im thinking the answer would be the 9600 or beige g3.. just wanting to confirm ! please + thanks
my interest in the serial port is for midi communication!
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2013, November 19 - 4:44am
#1
whats the most powerful/upgradable mac that still had a serial port (pre-usb)
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2013, November 19 - 4:57am
#2
Edit: I was pretty sure the blue and white G3 was the last mac with serial ports but no. It was the first mac to drop the serial ports. That leaves precisely the beige G3 ones.
2013, November 19 - 5:50am
#3
Beige G3. You can swap out their Zif socket CPU's with those from b/w G3's. There were also 3rd party G3 & G4 CPU upgrades by companies such as Sonnet.
A beige G3 I purchased on ebay came with a Sonnet 400MHz G4 CPU installed, you can get these Sonnet Zifs in up to 1GHz. Maybe higher speeds too? Not sure.
Avoid Rev-A beige G3 motherboards as they don't support Master/Slave configurations with their internal drives. Only go for Rev-B or Rev-C logic boards in this Mac.
B/W G3's did retain an ADB port tho', for legacy use, so you could use a USB keyboard or an ADB keyboard & mouse.
2013, November 19 - 6:06am
#4
is it possible to use the adb port for serial midi data?
lol just saw this .. seemed sarcastically appropriate:) there was a imac g3 mod for serial ports too that applied to the imac g3/333's only i think.. was there an initial imac design that still featured serial? probably not.. just wondering
what about the 9600 isnt it supposed to have like a crazy amount of pci slots? would it support a radeon 9200 graphics card? that might be a beast system.. the 9600s have serial ports dont they?? 9600 is a g3 chip isnt it?
2013, November 19 - 7:15am
#5
Don't know about ADB to serial, sorry.
On the original iMac there was solder points for floppy disk drive chips. So maybe this was dropped at the last minute.
Crazy amount of PCI slots in a 9600? Not really, it had 6 which is nice - It did have 12 RAM slots tho'. Now that was crazy! 
9600 is a G3? No, it has a 604e CPU and the introduction of the G3 CPU made the 604e redundant. It did have however, a "daughter card" 604e CPU, which could be upgraded with 3rd party solutions. I had a G3 upgrade for this socket.
For quick look-ups on basic Mac specs, I usually go here 1st. Covers the 1st Macs to now.