Fool Quartz Extreme into working on iMac SE

[Moo-Boo]

Greetings my wise friends,

For the last two days I have been searching the net and racking my brain trying to enable Quartz Extreme into working on my 600MHz SE iMac. It has 16mb of VRAM which is great, but, because it's a ATI Rage 128 Pro, Apple says it's a no-go, and to basically rack off. Is there any way into fooling this piece of otherwise great hardware into enabling Quartz Extreme. I have ordered an extra 512MB of RAM for it, which didn't cost much and should help, but there's nothing like Quartz Extreme. Any help or advice would be downright marvellous!

Thanks a million and take care of yourselves,

Matt (and the cat)

 

[Eidorian]

Sadly you need a Radeon series for it if you're going with ATI.

 

[Morn]

Weird, I wonder if quartz extreme needs transform and lighting

 

[CubeHacker]

Nope, its simply not going to happen. The Rage series of chips only allows for texture resolutions in powers of 2 (32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc..). However, because every window in OSX is rendered as its own texture when Quartz Extreme is used, and those windows can technically be of ANY size, the chip has to be able to render textures at any arbitrary size, not just in powers of 2. The Radeon and the Geforce I believe are the first line of cards that could do that. It has nothing to do with the amount of VRAM available, it has to do with the capabilities of the chip.

 

[Moo-Boo]

Well, I'd like to thank you my friends for your practical education and sound advice. It seems I'm doomed, but I can cope for a few months until I get a used eMac or Mac Mini. Or perhaps an old G4 iMac. The iMac SE is a great machine, but it can't cope with any games made after 2002 very well, even on OS 9. I'd better start saving!

Thanks once again, take care of yourselves and merry Christmas,

Matt (and the cat)

 

[Eidorian]

Yeah, there IS a way to trick Mac OS X to let PCI Radeons use Quartz Extreme. AGP is a requirement for Quartz Extreme.10.4.3 seems to have corrected that little hack though. Most people noticed a 15-30% gain in performance. The only downside is that it really taxes the PCI bus. You'll only performance out of your video card and nothing else on the bus.

 

[ahunter3]

Tell me I'm not the only person to misread the thread title as Fool Quartz Extreme into working on Mac SE...

::visualizes the 512 x 382 black and white screen displaying QE transitions, a bit slowly as the 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor processes the necessary instructions in 4 MB of RAM::



Can you imagine compiling all the XCode for the early 68K processor family?

 

[bousozoku]

Tell me I'm not the only person to misread the thread title as Fool Quartz Extreme into working on Mac SE...

::visualizes the 512 x 382 black and white screen displaying QE transitions, a bit slowly as the 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor processes the necessary instructions in 4 MB of RAM::



Can you imagine compiling all the XCode for the early 68K processor family?

Actually, I was thinking back to how Apple capped the memory controller at 4 MB instead of the 16 MB that the 68000 could use and how other 68000-based machines were running UNIX at the time. There was so much more that could have been done. Besides, the resolution was 512x384.

I'm not sure why anyone would try to fool Quartz Extreme into working on hardware that wasn't strong enough to make things better. That was the reason for the change. They wanted to offload some of the processing and generally the graphics processors back then were much more like a simple staging area with a blitter that they weren't all that useful.