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Oh performance is terrible lmao. QEMU is worse than VPC7, so if you're looking at doing this go with virtual PC 7

If you are going down that route, VPC5 is better than VPC6, which is better than VPC7.

Once Microsoft got its hands on it, the code bloat and lag followed. If you got Microsoft Office X Pro. or 2004 Pro, you got a bundled VPC6 or VPC7 resp. with a licensed copy of XP. Even on a dual-core G5, VPC7 with XP is virtually (ha!) unusable.
 
If you are going down that route, VPC5 is better than VPC6, which is better than VPC7.

Once Microsoft got its hands on it, the code bloat and lag followed. If you got Microsoft Office X Pro. or 2004 Pro, you got a bundled VPC6 or VPC7 resp. with a licensed copy of XP. Even on a dual-core G5, VPC7 with XP is virtually (ha!) unusable.

I wonder if the speed boost of VPC5 + the light weight of 95/98, + 1.gb of ram and SSD and if possible a slight overclock (i DO understand know what i'm doing if i do). would make some apps or low-end games doable.

Don't know that would be nessary with there bieng a PPC port of dosbox.
 
I wonder if the speed boost of VPC5 + the light weight of 95/98, + 1.gb of ram and SSD and if possible a slight overclock (i DO understand know what i'm doing if i do). would make some apps or low-end games doable.

Don't know that would be nessary with there bieng a PPC port of dosbox.

You would be better off with DOSBox or Boxer rather than going through that effort. I recommend against attempting to overclock any PowerPC portable if that is even possible.
 
You would be better off with DOSBox or Boxer rather than going through that effort. I recommend against attempting to overclock any PowerPC portable if that is even possible.


Yeah you keep saying that unless they had some yield/binning issues in regards degradation, with experience under my belt i can't see why not as long as heat and environmental fluctuations, and BGA integrity are kept in mind. :p

Can os 9 not be hacked to run on iBook G4s later than 800mhz? for games of 95/98 era obviously mac os ports would be the better if they existed.
 
Yeah you keep saying that unless they had some yield/binning issues in regards degradation, with experience under my belt i can't see why not as long as heat and environmental fluctuations, and BGA integrity are kept in mind. :p

Can os 9 not be hacked to run on iBook G4s later than 800mhz? for games of 95/98 era obviously mac os ports would be the better if they existed.

I am saying that for two primary reasons. iBooks and PowerBooks get hot enough in stock configurations and these machines had issues with solder joints cracking on the video card. If you want to try it then more power to you. I personally find it to be an interesting project you are wanting to undertake, but it isn't something I would try.

No iBook G4 can boot natively into OS 9. The final iBooks that could boot into OS 9 natively were 800/900 MHz 32 MB VRAM G3 models. The iBook G4 can however use Classic mode under OS X 10.3 or 10.4 without issue, but many state that the performance is lacking if used for games. I do not play any games in OS 9 running under Classic, so I am not quite sure. If you want the best portable Mac that will natively run OS 9 then you want to get a PowerBook G4 Titanium 1 GHz/867 MHz.
 
I am saying that for two primary reasons. iBooks and PowerBooks get hot enough in stock configurations and these machines had issues with solder joints cracking on the video card. If you want to try it then more power to you. I personally find it to be an interesting project you are wanting to undertake, but it isn't something I would try.

No iBook G4 can boot natively into OS 9. The final iBooks that could boot into OS 9 natively were 800/900 MHz 32 MB VRAM G3 models. The iBook G4 can however use Classic mode under OS X 10.3 or 10.4 without issue, but many state that the performance is lacking if used for games. I do not play any games in OS 9 running under Classic, so I am not quite sure. If you want the best portable Mac that will natively run OS 9 then you want to get a PowerBook G4 Titanium 1 GHz/867 MHz.

ultimately SL had rosetta, x86 of course. If rosseta could run starcraft and fallout 1 and 2 i don't see why leopard/tiger can't. That is not a very good gauge/base of judgment though.

This would utimley be for fun/project also something that be used to surf the inet on the couch and check email with and maybe run minecraft. Minecraft might be a stretch though.

As for heat, cooling modification can usually be made to some degree. Every notebook design is different' so it can't be guaranteed. The bag grid array aka the solder balls can be re-balled with higher grade solder, shouldn't be too pricey these days when most places can buy fully automated machines form china.

the BGA is gonna be the biggest factor here, the BGA's or solder balls fail from expansion and contraction back in my re flow days a few years ago, the best modification was copper shim to replace the thermal pad, not much good if the notebook has no thermal pads to replace but, work noting is the shims never educed idle temps much just the load temps. This effective reduced the Delta or rather the temperature fluctuation reducing stress the solder. which may or may not be relevant if you get it reballed with high quality silver solder.

then you come back to second biggest issue, the heat, the puppies look compact, probably part of the reason they over heat. There very may be little to no room for cooling system modifications. Never mind the fact you want OC you to handle above normal ambient temps, especially if you want to be able to take it places and or travel but, most notable for a truly stable OC. You can overvolt if the someone with the proper know how and the required spec sheets can be found for the voltage controllers. Over volting can help over come heat and increase stability, IF chip will allow it, ULTIMATELY there very may be no getting around the temperature problems.

I just noted there was guide for the 800mhz to 1ghz which may not have ran as hot as the 1.33ghz and 1.4ghz units, also the 1.33ghz and 1.42ghz units likely have different PLL chips which may or may not have spec sheets available.

It would certainly be fun project but, as you stated the odds are stacked against overclocking, then again with notebooks the odds are always stacked against you but, is possible in some cases.

If it is possible and yield of 200 mhz or better can be had with 1.5gb ram upgrade and an SSD could make notable performance upgrade but, not nessrarily worth while. The SSD would help load times and battery drain but, OC would possibly or likely help suck down the power, especially if over volted. Basically it comes down, heat and reliability then temps and stability.

Now i'm probably coming off as wanna be know it all or jerk or so i'll stop now.
 
If you get an ibook/powerbook test if sleep status works, after you get it. This is one thing I noticed to late, when I bought one of my ibooks. The DC-jack has a defect, the battery will load and the ibook can be used as usual, but you can't put it to sleep or wake it.
It completely does a hard shut down (losing data, if you are working on something, while it went to sleep), onyl way to get it back is, take out battery unpluck DC, wait 10sec, replug everything.
 
I think it depends on the machines. Higher speed G4s and G5s...Leopard all the way

Fore sure, Leopard opens up more possibilities. It is also a really nice looking OS even today. The PowerBook I'm posting this with is running Leopard.

However, I certainly wouldn't put Leopard on something like a 700 MHz eMac. Tiger runs great on machines like that.
 
Yeah you keep saying that unless they had some yield/binning issues in regards degradation, with experience under my belt i can't see why not as long as heat and environmental fluctuations, and BGA integrity are kept in mind. :p

Can os 9 not be hacked to run on iBook G4s later than 800mhz? for games of 95/98 era obviously mac os ports would be the better if they existed.


As it currently stands, with a hacked install it can boot but colours are limited to 256 so not much use for any but the most basic of games. You might be better off using Classic on a beefier Powerbook.

ultimately SL had rosetta, x86 of course. If rosseta could run starcraft and fallout 1 and 2 i don't see why leopard/tiger can't. That is not a very good gauge/base of judgment though....

As for heat, cooling modification can usually be made to some degree. Every notebook design is different' so it can't be guaranteed. The bag grid array aka the solder balls can be re-balled with higher grade solder, shouldn't be too pricey these days when most places can buy fully automated machines form china.

You can overvolt if the someone with the proper know how and the required spec sheets can be found for the voltage controllers. Over volting can help over come heat and increase stability, IF chip will allow it, ULTIMATELY there very may be no getting around the temperature problems.

Rosetta had a much beefier processor to play with. G4s were marginal even running stock OS. Not much room to suck up additional overheads. No real comparison, sadly.

As for reballing, I looked at the cost of resurrecting some of the nVidia Macbook Pro problem children. The typical cost is some £99 plus taxes and shipping for basic reballing with leaded solder rising to £159+ if you also want to replace the faulty gpu with an improved revision of the same gpu less prone to heat issues. Cost-wise, it is simply uneconomical unless there is some sentimental attachment to that particular notebook.

As for overcoming heat issues by playing with voltages, surely you mean undervolting? There was an app (Coolbook) to do just that for Macbooks but nothing equivalent for PPC. The nearest was a fan app (G4FanControl), which ramped up the fans earlier than Apple's conservative firmware would do. Might help if you can live with the noise.
 
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As it currently stands, with a hacked install it can boot but colours are limited to 256 so not much use for any but the most basic of games. You might be better off using Classic on a beefier Powerbook.


Rosetta had a much beefier processor to play with. G4s were marginal even running stock OS. Not much room to suck up additional overheads. No real comparison, sadly.

As for reballing, I looked at the cost of resurrecting some of the nVidia Macbook Pro problem children. The typical cost is some £99 plus taxes and shipping for basic reballing with leaded solder rising to £159+ if you also want to replace the faulty gpu with an improved revision of the same gpu less prone to heat issues. Cost-wise, it is simply uneconomical unless there is some sentimental attachment to that particular notebook.

As for overcoming heat issues by playing with voltages, surely you mean undervolting? There was an app (Coolbook) to do just that for Macbooks but nothing equivalent for PPC. The nearest was a fan app (G4FanControl), which ramped up the fans earlier than Apple's conservative firmware would do. Might help if you can live with the noise.

When asking the CPU for MORE speed you want more voltage because as heat goes so does resistance.

Also my goodness!!! We have a guy some where in my area who did a re-ball including tear down for $50 USD, that was maybe a year or 2 ago. Are shop chose not re flow and out source the job since it was so cheap. no guarantee such a deal can be had again but, i'm seeing some on flea bay for around $60.

Yeah noise might not be too bad of sacrifice. Might also affect battery life but, again thats gonna be sacrificed for performance almost always.

Assume a hack version can only boot 256 colors because of no video card drivers for the 9550 for os9?
 
ultimately SL had rosetta, x86 of course. If rosseta could run starcraft and fallout 1 and 2 i don't see why leopard/tiger can't. That is not a very good gauge/base of judgment though.

Rosetta was simply emulating the PPC code over to Intel. Classic is actually running the OS 9 system in the background.
 
OS X Tiger running in VMWare Fusion 2 on a Mac running Snow Leopard:

[click on image to enlarge]
 

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PPC Tiger could run the Classic Environment and of course did not need Rosetta.

The Intel version of Tiger came with Rosetta.
 
I stopped by yesterday to see one of my favorite professors in the department who has been out of the country(in her home country of Argentina) since November and had a nice chat.

This particular professor and her husband(retired from the department) are both Mac people from way back and have given me a lot of computers, including an 8500, a beautiful B&W, and a whole bunch of Mac peripherals(including a box of telephone plug keyboards).

In any case, while I was talking to her, she turned around and turned on the polycarbonate Intel iMac that sits on her desk. She doesn't use it much(she has a unibody 17" MBP that she uses primarily) but does use the office computer some. I was quite surprised to see it boot into Tiger. At some point, I'm going to subtly encourage her to upgrade the OS on this computer(without knowing the exact model it should at least run Snow Leopard if not Lion) since she complains-not infrequently-that her office computer can't do anything well on the internet.

At least PPC Tiger is reasonably well supported by the third party community with things like Tenfourfox, while there's virtually no third part support for the Tiger version of Intel. I don't think that there's any Intel Mac which can not run Snow Leopard, and as far as I know current versions of Firefox(and a whole bunch of other programs) are available for it. It's the minimum I'd consider running on an Intel Mac, much as Tiger is the minimum I consider viable for an internet-connected PPC Mac.
 
I stopped by yesterday to see one of my favorite professors in the department who has been out of the country(in her home country of Argentina) since November and had a nice chat.

This particular professor and her husband(retired from the department) are both Mac people from way back and have given me a lot of computers, including an 8500, a beautiful B&W, and a whole bunch of Mac peripherals(including a box of telephone plug keyboards).

In any case, while I was talking to her, she turned around and turned on the polycarbonate Intel iMac that sits on her desk. She doesn't use it much(she has a unibody 17" MBP that she uses primarily) but does use the office computer some. I was quite surprised to see it boot into Tiger. At some point, I'm going to subtly encourage her to upgrade the OS on this computer(without knowing the exact model it should at least run Snow Leopard if not Lion) since she complains-not infrequently-that her office computer can't do anything well on the internet.

At least PPC Tiger is reasonably well supported by the third party community with things like Tenfourfox, while there's virtually no third part support for the Tiger version of Intel. I don't think that there's any Intel Mac which can not run Snow Leopard, and as far as I know current versions of Firefox(and a whole bunch of other programs) are available for it. It's the minimum I'd consider running on an Intel Mac, much as Tiger is the minimum I consider viable for an internet-connected PPC Mac.

bump it's ram up when you upgrade that's probably half the problem if it's still running tiger. older ram is cheap. ESPECIALLY if it's ECC. at least ddr1 that is.

Yeah i'm kind of iching to try TenFourFox on a PPC.
 
bump it's ram up when you upgrade that's probably half the problem if it's still running tiger. older ram is cheap. ESPECIALLY if it's ECC. at least ddr1 that is.

Yeah i'm kind of iching to try TenFourFox on a PPC.

It's not my computer, so I really have no control over it.

I do know that she tends to listen to what I say about computers, so I can probably convince her to upgrade it as long as it won't "break" anything. It does concern me that she's using an OS that-to me at least-is very insecure in its current configuration. Snow Leopard is not currently being updated, but at least there are modern, supported browsers for it.

The polycarbonate iMacs uses DDR2 SO-DIMMs...a friend recently gave me some 2gb chips that I used to upgrade my black Macbook from 2gb to 4gb. I could easily up her iMac to 2gb with RAM that I have on hand, and I think 2gb DDR2 SO-DIMMs are running around $15-20 each if she wanted to go further. My past experience with Snow Leopard is that it should be fine with 2gb, though.
 
Even on a dual-core G5, VPC7 with XP is virtually (ha!) unusable.

I agree with this. I have VPC7 w/XP on my work G5, a 2.0 dual core.

There really is no task it struggles with and is one 100%(and fast) for everything I ask of it, but VPC7 is a real pig. I only keep it on there so that I can run Originplot, which never had an OS X version. It's enough of a pain that most of the time I end up using one of the Wintel boxes in the lab-even the old ones are faster at this than Originplot in VPC.
 
I agree with this. I have VPC7 w/XP on my work G5, a 2.0 dual core.

There really is no task it struggles with and is one 100%(and fast) for everything I ask of it, but VPC7 is a real pig. I only keep it on there so that I can run Originplot, which never had an OS X version. It's enough of a pain that most of the time I end up using one of the Wintel boxes in the lab-even the old ones are faster at this than Originplot in VPC.

Windows 2000 is the optimal OS for VPC - it's worth trying if Originplot runs on it. Windows 95 is even faster but you are good for only really vintage software. From what I've read, VPC was at it's most efficient in it's OS9 version (4 or 5) - however, even with the fastest OS9 Mac, I'm pretty sure it couldn't beat a top end G5 on OSX.
The one essential app I use VPC for is a utility to convert proprietary format images from an old Kodak camera into .jpgs and .tiffs so I've never had any speed issues.
 
From what I've read, VPC was at it's most efficient in it's OS9 version (4 or 5) - however, even with the fastest OS9 Mac, I'm pretty sure it couldn't beat a top end G5 on OSX.

VPC5 is UB so is probably the best to run on either given the comments of users. Having said that, after Microsoft took Connectix over it had access to VPC's source code and so could optimise the Additions for Windows clients.
 
VPC5 is UB so is probably the best to run on either given the comments of users. Having said that, after Microsoft took Connectix over it had access to VPC's source code and so could optimise the Additions for Windows clients.

I remember reading that Connectix said the multitasking and processor allocation under OSX made it hard for VPC to behave as efficiently as version under OS9. I can say that I have VPC4 under OS9 and VPC5 (OSX) both installed on a 500Mhz G3 iMac and VPC4 is significantly faster.
 
im looking for a ppc sega genesis emulator. also whats the fastest ppc mac mini or laptop ever made? i have tiger on my mini g4.
 
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