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Looking to buy a Mac Mini G4 - What to look for?

DearthnVader said:
So if we can confirm this, then we maybe able to use the external TMDS to drive non-coherent displays beyond the pixel clock limits of the R9200.
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What's the proper way to confirm it? I own both kinds of Minis..
 
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ojfd said:
What's the proper way to confirm it? I have both kinds of Minis..
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You'll have to pull them apart and look for a TMDS.

If you ever want to do that, snap so high res photos of both sides of both logic boards and we will help you.

Or you could try and run a higher screen res on your silent upgrade and see if you can exceed the pixel clock limit.

I have a hard time believing that Apple would upgrade the VRAM to 64MB and not add this external TMDS if it does in fact exist.

I'll upload some photos of my R9600 Mac/PC Edition 3 TMDS's if they are not covered by the heatsink.........
 
Prepare yourselves folks, these are raw naked images of TMDS's and parents may want to guard their children.
 

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DearthnVader said:
Well, I mean Qemu-ppc can do PCI passthrough in a Linux host. I've fired up and run Quake3 and JK2 just fine in Mac OS X Tiger on a PCI Rage128 16MB.

It wasn't the fastest thing in the world, but it was playable. The host was a 3.75Ghz AMD Ryzen 7 1700. Qemu's integer performance was about on par with a 1.25Ghz G4 but FPU and AltiVec suffer greatly.

A Radeon 9200 PCI, or even a PCI-E graphics cards should be doable. I did pass a GeForce 6600 PCI-E to it, but we need to do some work with OpenBios to get those cards working. With SLOF I was able to boot PPCLE linux in Qemu-PPC and I did get display form the GF6600 in text console it worked perfect, but got all garbled when I tried to run X. I think I just had an improperly configured X.

Anyway, nobody other than me has ever run OpenGL games in Qemu-PPC on the Mac OS, so I just didn't continue with the work of updating OpenBios to load FCODE ROMs for later cards than the Rage128.

You can run PCI Passthough on any Mac Tower from the MacPro 3,1 to I assume the 7,1 if you are running Linux as the host OS. You can ran as many GFX or other PCI devices as you have slots for.

I also ran a PCI FireWire card and passed it to OS 9 and Tiger. Tested my FW iSight in Tiger and a FW HD in OS 9. They worked just fine.
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I'm not knocking its passthrough abilities, they're actually really impressive. But when I want to run Windows XP on a new system, I run VMWare because it will emulate a graphics card, and use the one I already have in any system I'm running to do so. Until QEMU can do the same, I wouldn't really count on it.

Besides, the question was in reference to if you could do it on a modern Mac, unless you have a current Mac Pro, you wouldn't even have PCIE slots to do passthrough. It's honestly amazing what you can do with QEMU, but modern Macs are mostly not built for that.
 
repairedCheese said:
Besides, the question was in reference to if you could do it on a modern Mac, unless you have a current Mac Pro, you wouldn't even have PCIE slots to do passthrough. It's honestly amazing what you can do with QEMU, but modern Macs are mostly not built for that.
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You can't do PCIe pass thru with a PCIe slot connected to Thunderbolt?
 
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joevt said:
You can't do pass PCIe pass thru with a PCIe slot connected to Thunderbolt?
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You know what? That probably would work. It still fails the clunkiness test for me, but can you tell I haven't really worked with Thunderbolt? I never even really considered it. Good Thunderbolt enclosures were pricy the last time I checked, but maybe that changed. It would be nice if that was the case.
 
DearthnVader said:
You'll have to pull them apart and look for a TMDS.

If you ever want to do that, snap so high res photos of both sides of both logic boards and we will help you.
Click to expand...

OK, this is Mac Mini G4 1.42 GHz, bottom side.
 

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DearthnVader said:
I don't see a TMDS, other side please.
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There's nothing of that kind on top side of either original or silent upgrade Mini boards. My silent upgrade Mini is busy at the moment, so, I'll pull it apart a bit later, but, for the time being, there's a more or less hi-rez pic that I've pulled from the web. I see a Silicon Image chip there that isn't present on 1.42 GHz board
 

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ojfd said:
1600 x 1200? That's strange.
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Nevermind that. The important bit is that it does 165 MHz pixel clock — enough for 1600×1200 using non-reduced blanking (e.g. CVT or GTF) and 1920×1200 using reduced blanking (e.g. CVT-RB or CVT-RBv2) assuming a 60 Hz refresh rate.
 
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ojfd said:
So, what about "Mac Mini has a 135 MHz pixel clock limit" then. Still applies 😉
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That does not apply to the Silent Upgrade.

165Mhz TMDS means 165MHz.

Thanks for taking the time to figure this out.

Apple fixed the issue and just never updated the documentation.
 
In Linux I think you can choose the internal or external TMDS, but I wonder if they can be paired?

What's to full bandwidth of Dual Link DVI on the 30" Apple display?

I can't seem to find that Linux documentation anymore, but maybe they were talking about selecting the internal TMDS for the models that don't have the external, but that really doesn't make sense as the one with the external should be transparent.

So I think they were talking about the silent upgrade being able to select between the two, but it did not say anything about pairing them for Dual Link as I would have remembered that.

Sadly I don't see anywhere to add a TMDS to the Old G4 Mini's logicboard. Look's like a completely different PCB.
 
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ojfd said:
@DearthnVader , do you mind revisiting OS9 ATI drivers for Mac Mini G4 issue? 😉
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I'm not sure what I can do, we can try some of the later 'NDRV's for the Silent Upgrade and see if they don't have the issue I ran into that forced me to use the one from 10.3.7?( I think ).

I don't remember what the issue was anymore, but it was something.....

Check the Compatible property for the Silent Upgrade and see if they changed it. I don't remember what the Old Mini's property was?

If they changed it there will be a New 'NDRV' we've never tried before.
 
Anyway, I'm pretty sure the Old Mini could drive this:

Apple Cinema Display 23-Inch (Aluminum) Specs (Aluminum, M9178LL/A, A1082): EveryMac.com

Technical specifications for the Cinema Display 23-Inch (Aluminum). Dates sold, display type, resolution, viewing angle, brightness, price and more.
everymac.com everymac.com

Which would mean it was a coherent display and not effected by the Pixel Clock Limit for Non-coherent displays.

My old Vizio 50" I had when I was doing this work on the Old Mini was a non-coherent display. The Mini could drive it at 720p but not 1080p.

So maybe most of the later TV's are non-coherent and that would be a good way to confirm the external TMDS is active on the SU.

See if the old Mini can drive your TV at 1080p and if it can't your TV is non-coherent and the SU should be able to drive it at 1080p.
 
DearthnVader said:
What's to full bandwidth of Dual Link DVI on the 30" Apple display?
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For each dual-link DVI output: Two TMDS transmitters (or one internal and one external one I guess, given the GeForce 6800 GT DDL seems to have two external ones but two dual-link DVIs) but crucially, a fully wired up DVI output (pins 4, 5, 12, 13, 20, 21 in the picture below enable dual-link). Does the Mac mini G4 have that? If both transmitters can be combined to exceed 165 MHz via single-link DVI, higher-res displays with a HDMI input should™ work.

DVI_pinout_no_info.png
 
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Amethyst1 said:
For each dual-link DVI output: Two TMDS transmitters (or one internal and one external one I guess, given the GeForce 6800 GT DDL seems to have two external ones but two dual-link DVIs) but crucially, a fully wired up DVI output (pins 4, 5, 12, 13, 20, 21 in the picture below enable dual-link). Does the Mac mini G4 have that? If both transmitters can be combined to exceed 165 MHz via single-link DVI, higher-res displays with a HDMI input should™ work.

DVI_pinout_no_info.png
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We need some high res shots of both Mini's DVI connections on the logic board.....

Interestingly the OM( Old Mini ) has this nice circuit pad for something, but not a TMDS as it's only 8 pins and that is not enough for any TMDS I know of.

I'm thinking it maybe for an LVDS?


8 pin pad old mini g4.jpg
 
DearthnVader said:
We need some high res shots of both Mini's DVI connections on the logic board.....
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From what I can see all the parts around DVI connector are identical. Part location and numbering are also identical. Aside from bunch of resistors and ferrite beads/filters, there are only two ICs (U10;U11) and two transistors (Q13;Q14). If you want me to get the part codes of those, let me know.

Interestingly the OM( Old Mini ) has this nice circuit pad for something, but not a TMDS as it's only 8 pins and that is not enough for any TMDS I know of.

I'm thinking it maybe for an LVDS?
Click to expand...

It has 10 pads, not 8 and it is for some sort of connector. See the marking J16. Another unpopulated place for connector is to the left of it at the edge of the board and is marked J14. ICs are marked Uxx.
 
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