The beige G3 series Macs had no onboard audio, relying instead on a 'personality' card which came in two flavours: "whisper" and "wings" - the former being audio only, the latter capable of full AV.
My G3 has a 'whisper' version, and re-seating it restored things to normality. I guess the dust build-up in the last 8 years finally got too much for the electrons to overcome :-)
What was quite confusing was that my old TechTool rescue CD managed to boot it just fine. It seems that OS 8.5.1 through 9.1 can cope with a duff personality card, but 9.2.2 can't (at least not reliably - I did get one successful 9.2.2 boot out of it during various test cycles prior to reseating the card, which only served to be even more confusing!)
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simon
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