Although Griffin made an extension cable for these speakers, it seems to be long extinct. Unfortunately the shape of the board did not lend itself to sit flush against the round rear ports of the iMac. So I connected this to the internal 12V and hooked the iFire to my turtle bay usb audio adapters headphone port via a 3.5mm cable. Although my computer did not have a firewire 400, this is used only for power. So I opened up and tried internalizing the smaller Griffin iFire which connected via a standard 3.5mm audio jack and FireWire. However, this board was a tight fit and I already had a USB audio adapter for use with the internal microphone and did not want to add a second. To do this I had intended to internalize the griffin powerwave's board with the DC power hooked up to the an internal 12V line. You could either have the amp in the computer and then output the amplified sound to the speakers or keep the amp external, but use the computers power supply to power it.įor my project, I wanted to make it as similar to the original iMac G4 as possible. It makes sense, why should computer speakers need another cable for AC power to power an onboard amp (complete with its own powerbrick for DC conversion) when you have a power supply in your computer and a cable already connecting to it. Steve Jobs talked about this frequently and this was one of the reasons that he so greatly favored all-in-ones. One thing that made iMacs appear more elegant was the lack of "cable mess". Griffin iFire Adapter (Powered by Firewire) I had been lucky to obtain both a Griffin Powerwave and a Griffin iFire which accept the apple mini jack and never gave this connector much thought. I had always known that the apple pro speakers had a proprietary connector (the apple mini-jack) and lacked an amplifier in the speakers themselves, but I didn't realize exactly how they worked until I was completing my most recent project and decided to incorporate these speakers. Other speakers just don't look quite right next to the iMac G4. Similarly, the apple pro speakers, sometimes called the orb or eyeball speakers falls into the same category for me. Although this is no longer a critical feature and it uses a huge amount of space in the dome, the disc tray emerging from the oval slit in the otherwise featureless dome is something I always associate with the iMac G4. I'd never used a G3 series iMac for more than a few minutes back when they were new so I had no idea what to expect.There are a few "extra" features of the iMac G4 that I have gone to great lengths to incorporate because I felt that these were important to the design of the iMac. I threw in the soundtrack CD from The Fellowship of the Ring to test the optical drive and was really impressed by how good the audio quality is. The firmware is still on a 3.x version and will need to be updated along with setting up a clean OS. I'm still very happy with it now that my mystery is over! Is the slightly lesser CPU (750 versus 750cx) and lesser graphics really going to ruin my whole world? Probably not. A quick peek in MacTracker and a Google search later confirmed my suspicion, this was not exactly the iMac I was looking for. Booting into Open Firmware advised me it was a PowerMac2,2. Definitely wasn't right on the specs for a Flower Power. and it's running OS 9.0.4, has 128MB of RAM and 8MB Rage Pro video, a DVD-ROM drive and a 30GB hard drive. I opened System Profiler and started looking around. It looks like it was powered off for the last 10 years, with the last few documents being modified in January of 2005. To start, it felt like opening a time capsule. It arrived Saturday morning and by evening I got it unboxed, powered up and decided to see what my lucky bid got me. The listing didn't go into a ton of detail about the specs on the machine, but it looked great in the photos and the seller has great feedback. I got a push notification that the auction was ending in 15 minutes and still had no bids. I was the only bidder on a recent eBay auction for a Flower Power iMac G3.
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