Maintaining PowerPC support on ARM Macs

[Spectrum]

Have you had a look at this? Seems like somebody has had the same problem and wrote something to dupe functionality of imagegauge in an opensource and modern way. No idea if it does everything you want but might be worth a look.

Thanks! Very interesting - I had no idea about it! From a quick look I can't see a link to a compiled download to test. The functionality also looks rather limited at present, and I presume it will not be possible to load the files that we previously analysed using ImageGauge. Nonetheless, worth an email to the developer I think!

 

[superiska123]

I'm a bit late to the party, but my suggestion would be to get a 2010-2011 Intel Mac capable of running Snow Leopard natively. They are quite cheap these days and still run very reliably, and you don't need to deal with the hassle of OS emulation.

I mentioned 2010-2011 Macs in particular because they are the last Macs capable of running OS X Snow Leopard natively and because some of them have i5/i7 processors so they run the OS really fast.

In any case, good luck!

 

[Spectrum]

I'm a bit late to the party, but my suggestion would be to get a 2010-2011 Intel Mac capable of running Snow Leopard natively. They are quite cheap these days and still run very reliably, and you don't need to deal with the hassle of OS emulation.

I mentioned 2010-2011 Macs in particular because they are the last Macs capable of running OS X Snow Leopard natively and because some of them have i5/i7 processors so they run the OS really fast.

In any case, good luck!

Thanks for the tip!
Actually I have three of these (2011 Mac mini's, two quad i7s, one dual i7), and indeed stayed on 10.6.8 for a very long time (it required a special modified kext for the intel GPU extracted from the 2011 i7 MBPro). Those machines shipped with Lion, which was both terrible performance wise, and dropped Rosetta.

Eventually I was forced to upgrade these Macs to High Sierra when Dropbox ceased support for 10.6.8. It was at that point that we started using 10.6.8 in a virtual machine via VMware Fusion, which also meant we could now purchase newer hardware.

For what it is worth, 10.6.8 runs at least as fast (maybe faster) on a VM inside a 2018 i7 Mac mini host as it ever did natively on the 2011 Mac mini model. 6 cores and turbo of 4.6Ghz is More than enough to overcome the VM overhead.

 

[superiska123]

Thanks for the tip!
Actually I have three of these (2011 Mac mini's, two quad i7s, one dual i7), and indeed stayed on 10.6.8 for a very long time (it required a special modified kext for the intel GPU extracted from the 2011 i7 MBPro). Those machines shipped with Lion, which was both terrible performance wise, and dropped Rosetta.

Eventually I was forced to upgrade these Macs to High Sierra when Dropbox ceased support for 10.6.8. It was at that point that we started using 10.6.8 in a virtual machine via VMware Fusion, which also meant we could now purchase newer hardware.

For what it is worth, 10.6.8 runs at least as fast (maybe faster) on a VM inside a 2018 i7 Mac mini host as it ever did natively on the 2011 Mac mini model. 6 cores and turbo of 4.6Ghz is More than enough to overcome the VM overhead.

I had a feeling that you'd have tried my suggestion already, one way or another!
The only real issue I have with emulation is that there is no way (afaik) to enable graphics acceleration... If there was, I'd be emulating SL all day

 

[Spectrum]

I had a feeling that you'd have tried my suggestion already, one way or another!
The only real issue I have with emulation is that there is no way (afaik) to enable graphics acceleration... If there was, I'd be emulating SL all day

haha! 10.6.8 was and still is a very good OS version. I hated Lion with an absolute passion, but was pretty happy with High Sierra, and now Mojave.

Do you mean graphic acceleration for games? I installed whatever Tools VMWare provide and the GUI seems pretty good - also automatically resizes to the window. I think (need to check) that PDFs and QuickLook don't work though. Or something anyway.

 

[superiska123]

haha! 10.6.8 was and still is a very good OS version. I hated Lion with an absolute passion, but was pretty happy with High Sierra, and now Mojave.

Do you mean graphic acceleration for games? I installed whatever Tools VMWare provide and the GUI seems pretty good - also automatically resizes to the window. I think (need to check) that PDFs and QuickLook don't work though. Or something anyway.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant... Stuff like making the menu translucent and graphics intensive apps don't work well in my experience.
And agreed, Snow Leopard is still the gold standard for desktop operating systems if you ask me! Mavericks being a close second.

 

[Spectrum]

Yes, that's exactly what I meant... Stuff like making the menu translucent and graphics intensive apps don't work well in my experience.
And agreed, Snow Leopard is still the gold standard for desktop operating systems if you ask me! Mavericks being a close second.

Got you.
I skipped many of the intermediate OSs, jumping from SnowLeopard straight to El Capitan, and from there to High Sierra.
Let's see what happens with Big Sur...and ARM...

 

[Spectrum]

I just found a link to this video. It looks impressive and performance probably perfectly useable for our needs!

Watch Mac OS X Leopard running on 2020 iPad Pro

Running OS X on a tablet was a pipe dream for many Apple fans long before the iPad came out. Now that the iPad Pro has a processor that can compete with

www.cultofmac.com

 

[pgolik]

If I remember correctly, those Fuji imager files are just 16bit TIFFs, with some custom metadata in the header. You could change the extension to .tif and open them in something like Fiji (might be inverted, but that's a quick fix). This would be your best option, unless you have many ROIs and other analysis features added to your images. In such case, I'd get the cheapest Windows PC available and run the latest Windows version of MultiGauge. Also, I'm sure there will be some emulated option to run Wintel apps on ARM Macs, there is more interest in that than in emulating PPC.

 

[Spectrum]

If I remember correctly, those Fuji imager files are just 16bit TIFFs, with some custom metadata in the header. You could change the extension to .tif and open them in something like Fiji (might be inverted, but that's a quick fix). This would be your best option, unless you have many ROIs and other analysis features added to your images. In such case, I'd get the cheapest Windows PC available and run the latest Windows version of MultiGauge. Also, I'm sure there will be some emulated option to run Wintel apps on ARM Macs, there is more interest in that than in emulating PPC.

Thanks - good call! Unfortunately, TIF conversion is not quite as simple due to the data being stored in a nonlinear log10 format. This enabled the files to have greater dynamic range (>100,000:1) than was possible to store in a linear 16 bit TIF file. Using log10 also biases greater dynamic range towards the lower-end of the image intensity values - often where it is most scientifically valuable. i.e. the difference between 10 and 20 is more important to record accurately than the difference between 10,000 and 10,010.

If one does manage to get them open in something like Fiji/ImageJ, the quantification is wrong. Same is true with images created on the GE Typhoon (stored in a square-root format, and thus requires a data transformation within Fiji). Fiji/ImageJ also sucks for image analysis compared to ImageGauge! Thanks!

 

[barracuda156]

You'd be better off using a recent Mac mini that'll run 10.14, then virtualise server 10.6 on that - as it's running currently. Putting critical data on 15+ year old PPC hardware is a bad idea.

Best solution is to look at moving the data to something current and supported.

1. You can get MacMini Server 2011 or 2012 and run 10.6.8, which supports PPC apps natively.

2. Why so? I can imagine processor or video-card may fail, but nothing will happen to the data that cannot happen on any other system. Do backups if data is critical. If anything, PowerPC gonna be more secure.

 

[MagicBoy]

1. You can get MacMini Server 2011 or 2012 and run 10.6.8, which supports PPC apps natively.

2. Why so? I can imagine processor or video-card may fail, but nothing will happen to the data that cannot happen on any other system. Do backups if data is critical. If anything, PowerPC gonna be more secure.

Why are you digging up a 2 year old necrothreads?

1. That's still 9+ year old hardware now. So the same point applies.
2. Doesn't even merit an answer.

 

[Technerd108]

Since you can get a pretty powerful PPC system used for cheap I would probably just buy a couple of PPC Macs and just run them for that software only. I would not connect them to the internet unless the app requires it. Just use a USB stick to transfer files.

Power PC Mac is going to run your software the best and if you just use the one application even if you need to use the internet I would assume you would be fine.

Having a couple of power pc Macs would help redundancy if one of them fails.

 

[barracuda156]

Since you can get a pretty powerful PPC system used for cheap I would probably just buy a couple of PPC Macs and just run them for that software only.

And latest G5 are reasonably fast even by today standards. gcc10 build within 2+ hrs on my Quad. Casual usage is comfortable. Booting from SSD is fast.

 

[Adarna]

Why are you digging up a 2 year old necrothreads?

1. That's still 9+ year old hardware now. So the same point applies.
2. Doesn't even merit an answer.

In a nutshell that's what they want to do. Let em at it.

My point of view is this... if your Mac/Windows is 520 weeks or older respect yourself and replace.

Unless you're not a typical consumer.

 

[theluggage]

1. That's still 9+ year old hardware now. So the same point applies.

...and the original problem was the need to run what is now 16+ year-old software. You might get away with that on PC, but the Mac has a history of completely changing CPU or OS every decade or so. The 20:20 hindsight solution is that, if you want a maintenance-free solution for the ages, don't look to Apple. Part of what makes the Mac what it is is Apple's willingness and ability to sacrifice backwards compatibility.

The solutions boil down to either (a) find a replacement for the software (b) keep some old hardware up and running, (c) use something like QEMM/UTM or (d) print out all the results, archive them in a secure filing cabinet somewhere and move on.

None of those come without major downsides. Eventually, it comes down to whether the benefits of keeping the work alive outweigh the cost and effort.

(b) probably entails being prepared to buy several old Macs and scavenge them for parts.

I've had a shedload of work (by myself and others) rendered unusable thanks to the demise of Flash, for example. Some of it I've re-written, some of it works with an open-source replacement (ruffle) but some of it is just dead and there's no point anybody asking for it unless they can stump up a few thousand bucks for the work.

Hopefully, the original poster found a solution. It might be a non-issue, if it works under a VM an x86 Mac, since even 2 years later Apple is still selling x86 Macs, so they'll be obliged to support them for a few years to come. Longer term there's no alternative but to find a replacement for the software.

 

[Adarna]

I'd like to thank Steve Jobs for killing Flash.

Legacy tech should be sandboxed when posssible seperate from the modern parts of the OS

 

[pshufd]

I'd like to thank Steve Jobs for killing Flash.

Legacy tech should be sandboxed when posssible seperate from the modern parts of the OS

I thought it would be a pain but we're in a much better place without it.

 

[Adarna]

I thought it would be a pain but we're in a much better place without it.

The pain is from using different tech for past outcomes. Its just expensive to redo. But considering you have a decade useful life then it should be OK.

Windows would be awesome if they only kept tech from the last 120 months as an integrated part. Anything older and to the sandbox it goes.

 

[ahurst]

Yes, that's exactly what I meant... Stuff like making the menu translucent and graphics intensive apps don't work well in my experience.
And agreed, Snow Leopard is still the gold standard for desktop operating systems if you ask me! Mavericks being a close second.

I know this is an old thread, but since it’s been revived: there actually *is* a way to run a Snow Leopard VM with full graphics acceleration on modern hardware, though unfortunately not on macOS itself.

Basically, you get a desktop PC with a spare PCI-E slot, get a SL-comatible graphics card to use with it (can be a cheap GT120 or something fancier), and use KVM virtualization under Linux or VMware with ESXi passthrough on Windows to pass the GPU directly to the VM. Obviously that’s a fair bit of complication just for working QE/CI, but if you use macOS VMs a lot for any reason it might be worth looking into!

Personally, I just keep an iMac G4 around for all my PowerPC macOS needs, and an even older PowerBook for opening files with the Classic software Tiger won’t play nice with, but that’s also pricey if you aren’t in the right place at the right time while your department’s cleaning out a floor of e-waste