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Installing Leopard on a B&W G3

bunnspecial

bunnspecial

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 3, 2014
8,359
6,498
Kentucky
I have a 450mhz ZIF G4 and a Radeon 9200 on the way that I just bought from member Gavinstubbs. As soon as they arrive, they are going right in one of my B&Ws.

If I'm not mistaken, these upgrades should make it possible for me to install Leopard on the computer. As I don't particularly like using Leopard Assist, my plan is to do the Leopard install on another computer.

I'm wondering, however, if I'll need to do any other tinkering to get things to work. I know that some iBook G4s that were officially Leopard-capable used the 9200 GPU, so I'm assuming that the kexts should already be there the graphics card.

Has anyone here done this, and if so is it a plug-and-play install? If not, what else needs to be done to get it to work correctly?
 
bunnspecial said:
I know that some iBook G4s that were officially Leopard-capable used the 9200 GPU, so I'm assuming that the kexts should already be there the graphics card.
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Those are mobile GPUs so inbuilt support for desktop variants is not assured but I would be surprised if Apple or AMD did not make drivers available at some stage.
 
Quartz Extreme requires a Radeon\GeForce 2MX or newer with 16MB vRAM on an AGP bus. It would be supported on an AGP connected Radeon 9200.

If memory serves Core Image requires shader model 2. nVidia support started with the FX5000 series, ATI with the Radeon R300 (ie 9500 upwards). As any GPU capable of supporting Core Image is also Quartz Extreme capable, it would follow that it's AGP/PCIe bus only as per Quartz Extreme.

The only video cards with shader model 2 that came in PCI bus were the FX5200/FX5500 to my knowledge. I know we used them a few years ago for dual display support on Windows machines at work. As long as Apple are not checking for an AGP/PCIe video card it should enable Core Image.

On a related note Core Image basically has the same video card requirements as Windows Aero. That does work on a PCI 5200FX card, I've had an ancient Pentium 2 running it on Windows 7 and it wasn't that bad.
 
Thanks for the responses. I did some searching, and apparently ATI did release some drivers for the whole 8000 and 9000 range of graphics cards for 10.5, so hopefully I can get it to work.

As far as core image-from my reading PCI doesn't have the bandwidth to support it even if the card/GPU were theoretically capable of doing so. Everything I read indicated that you needed at least 2x AGP to get Quartz Extreme, and I suspect that Core Image requires even more(although I'm just guessing). I know that I have it working in the 4x AGP slot on my Quicksilver using a Radeon 9600.
 
I don't know if this helps you at all, but I have 10.5.8 running on a G4/400 AGP with 256mb ram.

Said G4 has a Rage 128 AGP card. Leopard runs fine.
 
First thing that pops up in my head when i se "B&W G3" and Leopard in the same sentence is "don't do it". But then, what runs fine is a bit different from person to person. Are there any special reasons why you need to run Leopard?
 
The issue with (old school conventional) PCI is it's a shared bus of 133MB/sec. All the I/O devices - graphics, disk interfaces, ethernet etc are sharing the bus. Moving the graphics to a separate bus (AGP) increased general I/O performance. AGP 2x was about 4x quicker than PCI, they also added a feature called GART so AGP cards could directly access system memory for texture information instead of having to copy it across the bus the onboard VRAM. I can see how that would benefit QE rendering performance.
 
proxyLain said:
First thing that pops up in my head when i se "B&W G3" and Leopard in the same sentence is "don't do it". But then, what runs fine is a bit different from person to person. Are there any special reasons why you need to run Leopard?
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To do it :)

I have three B&Ws I'm mostly experimenting to see if it can be done-and, as I said, just to do it.

I have Leopard on a 450mhz Sawtooth(although I use it primarily as an OS 9 machine). Leopard actually runs fairly well on it, although with 2gb of RAM and a Radeon 8500.

With the G4 upgrade installed in the B&W, it functionally shouldn't be much different from a Sawtooth aside from the graphics differences(which admittedly aren't insignificant) although the 9200 really is a better card than the 8500 in my Sawtooth. I'll also only have 1gb of RAM, although I have several computers running Leopard with that much RAM and in some cases have done it with less.
 
Nermal said:
Hah, you're starting to sound like me now (I once installed Windows 3.1 inside DOSBox inside RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi, just to see whether it would work) :)
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Intell, who is a regular poster in this section and on Macrumors, installed Leopard on a PowerMacintosh 8600.

These used a processor card not unlike Pentium IIs and early Athlons, and at one time there were G3 and even G4 upgrade cards available for these. If he sees this thread, he will probably comment, but I think he used a G4 upgrade for his 8600(Leopard won't run on a G3) and a 9200.

I figure if he can do it on an 8600, a newer B&W(which can run Tiger without any modifications at all, other than more RAM, since I think that most came with 128mb) should be a relative breeze with the right upgrades.
 
bunnspecial said:
To do it :)

I have three B&Ws I'm mostly experimenting to see if it can be done-and, as I said, just to do it.

I have Leopard on a 450mhz Sawtooth(although I use it primarily as an OS 9 machine). Leopard actually runs fairly well on it, although with 2gb of RAM and a Radeon 8500.

With the G4 upgrade installed in the B&W, it functionally shouldn't be much different from a Sawtooth aside from the graphics differences(which admittedly aren't insignificant) although the 9200 really is a better card than the 8500 in my Sawtooth. I'll also only have 1gb of RAM, although I have several computers running Leopard with that much RAM and in some cases have done it with less.
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Ahh, i missed that G4 part. I think i'm way to tiered. :rolleyes:
Its always fun to see if something can be done and how it ends up. :)
 
An interesting project. Not one that I would suggest for someone to undertake, but fully possible. I have a B&W G3 with Leopard on it, 1GB of ram, a G4 upgrade, and a PCI GeForce 5200. CoreImage works very well or as well as it can on a GeForece 5200. It benches higher than the GeForce 5200 in my 12" Powerbook, iMac G4, iMac G5, and my PowerMac G5, but still a poor performer at gaming. The B&W G3 has a rather unique video card slot. It's a 66Mhz PCI that is not shared with any other device. In effect, it's an AGP 1X slot. The hardest part is getting the older kexts to load in the correct order. Last bit of advice, do not try this on a Rev. 1 board.

My spunky Power Macintosh 8600 does indeed have Leopard on it. It runs about the same at my B&W G3, but with an ATI 9200. It has QuartzExtreme enabled by default and it runs it on the shared PCI bus along with a USB and ATA card. A pity no CoreImage card has compatibility with OldWorld ROMs or that would be one nice machine. Also, one of the beta versions of Leopard runs on G3, but it is very unstable on them.
 
Intell said:
An interesting project. Not one that I would suggest for someone to undertake, but fully possible. I have a B&W G3 with Leopard on it, 1GB of ram, a G4 upgrade, and a PCI GeForce 5200. CoreImage works very well or as well as it can on a GeForece 5200. It benches higher than the GeForce 5200 in my 12" Powerbook, iMac G4, iMac G5, and my PowerMac G5, but still a poor performer at gaming. The B&W G3 has a rather unique video card slot. It's a 66Mhz PCI that is not shared with any other device. In effect, it's an AGP 1X slot. The hardest part is getting the older kexts to load in the correct order. Last bit of advice, do not try this on a Rev. 1 board.
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Thanks for the suggestions and information.

My intended "victim" is indeed a Rev. B board, or at least I think so as it currently has two HDDs installed and working perfectly as well as a dual HDD bracket(my Rev. A B&W is too nice to mess around with this kind of stuff on).

I'll try to hunt down a PCI 5200. In the mean time, though, would it be reasonable to get it working with the 9200 since that's whats on the way?

If I find a 5200, I'll migrate the 9200 over to my one of my other G3s.

One other thing-did the PCI 5200 come in a Mac version, or will I need to flash a PC card? I'm well acquainted with the AGP 5200 that came in standard in many G5 towers, but an Ebay search didn't turn up a Mac PCI version of the card.
 
The 9200 is still a good and powerful card for use in a B&W G3. Leopard will work nicely with it. You can use nearly any PCI video card with Leopard in there, so long as it isn't an ATI Rage 128. Leopard doesn't have drivers for those and they are extremely slow. The GeForce 5200 never came in a PCI Mac version. You're going to have to locate a compatible PC PCI one and flash it. The most powerful ones go for less than $20.
 
Intell said:
The 9200 is still a good and powerful card for use in a B&W G3. Leopard will work nicely with it. You can use nearly any PCI video card with Leopard in there, so long as it isn't an ATI Rage 128. Leopard doesn't have drivers for those and they are extremely slow. The GeForce 5200 never came in a PCI Mac version. You're going to have to locate a compatible PC PCI one and flash it. The most powerful ones go for less than $20.
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Thanks-as always-Intell.

I've been looking around on Ebay a little bit, and found several inexpensive PC PCI 5200s. I found one pretty easily with 128mb of VRAM and dual VGA out. On paper it looks better than the Mac 5200, except for the VGA outs. This one will around $17 shipped.

Are there better spec cards out there, or is this about as good as they get?
 
I think the best one has 256MB of ram. They're all similarly clocked, but I think the 256MB ones have a 128 bit bus. Not sure about that though.
 
Nermal said:
Hah, you're starting to sound like me now (I once installed Windows 3.1 inside DOSBox inside RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi, just to see whether it would work) :)
Click to expand...

Any chance you can share how you did that? I've been trying to install windows 95 on dos box for a few years and can't find any tutorials out there. I gave up last year
 
comda said:
Any chance you can share how you did that? I've been trying to install windows 95 on dos box for a few years and can't find any tutorials out there. I gave up last year
Click to expand...

3.1 installed the usual way (just by running Setup) but I suspect that 95 will be trickier since it has its own version of DOS and installs its own bootloader etc. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't offer downloads for 95 anymore so I can't test it myself.
 
I have the G4 installed and working. It was relatively straight forward, although getting the 9200 working under OS 9(which was all I had on this computer at the time) was a bit fiddly. I was running 9.0, and attempted to install the 9200 drivers but was told that I needed to be running 9.2.2 for them to install. I proceeded through the upgrade sequence(the only way I know to upgrade to 9.2.2 is to go 9.0-->9.1-->9.2.1-->9.2.2). The computer ran fine with the 9200 and 9.0 and 9.1. When I upgraded to 9.2.1, it started locking up as soon as the desktop loaded. I had a similar problem a while back when installing a Radeon 9000 in a Digital Audio G4. The problem then(and this time I assumed) was the lack of the correct drivers for the Radeon card I was using. So, with that in mind, I put a Rage 128 in the G3, proceeded to upgrade to 9.2.2, and then installed the Radeon 9200 drivers. Once I did this, all was fine.

I did, however, run into issues with the Leopard install. I tried doing an install in another computer(I did take the time to install the Radeon 9200 drivers) and swapping the drives, but Leopard kernel panics on booting.

I haven't completely worked things out yet, but am currently installing Tiger so that I can run Leopardassist and then install Leopard again. Hopefully, that will work.

I'd also mixed up my computers, and my source computer was actually 400mhz and not 450mhz as I'd thought. I don't have enough of the correct sized jumpers to change the clock multiplier(they are smaller than a normal hard drive jumper), so for the time being the processor is underclocked at 400mhz. I'm going to run by Radio Shack tomorrow to pick up some jumpers.

I've photographed the process all along the way, and intend to write everything up and post it here when I've completely finished.
 
comda said:
Any chance you can share how you did that? I've been trying to install windows 95 on dos box for a few years and can't find any tutorials out there. I gave up last year
Click to expand...

Seems to be quite a few guides out there.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hvgFvAYjPG93h-Avun3sprvZX2GfkRhl4YJBT15FTx0/edit#

http://dosbox95.darktraveler.com/

http://dsync.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/a-complete-guide-to-install-windows-95.html

https://cutefloor.wordpress.com/dosbox-tutorial/windows-95-in-dosbox/
 
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