Rick Norcross Gifts His Wife a Classic Apple iMac G3 — with an AMD Ryzen Sleeper Build Inside

When you're looking for the antithesis of a standard PC case, you can't go wrong with late '90s Apple designs.

Gareth Halfacree
2 months agoHW101 / Retro Tech

Mechanic and vintage computing enthusiast Rick Norcross has turned a classic Apple iMac G3 into the housing of a modern sleeper build — making room for an AMD Ryzen processor and its motherboard with a shift to a flat-screen integrated display.

"My wife wanted me to build her a PC but didn't want your typical PC case," Norcross explains of the project. "[I] found a broken [Apple iMac] G3 on [a] marketplace and gutted it down to just the plastic and the metal plate. [I] fit a full mATX PC with power supply inside. The wife plays on it and loves it."

Launched as simply the iMac, back in 1998, the iMac G3 and its successors are possibly Apple's most iconic systems. The computing hardware is hidden away inside the housing of a cathode-ray tube (CRT) display, which is made from translucent and the buyer's choice of 13 different colors of plastic — a million miles away from the minimalist design ethos of modern Apple, and mirrored in the "Aqua" user interface of the company's early Mac OS X releases.

A 32-bit 233MHz PowerPC G3 processor and 4GB hard drive doesn't get you far these days, though, which is why Norcross pulled out the broken internals in his marketplace find and replaced them with something more modern: a mATX motherboard hosting a 64-bit, multi-core AMD Ryzen processor. While the motherboard fits in the case, the power supply was more of a struggle — and, Norcross admits, finding a flat-screen display of the correct size and aspect to fit where the original CRT lived was a real challenge.

"We wanted it to play the original Mac startup sound when we hit the power button, so I bought the Adafruit Audio FX sound board," Norcross adds. "With this board you can add .wav sounds that are triggered with ground input on one of the pins. The problem with ground input is there is no momentary ground output off the motherboard as far as I could find. So, I added a second micro-switch next to the power button that triggers ground to that pin. The Adafruit FX sound board also has a built in 2×2w amp, so it doubles as a system speaker amp."

More details on the build are available on Hackaday.io.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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