What I've learned from Macs' video cards:

1) You can't put in PC video cards.

2) You're not going to get any ADC-compliant screens anymore anyway. The old Apple Studio Displays (white, pinstriped, and looks like an easel) are still too expensive, even off of ebay. I'd want one, but it's cheaper to get other displays.

All the new Apple Cinema Displays are DVI. (the new aluminium ones)

ADC provided DVI and power to a Studio Display, as well as more USB and FireWire ports to the display. With a simple ADC-to-DVI plug, you can run a standard DVI display (I have this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812116204 and am running dual 1280x1024 19" Samsung flat panel displays on a G5 tower).

3) You can always use a DVI-VGA adapter for an older display. However, you can't go ADC-DVI and DVI-VGA. I've tried it at least with mine, and it didn't work. You can only plug a DVI-VGA adapter into a DVI port, not a converted ADC.

The Mirror Drive Door G4 came with a better vid card because it was newer.

If you want some pictures, I can take some. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. Hope it helps!

Those're some good tips!

Because I'm really low on cash flow, I'm stuck with two VGA monitors and one DVI-VGA adapter right now.

Apparently, according to the internet, there are some ADC-VGA adapters out there for $34 or so. Much easier to purchase than a whole new monitor, assuming that it'll still work to run dual monitors with the card that way.

On another note, I have a whole mess of hard drives and two towers. I noticed on your twitter that you did something like make a tower of hard drives? Or did I read that wrong.

Well, you can always add another drive or two inside those towers; the G4 towers should all accept PATA (IDE) hard drives, just like most PC towers — master-and-slave the drives. You could probably also add another HDD to the optical drive bus, as long as there are enough molex power plugs for all the drives.

Plus, Macs accept PC HDDs and can use them as long as they're formatted so that OSX can read them. (I replaced most of my Mac's HDDs and RAM with new "PC" components, and it works great).

This may be a project for later in the week, or even next weekend. I have a lot of hard drives now. More than can fit in one tower.

I'm tinkering with various ideas of running the second tower headless, either with the install of Ubuntu on it or whatever MacOS runs best for its speed.

But if I can't think of any actual usefulness for it besides housing hard drives, I may find myself donating it to a needy cartoonist.

That machine could make a great fileserver for backups and networked file storage.

Then again, one of my close friends has an old 450mhz G4 (the blue-green one), that he has an old Intuos2 hooked to, and it works reasonably well for him.

Plus, I do believe those G4s still have a 128gb HDD size cap — the machines can't address more than that (fortunately they don't have the 8gb "oldworld" Mac limit).

Yeah, I'm kinda thinking that I can't have too much backup.

Also, if I leave Ubuntu installed on it, I can play with Linux!

What kind of video card came with the newer mac ? I ask because 16mb of vram is gonna slow you down. I'm betting the video card from your newer mac is faster.

16mb is still enough to run OSX's Core Image and Core Video, though you can't drive huge displays.

My old G3 PowerBook had an 8mb ATI RAGE128, though the death pixelstained of that AGP processor was the reason that wonderful machine had to eventually retire.

Yeah, the 16mb was fine for resolutions up to 1224 x 1024, and could still run the highest resolution. But that's not for gaming, just dinking around in the OS.

I've since swapped it back, and found the original card is a 64mb Radeon. So much better!

Also a card that is more likely to be able to handle duel monitors.

Yeah; the one in my machine is a 9600xt, and it's a little newer. The real trick is finding AGP cards for Macs these days. It's hard, because AGP are scarce, and Mac suff is even scarcer. I'll probably just stick with what I have until get a new desktop — this one's too old for gaming, and fore more than two displays, I'd want some PCIe ports to handle more cards.

Mmm...

I think MacGlashen is going to serve me well for quite some time.

At some point, though, I'm going to need a new laptop. By the time I can afford one, whatever I get will be able to run Spore and I'll be happy on the front for a while. For now, though, the lack of games improves my productivity.

See ! I was right. The speed of your computer depends on so many more things than just processor speed and ram. Your video card and harddrive are an important part of that equation. Especially for photoshop.

Oh, absolutely!

I expect that when I hook up the duel monitors, I'll actually shut one down occasionally in order to save memory space while doing really complex Photoshop stuff.

If it looks like I'm ignorant about Mac stuff, it's mostly because I'm still learning how to identify their components. I've been building PCs since '94, so I'm relatively familiar with the importance of bus speeds and video ram and stuff like that. But now I get to play catch-up with the Macs. I'm not familiar enough with their various lines to be able to make any sort of assumptions of power and capability by just looking at the color of the cases yet. But the fact that you can do that is intriguing!

I'd guess that other than the OS they are actually the same. Although I believe for awhile Mac's were the only computers that could have a 30 monitor. I could be wrong.

Well, there were some big differences in the early days, such as the CPU archetecture. But these days the big differences are A) the OS and B) the packaging.

Because Macs are generally put out by the same company, Apple, or have been for long enough that new companies just follow Apple's lead, you can identify a Mac by its case (unless it has been upgraded).

There are so many different PCs, and so many of them tinkered with or built from scratch, that you just can't do that.

Finally, I'm just not as familiar with the Mac OS as I am with Windows (yet). But I am rapidly catching up. In fact, I'm learning it so much damn faster than I learned Windows it kind of scares me.

That, coupled with my habit of asking questions online before actually looking into them myself (a trick that is needed with most Windows problems), probably makes me look more than a little naive. ;)

But the point is, this is the highest resolution I've ever had to play with! And the Mac switches between these resolutions so smoothly!

Sigh - you gave me an Amiga moment then. You could have multiply screens with different resolutions on it, thus devote a screen to each app if you wished. And not only was switching between them instantaneous, you could scroll the screens up and down, so look at the top of the one beneath the current front screen.
[/sigh]

Some Macs, including mine, can do that. But, oh yes, Amigas were great. I never got to play with one, but a friend gave me a tour of what his could do once. I feel like I've missed out on a great deal.