who seemed to be much more into it and willing to at least try actually restoring the thing into a better shape than i did.
the emac is an epic machine. I had a 1.25ghz model, and i used the crap out of it. Hrutkay got it when I moved because I didn't want to move it, the Achilles heel of the emac line, they are too damn heavy!
A good video on a G4 classic. I have sold many of these in the past, and those caps that you replaced on the logic board suffered the dreaded cap leaking plague in the early 2000s. These last lot of eMacs suffered it the most, and my outsourced tech couldn't keep up with the endless logic boards I was supplying his for a cap replacement. I got rid of the hundreds that I had, and I am down to 2 I believe. BTW, the top 2 screws are purely cosmetic, as far as I can remember.
Good lord, that soldering iron is huge. If I was looking for a portable soldering iron I'd much rather go with either a Miniware TS80P or a Pinecil combined with an USB-C power bank just for ergonomic reasons.
I've seen a few of these for sale recently and looked into it. They seem to be surprisingly powerful and capable systems for something released for the education market. 150Hz for Minecraft on a 20-year olf machine, however edited down, is insanely impressive!
My old school had eMacs. I always thought of them as quirky iMac-like computers (I wondered why these ones were eMacs and if Apple ever made ePods) that were tricky for a PC user to use (macOS makes more sense now) and not very fast, but were reliable. I somehow could pick one up at 10. These things are like 50 pounds! I used to think that all mac desktops were all-in-one units - the gifted class I'd go to later on had Power Mac G4s in half the classroom and I was fascinated with the fact that Apple made towers too. I used to think that Macs were for teachers and school kids and that the apple symbolized the old tradition of giving an apple to a teacher.
I have always loved the eMac. I have one I got from my mom when we “upgraded” her to a 2012 iMac that has the dreaded monitor problem. I have been hoping for the time to dig into it and try to repair it for years…
I used these in middle school. I remember how well they actually worked and the speakers sounded really good (at least to my 12 year old ears). fond memories on newgrounds on those
My elementary school was a Mac school. We had G3 iMacs in the computer lab and classrooms (soon to be replaced by iBook G4s), and the office staff had eMacs. Even though I never got to use them, I was always fascinated by those eMacs. Over the past few years I’ve been so tempted to get one from Facebook Marketplace but I don’t have room for one lol.
I remember using this machine along with the colorful iMacs back in grade school. My district completely skipped over the G4 and went straight to the G5 after this.
I LOVE the eMac G4. It was the first Apple computer I ever remember using back in school. I only have the 1 GHz ATI Graphics model so it's not the most powerful of the lineup, but it's a great computer for doing mid 00s related tasks. Plus it's high resolution flat CRT is absolutely gorgeous, probably my favorite CRT display in my collection. Great to see you working with one of my favorites!
These are basically a lowered spec CRT studio display with a G4 sat in the bottom. I have one of those displays, and yes they are monstrously heavy even without the computer tucked inside.
I had one a couple of years ago. One day I turned it on and there was a burning smell then it never worked again. Such a shame as the CRT screen was stunning! Retro games and DVDs looked amazing on it.
On one hand I regret not having the most powerful all in one powerpc mac buying the 1.44 ghz emac but, on the other hand, I am deeply happy to have the 1.25 that can also boot classic.
I swear I have a memory of using these in like first or second grade. My more vivid computer lab memories were of newer thick iMacs with the magic keyboard that had the cylinder on the back of it propping it up.
man I love my emac's used these so much through my high school years, I have 2 of them in my collection, wouldn't mind getting a bunch and setting up a computer lab just lick a school setup, I had one have a bad cap in it that would make it crash on boot load had to run it with extensions off then it would run after I replaced the bad cap then it was fine and still is today
I have the top-spec eMac. Bought it from an ewaste recycler in 2009 to get me through when out laptop died. A lovable machine - looks like the nose cone of an airliner and weighs about as much. Mine is still kicking after all this time. Still a joy to use… the matching swivel stand is a must. I remember the Radeon graphics being tough to get working on Linux - haven’t tried it in some time though.
11:30 the video issue affects all distros debian is in framebuffer not accelerated mode. Driver needs to switch modes using i2c commands. Also affects the BSD flavors on eMac.
Very good, glad to see an eMac front and center. Had a eMac around 2002, loved it and ran YellowDog Linux on it. Wished that I had kept it, was a nice machine.
Another issue with that eMac could simply just be that the CRT is a little tired from underuse. Leave it turned on for a few hours and see if it brightens up. If not, you may need to rejuvenate it.
The cap swelling is moisture ingress, store your surplustronics with dessicant packs like from new shoe boxes. Caps are all still fine in my emac (touch wood)
I love my eMac! It's such a nice machine to use, but it's just a shame that it's so big and heavy, because I don't have the space to keep it set up in my tiny apartment, so it just sits in storage waiting for the day when I move to a place large enough to have a dedicated computer room.
I've been wanting to snag one of these, hijack the display board, and use it as a monitor forever. I want to build a picade around it and build out an all-white arcade stick to match.
Until M1 Apple never convinced me. It seemed a more expensive, more convoluted way to do things. I was wrong to a certain extend, but back in the day I only dabbled with Macs, never investing in one properly. From all of the cheap macs I had, the eMac was the smoothest running, most stable one and also the only one that I used somewhat longterm. They are great machines.
We had like a dozen of these in one of our college computer labs. I had totally forgotten the big exposed screws all over the sides. I guess they didn't want to go with the usual snap-off plastic parts with screws hidden underneath lest kids pull them off and steal them. But of course they still had to find a way to make it stylish.
The situation of Linux support on old POWER machines has gone worse dramatically since IBM introduced POWER 8 a few years ago. With POWER 8 they switched their architecture from PPC64BE (Big Endian) to PPC64LE (Little Endian) which causes LE binaries to be incompatible to BE and vice versa. LE processors may run BE binaries, but only if the whole OS runs in BE mode (like AIX does). Modern Linux systems usually only support LE mode, not BE anymore... This caused that big distributors such as Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE dropped their support for BE and old processors and the old architecture... There are only few distributions left that still support PPC64BE or even PPC32 these days...
I actually have an old eMac that I got from my dad! I use it for writing my college essays and old games! I love the thing. Good to see a video that actually shows the eMac.
That's genius, using an outdated computer for collage essays. Maybe something I should look into doing, so easy to get distracted otherwise. How reliable do you find it? No worries about a failing HDD or something?
I'm looking to buy a used Power Mac G5 from e-Bay because I'm a big fan of all retro computers and I was crazy about G5 when it came out in 2003 but couldn't afford it at that time. But my biggest worry is that even on the most powerful Quad core G5, we cannot browse modern websites... whether we use Safari from Sorbet Leopard OS, TenFourFox, Arctic Fox, Dillo or any browser, it can't even browse basic websites and can't play TH-cam videos at 720p. Is there any new browser for PowerPPC that can browse websites normally on G5 ?
I just bought the screwdriver and soldering iron kit using your links for shipment to the UK! Looking forward to using them, ironically (hehe, iron-ically?) for a capacitor replacement for an old Xbox! Cheers to Action Retro and Fanttik! 🤩
I used to use an eMac every day as a newspaper reporter in the early 2000s. They weren't the prettiest and they weren't always the best, but they were reliable.
I have the 1.25 ghz model, which I upgraded with an Airport card and 2 gigs of RAM (officially only supports 1, but will recognize 2). I'm going to pop an ssd drive in there, and it is still a totally usable computer. That CRT is actually far nicer than it has any right to be.
The eMac is one of the last Macs that can still run Mac OS 9. Mine is dual-booted with 9.2 and 10.4, making it a pretty great classic Mac gaming platform.
This is my favourite PPC Mac- I’ve had a couple over the years- this is definitely something you should be trying to put an M1/2 board in to bring it up to date- same as you did with the G4 iMac- i’d love to use mine as a daily with modern internals
One oddity with my unit (an 800MHz ATI Graphics unit) is that it doesn't have a modem for some reason. Totally blanked out the port on the side, but I don't really need it anyway. At least it's one of the last machines that will boot OS 9.
I'm tempted on the soldering iron, but being wireless I'm concerned it would be very niche, since it may not be able to heat pads on a large ground plane.
I still have mine, it was my third Mac - it's been a tank, it's plastic wrapped in my basement right now. I feel really guilty... It did like 14 years of service between it's short 'main computer' life into the 'my kid's computer' life. I remember having to downgrade it so my kiddo could play OS9 games... No, I didn't seed that era, the thrift store did ;) I may have to dig mine out, as I was planning to do a full modded Baldur's Gate I run on my MDD dual 1.33... but I think I killed it (with that modded game, I'm not kidding - I had a number of old school upgrades added... I think I might have killed the XServe dual CPUs on Baldur's Gate... Yeah, that is both pride and shame...)
Had a 700MHz one, what a wonderful machine. It was flying back then and was also very pretty with its 17” CRT. Sadly, the IVAD cable was awaiting its demise and sooner or later it died, I tried to open it but the screws were broken so I couldn’t open it, and that’s why I threw it away. Regret it to this day.
i followed your tutorial on adélie with my eMac, it worked, it just needs a lot of time to boot up (used an usb thumbdrive, took 6+ minutes to boot into live kde) had some problems during install, kde environment was empty, only taskbar and missing all the apps
This is definitely my favorite Mac. I lost mine in a house fire 2 years ago but I still used it daily from 2002-2022! I never got to try sorbet leopard tho😢. I was using Linux
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Honestly, thank you for using my project. I was about to leave it abandoned without any updates. That's why the file downloads weren't working, as I had disabled that proxy. But when I saw your video and realized you used what I created, I'm happy and I will try to bring as many updates and fixes as possible. Thank you so much. 🙇
Man this is uplifting! Keep at it bro! Your work is not in vain 🎉
Just about yesterday I had it downloaded it on my old dual 1,2 Ghz MDD powermac, thank YOU for bothering with this! Keep it up dude!
What's the project called?
@@charliesretrocomputing ClassiCube-PPC
@@charliesretrocomputingclassicube PPC!
electronics abuse, classicube, AND linux in the same video? we've distilled your content
nice
No censored thermal paste application. 8/10.
@@RhetoricaRhamnusia7:20
@@soli-ethd Oh shit! I can't believe I missed that. It *is* a complete Action Retro video!
@@RhetoricaRhamnusia now we just need some hardware that can run BeOS or Haiku. Shame neither would work on this delightful little machine.
"soulless but perfected" is just modern apple in a nutshell
I used to like to sleep inside an eMac box when I was a kid! It had lovely pictures of sunflowers on it!
💀
Thats adorable
I used my eMac box as a coffee/multipurpose table for 8 years or so. I do still have the actual eMac, ironically the box would be more useful still.
Sleeping in an eMac box under the stairs half a block down the street from Jerry’s Bait Shop? You know the place. (Weird Al Yankovic’s Albuquerque reference)
I'm sure it was more comfortable than sleeping inside an eMac...
The top thing I remember from using the eMac in school was just how much nicer the screens were than the iMac g3s. That and being way faster...
I used to have a few iMac g3s. The later SE models had way nicer CRTs. True black as far as I can tell. Not sure if they were any clearer.
There was, very briefly, an e-mac in the department JCR at college. I say "briefly" because somebody walked out with it.
Thats surprising because it is incredibly heavy
@@tulippasta The Proctor (guard/receptionist) had retired the previous term and the college didn't think it worth replacing him. It was a very small department so you wouldn't have to walk far as long as you had a getaway vehicle.
I took a video class in college that was full of them. Sadly, they were too underpowered for the task.
“Surprise, surprise, Mr. Puffy is bad.”😂
I was an Apple service engineer when Apple announced the logic board replacement program, 12 months of my life was solely replacing eMac logic boards....
The eMac was the Macintosh LC of the G3/G4 era.
I found them to be surprisingly good when they weren’t abused by pupils in the school. Sadly, the IT technician at that time was a PC/Windows person and didn’t know how to lock them down properly.
EDIT: I think I have two or three in the house. Freecycle was a great idea!
I rescued a 1.25GHz eMac last year and I love the bog chunky boy. Fast G4, Pin-sharp Trinitron CRT, and great sound. The later models also have USB 2.0 too! I loved it so much I spent an extra 35 bucks and bought a stand for it :)
I still own a 1.25ghz model. Gave it an SSD upgrade earlier this year using a PATA to SATA adapter and a repaste. Installed Sorbet Leopard. It's now surprisingly useable.
I had a devil of a time trying to get a working SSD in mine. Ended up going with a 250 GB mechanical laptop HD out of a PowerBook G4 instead. Haven't done anything beyond that and swapping the optical drive. The power LED glows amber rather than white though. Not sure what to make of that.
I have my father's old 1Ghz eMac. I didn't have any trouble getting an SSD working in ours. I have it dual-bootting OS9 and 'regular Leopard.' I have "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" on it, and it runs decent. MacOS9 is really fast on it.
@@ericwood3709 FYI, if this thing has the same pickyness the PowerMac G5s tend to have, they don't play nice with SATA III SSDs. You need SATA II or very specific SATA III devices to make it work. Not sure what the technical reason is tbh, but it's definitely a thing.
@@cathrynm Yours sounds like the older model, given that it boots OS 9. Mine is the newer model that only boots OS X, and for some reason it has not liked the solid state options I've tried with it. Last one I tried was this Ebay thing in a white 2.5" case that works fine in my G4 Mini and other systems, but not that one.
@@TopVersnelling No SATA at all in the eMac. Anything G4 only has PATA built in. I've actually had pretty good luck with SATA SSDs on the G5 though, albeit on the latest models.
I scored one of the very last gen eMacs during a curbside e-waste event. It took a while, but I persevered and it now dual boots OS9 and OSX. Updated the CD-ROM to a Superdrive, bought an Airport card for it, maxed out the ram, recapped it and it's 100% reliable now.
Man, I used one of those all the way until 2010. I remember creating flash animations on this bad boy, playing Warcraft 3, Call of Duty 1, Diablo 2. Good times
As a 2000 baby I have a soft spot for these. My elementary school got these after the g3 iMacs. These were the COOL ones. They ran faster. Screen was flat. And way better. Speakers were better too
eMacs are severely underrated computers. They’re good fun when you just wanna tinker around with an old computer :)
12:18 this scene kinda looks like ur emac was telefragged by another one
the eMacs always looked so slick to me as a kid. also preferred the flatter screen
I always liked these. Came across an empty shell ages ago a built my daughter her first computer using a motherboard I had kicking around and an led panel I secured from inside
When I was in pre-school and kindergarten, the schools I went to were still using eMacs (and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger iirc).
I vaguely remember using Kid Pix on them, and while they got replaced the next year, some classrooms still had them (the last room with eMacs was a special education classroom). I've wanted an eMac ever since I rediscovered them in 2019 through a TH-cam video.
I remember the emacs being put in one of the computer rooms at school. I never seen them elsewhere, they seemed really cool and nice looking.
What I remember the most was they all had this fluorescent looking screensaver that just was mesmerizing to watch. It was just these beams that moved around the screen and I never seen that screen saver since. I always wanted to have it for windows or linux.
One thing I do remember is they had to get an air conditioner for the room because those computers heated it up and kept dying, but seeing this, it looks like maybe it was the capacitors being more likely the culprit.
This brings back some memories. My cousin works in IT for a school system and gave me two of these in 2007 when they upgraded. I found the instructions to tear it down online and upgraded the ram, HD, and CD drive to DVD burner and bought an installation CD for Tiger. I had just fried my home built PC from tinkering with it too much so the two years I used the eMac exclusively converted me to being a Mac user and I’ve owned some form of Mac ever since. That was also right when I bought the first iPhone. It was still slow as Christmas syncing the 1st iPhone over USB 1.1.
Hey, I grew up with one of those as a kid! We (by that I mean my family) ended up selling them off years ago, but I still have fond memories of using them. Good times. :)
I didn´t even watch the video yet.. but read Emac and was hooked... Just bought two of those and overclocked them heavily (7447a and 7447b models) love these machines as my CRT retro machines.
This was the first "modern" Mac I had....I had an Apple II as a kid, then went to Windows but always wanted to own a "modern day Mac". I remember my boss knocking on my door randomly one day and he just said "So, you want to buy a Mac?"....turns out, he had bought one of these used from someone and his wife was NOT happy....he knew I wanted a Mac because when I was at work, he would talk about me about what kind of computer he should buy and at the time, I was an Apple fan boy. I had a Dell laptop but I turned it into a Hackintosh and even put an Apple sticker on the Dell logo that I got with my iPhone. He sold it to me for $250 and I kept it for about 4 years and sold it for $100 after I got an Intel MacBook.
I had been a cert carrying PC/Windows repair tech for a number of years by the time the G4 eMac came out. I could not afford to miss the opportunity to find out what all the buzz was about when I found a 1.25/512/40 G4 eMac on clearance @ Best Buy for somewhere around $500-599 in the 2003-4 time frame. By then, I had experience with PCs and x86 servers from home to enterprise level, but none of that brought me the satisfaction the eMac did. I honestly had more fun over the next 5 years on the eMac than any of the PC headaches. Constantly updating/reinstalling drivers, Windows reinstalls, etc. The eMac "just worked" and I don't remember ever having to work on or repair it for anything that wasn't my own fault. Each OS update was seamless and I never *had* to reinstall the OS until I finally decided I had to do it anyway for no real reason whatsoever. I immediately put 2GB of RAM and a 100GB disk in it after bringing it home because I was already jaded in that regard from prior PC experiences. I brought it out of storage a week ago and put FreeBSD 14.1 on it just to drive it again for nostalgia, though I think I'm switching to a debian based PPC release since I have now been an Ubuntu daily driver for a few years now. Anyway, I'm sorry for writing a novel. The eMac proved to me that stable and reliable systems weren't just a fairy tale and ignited a passion in me that I continue to demand it out of my equipment today.
I've got an eMac with the stand and love it! For a while I had it setup in my kitchen as one of my usable, retro machines, just having it remote into a newer machine. It's very nice!
This is going to be a nice long journey, getting it up to snuff with modern Linux! I helped install a few of eMacs for a law office, they were a great value but after 5 or so years with a lot of heavy use all the screens that started having issues. Probably heat and caps!
Two huge perks with this model aside from the 1.42GHz CPU are the Radeon 9600 and DDR RAM (as opposed to single channel PC-133). The RAM speeds are just astronomically faster than earlier models. I think it unofficially supports 2GB as well. I have had some trouble getting it to run games great that should fly on it, though.
Quake III runs rather perfectly at its highest settings, but RTCW and Medal of Honor don't run great maxed out. Have to gimp them a little to make them run smoothly, but they definitely run well enough. Doom 3 runs kind of as you would expect. The 9600 just isn't the GPU for that game. It's playable, but leaves a lot to be desired. Aliens vs. Predator 2 is pretty decent while maxed from what I can remember. Surprisingly, No One Lives Forever gives me some trouble and I would think that game should run flawlessly. Total Immersion Racing runs fine as long as you disable car reflections, which is kind of a disappointment. 4x4 Evo 2 is a blast and runs well. Played it for hours inadvertently. Oh, and Unreal Tournament 2004 runs pretty well on medium settings. I'm sure the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament will run flawlessly because they run great on my 600MHz Graphite iMac, while Quake III really seems to be its absolute limit.
This was all running the latest version of 10.4. Whichever exact version was right before 10.5. I read that 10.5 just doesn't run great on it, but I will eventually upgrade to a larger SSD and get it dual-booting both. Hopefully by then someone will figure out how to run OS 9 on it natively by the time I get to that lol. I believe the 1.25GHz model can now run it perfectly thanks to some major community effort.
Great video! Would love to see you throw as many games as you can at the 1.42GHz model as you can just to see if you get the same performance I do.
@ 11:22
From what I've heard, it's due to Linux (and more specifically, X11) not respecting available video modes for the eMac's display and so it tries to force 60Hz and the display doesn't work
Driver doesn't send i2c commands that switch modes on the graphics card in these. Debian is using the ofw framebuffer mode here only.
8:51 A+ Diddy joke! 😂
your thermal repasting doesn't have enough pixelation. Gonna need you to go see HR please. ;)
My dad had one of those, loved the heck out of it. He got his first Mac in 1985 and this was his last one. Was great for his photo editing and amateur photo business.
This was the computer we used for media production when I was in high school many many moons ago. I have a strong fondness for it.
Good luck out there, "Totally Fine" eMac!
I owned a few of these to go along with my PowerMacs. I loved the form factor and the speed. Ironically these eMacs were faster than the more expensive iMacs given the same speed because of how the cd rom and hd shared the sane channel on the iMac and used laptop ram. These full fledged beasts had almost been as quick as a single cpu powered powermsc tower for many tasks. Quite competitive, and a fantastic value considering. My first unit I bought (slightly) used at a school auction. The 2nd, 1.25 ghz unit I bought refurbished. Again worth every penny. Kept them both until 2012.
I tried Debian 12 on a Chromebook thanks to the developper mode, churutlbook project and removing the battery to bypass the write protection. Everything went great as was super smooth with the Lxqt graphical environment... except the Wi-Fi. Debian 12 is supposed to have the option of installing the proprietary drivers to fix the issue but i didn't seen it. I settled with the Xfce Manjaro install with the proprietary drivers. Works great for me now but i don't know if you will have the same problem with the Wi-Fi as i did (or if the G4 is wi-fi capable anyway). I hope for the best!
My friend's mom used this computer for graphic design in college. They have since donated it to me, I very much lucked out. Mine is in excellent shape with original hard drive, ram, and capacitors. they only problem is that they keyboard is a bit yellow. She also got the maxed out one back in 2003 1gb ram, the superdrive, 1ghz G4 processor, and the acrylic stand. The only thing she didn't splurge on was the AirPort card, but that was a cheap, easy upgrade.
Used these things in junior high. typed a few reports in office 2004. They ran a mix of Panther, Tiger and Leopard. When they were retired, we got one to mess around with in 2011. The speakers in these machines were killer
One of my favorite CRT all in one machines, the earlier eMac models are the last to run Mac OS 9 natively, great for some late 90’s early 2000’s Mac compatible games!
as a person who grew up in the classic mac era, and never really used osx for games, i was thrilled to get my hands on an emac. ended up being an OSX only model, so i down graded the whole motherboard to an OS9 compatible one. i think its a very underrated machine!
I was still using one of these for music production in school with Logic Pro back in 2010-2011. By that point the hardware was not pleasant to use for the task but they still worked and I think the styling is iconic at the very least!
I loved the eMacs in the computer lab at college. They were more business, more serious, than the goofy iMacs around. I loved the concept too- no frills all-in-one computing ready to go out of the box.
7:18 Yeah, because _that_ is totally worth censoring! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
People have... Thoughts, let's say, regarding thermal paste. It's like an oil thread on a car forum!
used to have one of those. got it a few years back for dirt cheap, like $5 at today’s rates. wasn’t in the best shape visually (scratches on the case, missing screw, missing speaker grills) and needed a disc drive swap but otherwise was fine. well, the power button fell apart soon after since it was barely working at that point, but that didn’t prevent me from using it anyway. l
quite a charming machine for sure. definitely underloved.
had my bit of fun with it and then sold it off for the same price i got it for to a random guy who seemed to be much more into it and willing to at least try actually restoring the thing into a better shape than i did.
the emac is an epic machine. I had a 1.25ghz model, and i used the crap out of it. Hrutkay got it when I moved because I didn't want to move it, the Achilles heel of the emac line, they are too damn heavy!
A good video on a G4 classic. I have sold many of these in the past, and those caps that you replaced on the logic board suffered the dreaded cap leaking plague in the early 2000s. These last lot of eMacs suffered it the most, and my outsourced tech couldn't keep up with the endless logic boards I was supplying his for a cap replacement. I got rid of the hundreds that I had, and I am down to 2 I believe. BTW, the top 2 screws are purely cosmetic, as far as I can remember.
I love all your videos, especially the ones where you bring life to old hardware!
the eMac was awesome, the computers we had at school, on which i played hours of reckless drivin and deimos rising. such happy memories.
Good lord, that soldering iron is huge. If I was looking for a portable soldering iron I'd much rather go with either a Miniware TS80P or a Pinecil combined with an USB-C power bank just for ergonomic reasons.
Both of those are corded options so of course they are smaller!
ifixit has a new portable soldering iron that uses a power bank design too
I've seen a few of these for sale recently and looked into it. They seem to be surprisingly powerful and capable systems for something released for the education market. 150Hz for Minecraft on a 20-year olf machine, however edited down, is insanely impressive!
My old school had eMacs. I always thought of them as quirky iMac-like computers (I wondered why these ones were eMacs and if Apple ever made ePods) that were tricky for a PC user to use (macOS makes more sense now) and not very fast, but were reliable. I somehow could pick one up at 10. These things are like 50 pounds! I used to think that all mac desktops were all-in-one units - the gifted class I'd go to later on had Power Mac G4s in half the classroom and I was fascinated with the fact that Apple made towers too.
I used to think that Macs were for teachers and school kids and that the apple symbolized the old tradition of giving an apple to a teacher.
I have always loved the eMac. I have one I got from my mom when we “upgraded” her to a 2012 iMac that has the dreaded monitor problem. I have been hoping for the time to dig into it and try to repair it for years…
I used these in middle school. I remember how well they actually worked and the speakers sounded really good (at least to my 12 year old ears). fond memories on newgrounds on those
My elementary school was a Mac school. We had G3 iMacs in the computer lab and classrooms (soon to be replaced by iBook G4s), and the office staff had eMacs. Even though I never got to use them, I was always fascinated by those eMacs. Over the past few years I’ve been so tempted to get one from Facebook Marketplace but I don’t have room for one lol.
I remember using this machine along with the colorful iMacs back in grade school. My district completely skipped over the G4 and went straight to the G5 after this.
We'll will see to Restore this..ish Thing... eMac G4?
HOLY SHIT!!!! Great job Action Retro!!!
I LOVE the eMac G4. It was the first Apple computer I ever remember using back in school. I only have the 1 GHz ATI Graphics model so it's not the most powerful of the lineup, but it's a great computer for doing mid 00s related tasks. Plus it's high resolution flat CRT is absolutely gorgeous, probably my favorite CRT display in my collection. Great to see you working with one of my favorites!
These are basically a lowered spec CRT studio display with a G4 sat in the bottom. I have one of those displays, and yes they are monstrously heavy even without the computer tucked inside.
I had one a couple of years ago. One day I turned it on and there was a burning smell then it never worked again.
Such a shame as the CRT screen was stunning! Retro games and DVDs looked amazing on it.
On one hand I regret not having the most powerful all in one powerpc mac buying the 1.44 ghz emac but, on the other hand, I am deeply happy to have the 1.25 that can also boot classic.
I swear I have a memory of using these in like first or second grade. My more vivid computer lab memories were of newer thick iMacs with the magic keyboard that had the cylinder on the back of it propping it up.
man I love my emac's used these so much through my high school years, I have 2 of them in my collection, wouldn't mind getting a bunch and setting up a computer lab just lick a school setup, I had one have a bad cap in it that would make it crash on boot load had to run it with extensions off then it would run after I replaced the bad cap then it was fine and still is today
That RAM stick is AWESOME! ... but I love alternate colored components so...
I have the top-spec eMac. Bought it from an ewaste recycler in 2009 to get me through when out laptop died. A lovable machine - looks like the nose cone of an airliner and weighs about as much. Mine is still kicking after all this time. Still a joy to use… the matching swivel stand is a must. I remember the Radeon graphics being tough to get working on Linux - haven’t tried it in some time though.
8:28 Yikes! I’ve seen complicated apple products but this one is something else!
My grandfather had an emac! It was the last computer he owned before he passed. I hope you do some crazy stuff with this!
11:30 the video issue affects all distros debian is in framebuffer not accelerated mode. Driver needs to switch modes using i2c commands. Also affects the BSD flavors on eMac.
Very good, glad to see an eMac front and center. Had a eMac around 2002, loved it and ran YellowDog Linux on it. Wished that I had kept it, was a nice machine.
Another issue with that eMac could simply just be that the CRT is a little tired from underuse. Leave it turned on for a few hours and see if it brightens up. If not, you may need to rejuvenate it.
I love the contrast of you talking about it, with a friends one chilling there and yours in a chaotic pile.
The cap swelling is moisture ingress, store your surplustronics with dessicant packs like from new shoe boxes. Caps are all still fine in my emac (touch wood)
I love my eMac! It's such a nice machine to use, but it's just a shame that it's so big and heavy, because I don't have the space to keep it set up in my tiny apartment, so it just sits in storage waiting for the day when I move to a place large enough to have a dedicated computer room.
I've been wanting to snag one of these, hijack the display board, and use it as a monitor forever. I want to build a picade around it and build out an all-white arcade stick to match.
Until M1 Apple never convinced me. It seemed a more expensive, more convoluted way to do things.
I was wrong to a certain extend, but back in the day I only dabbled with Macs, never investing in one properly.
From all of the cheap macs I had, the eMac was the smoothest running, most stable one and also the only one that I used somewhat longterm. They are great machines.
My elementary school's lab was emacs, loved playing the Tony Hawk game, kidpix, freddie fish, pajama sam
We had like a dozen of these in one of our college computer labs. I had totally forgotten the big exposed screws all over the sides. I guess they didn't want to go with the usual snap-off plastic parts with screws hidden underneath lest kids pull them off and steal them. But of course they still had to find a way to make it stylish.
I love when he gives up half way through a project and just gets a working unit.
The situation of Linux support on old POWER machines has gone worse dramatically since IBM introduced POWER 8 a few years ago. With POWER 8 they switched their architecture from PPC64BE (Big Endian) to PPC64LE (Little Endian) which causes LE binaries to be incompatible to BE and vice versa. LE processors may run BE binaries, but only if the whole OS runs in BE mode (like AIX does). Modern Linux systems usually only support LE mode, not BE anymore... This caused that big distributors such as Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE dropped their support for BE and old processors and the old architecture... There are only few distributions left that still support PPC64BE or even PPC32 these days...
Another great video sir. Hope we get to see a part 2 where you finish working on your eMac!
I actually have an old eMac that I got from my dad! I use it for writing my college essays and old games! I love the thing. Good to see a video that actually shows the eMac.
That's genius, using an outdated computer for collage essays. Maybe something I should look into doing, so easy to get distracted otherwise.
How reliable do you find it? No worries about a failing HDD or something?
@@CouldBeMathijs nope all good!
Tasty capacitor juice! 😋
I'm looking to buy a used Power Mac G5 from e-Bay because I'm a big fan of all retro computers and I was crazy about G5 when it came out in 2003 but couldn't afford it at that time. But my biggest worry is that even on the most powerful Quad core G5, we cannot browse modern websites... whether we use Safari from Sorbet Leopard OS, TenFourFox, Arctic Fox, Dillo or any browser, it can't even browse basic websites and can't play TH-cam videos at 720p. Is there any new browser for PowerPPC that can browse websites normally on G5 ?
I just bought the screwdriver and soldering iron kit using your links for shipment to the UK! Looking forward to using them, ironically (hehe, iron-ically?) for a capacitor replacement for an old Xbox! Cheers to Action Retro and Fanttik! 🤩
The first Mac I ever used was one of the polycarbonate Mid-2000s iMacs in a couple of classes in high school.
I used to use an eMac every day as a newspaper reporter in the early 2000s. They weren't the prettiest and they weren't always the best, but they were reliable.
I have the 1.25 ghz model, which I upgraded with an Airport card and 2 gigs of RAM (officially only supports 1, but will recognize 2). I'm going to pop an ssd drive in there, and it is still a totally usable computer. That CRT is actually far nicer than it has any right to be.
The eMac is one of the last Macs that can still run Mac OS 9. Mine is dual-booted with 9.2 and 10.4, making it a pretty great classic Mac gaming platform.
fun fact, the first mac mini out preforms the best eMac in almost every way apart from the disc drive and storage
Hey, that RAM was golden!
This is my favourite PPC Mac- I’ve had a couple over the years- this is definitely something you should be trying to put an M1/2 board in to bring it up to date- same as you did with the G4 iMac- i’d love to use mine as a daily with modern internals
This was my favorite Mac to use at school we had one lab of g3 iMacs and in the 4th grade we had another lab of eMacs
Much thanks .... i ended up buying that soldering iron . It's on order
One oddity with my unit (an 800MHz ATI Graphics unit) is that it doesn't have a modem for some reason. Totally blanked out the port on the side, but I don't really need it anyway. At least it's one of the last machines that will boot OS 9.
I'm tempted on the soldering iron, but being wireless I'm concerned it would be very niche, since it may not be able to heat pads on a large ground plane.
I still have mine, it was my third Mac - it's been a tank, it's plastic wrapped in my basement right now. I feel really guilty... It did like 14 years of service between it's short 'main computer' life into the 'my kid's computer' life. I remember having to downgrade it so my kiddo could play OS9 games... No, I didn't seed that era, the thrift store did ;)
I may have to dig mine out, as I was planning to do a full modded Baldur's Gate I run on my MDD dual 1.33... but I think I killed it (with that modded game, I'm not kidding - I had a number of old school upgrades added... I think I might have killed the XServe dual CPUs on Baldur's Gate... Yeah, that is both pride and shame...)
Had a 700MHz one, what a wonderful machine.
It was flying back then and was also very pretty with its 17” CRT.
Sadly, the IVAD cable was awaiting its demise and sooner or later it died, I tried to open it but the screws were broken so I couldn’t open it, and that’s why I threw it away. Regret it to this day.
i followed your tutorial on adélie with my eMac, it worked, it just needs a lot of time to boot up (used an usb thumbdrive, took 6+ minutes to boot into live kde)
had some problems during install, kde environment was empty, only taskbar and missing all the apps
If anyone is wondering why he didn't plug the buttun in to test it, it requires putting the shell back on. And that's a bit of a pain.
I'm sorry in advance for the additional back pain caused by more eMacs!
Ah the emac, my first apple computer and still one of my favourites. I still use one as a stereo
This is definitely my favorite Mac. I lost mine in a house fire 2 years ago but I still used it daily from 2002-2022! I never got to try sorbet leopard tho😢. I was using Linux