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The iMac G3 came in tangerine, blueberry, lime, grape, and strawberry colors.

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Lost colors on screen when I installed OSX, amber only color left

I was given an iMac G3 M4984. I installed OSX and lost almost all colors on the screen. I am left with only amber hues. The colors were all there and working fine prior to the installation. The computer boots with OSX, but still runs OS9 when I run the older disks and games that we have.

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How much RAM do you have? What version of OSX did you use? Does the problem persist in both OS 9 & OS X? I would start first in OS 9. You may not have the RAM or CPU power to run the OSX version you are trying. In OS9, try going to :Under the Apple icon in the upper left hand corner, go to: control panels - monitors and see if the color is on. Then try lowering your colors to 256, next try raising it to thousand?

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good answer +

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If this is the 333Mhz tray loader model, and you did not install OS9.2.2 first, AND update the firmware to 1.0 ( NOT 1.2)from apple downloads, then you have a problem. If you did not do both these things, your installation of OS X has caused the display failure.

There is a guy in the USA who will repair it for $80. It is a well documented problem, so google it and you will learn more.

Good luck.

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This sounds promising, but can you please provide a link? "Google it" isn't really helpful.

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Yeah... it's hard to just "throw these out"... More fun to upgrade them in every possible way, especially now when the upgrade parts that we used to drool over as being too expensive can be so cheaply obtained at a Goodwill computer store or other computer recycling store.... I mean, yes, they are dinosaurs, but dinosaurs are cool!

Years ago, I did the firmware upgrade on a slot-loading iMac that had been temporarily wrecked by a premature OS X installation. It involved jumpering certain connectors on the video cable and then hooking up to an external monitor looking for things on a severely disabled screen in order to open up the firmware package... Can't remember exactly what I did, or where one can find the info, but at least this gives an idea of what is involved...

If it's a slot loader, there may be the additional complication of an analog video part frying internally from the heat that was supposed to be convecting out of the machine...(sorry, it's been so long that I forgot the name of that part - oh heck.... google it!) That part has to be unsoldered from the analog video board, and the new one soldered in. Oh, and the massive, potentially fatal, stored up voltage from the cathode ray tube needs to discharged safely first before doing this.

Aieeee... so hard to get rid of one's pet dinosaur even when repairing it gets ridiculous!

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its way too old throw it out

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I like these old G3 iMac computers as a collectable! I have a 600MHZ G3 i upgraded to 768MB, 100GB HDD which had 128MB, 40GB HDD

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