Post Your "About This Mac" Screenshots (PowerPC)!

So what we’re seeing here is the system bus speed difference between the TiBook and the 17” makes for near zero actual processing performance improvement.. or do you think the benchmark software’s CPU/FPU testing process is being cached on the L2 (or L3) in both cases not needing to refer back to the system bus?

I wonder what Geekbench 2 in Tiger would have to say about it.

I find my TiBook 867 runs pretty hot compared to the 15” and 17”
AlBooks. My 17” in particular (1.67Ghz SLSD), never seems to even warm up, let alone run the fans. It must have a very efficient thermal design.

 

The TiBooks are very cramped inside, which doesn't help thermal dissipation. Things improved slightly with the AluBooks but obviously the space inside the 17" models gives a bit more breathing space.

I only posted the benchmarks as a bit of interest and would not rely on them too much. MB 4.0 is somewhat outdated given its base of the 6100. MB 5.0 starts from the beige G3, so probably takes better account of improvements in caching among other things.

 

Tiger/Leopard dual boot G4mini.





This free-to-me box is certainly more responsive in tiger than leopard but leopard is endlessly more useful app-wise. Unlike my tiger disc, for the life of me I could not get my leopard disc to install (reboot-C, tried an external superdrive etc.). Anyhow, so I ended up cloning my 17" SLSD hdd to a leopard partition I made in DU while installing tiger via TDM. All this effort for a low spec g4mini hah. Truth be told it's not terrible box. I like it anyhow. I think I might split the tiger partition and try my luck at an OS9.2.2 install later on & I wanted to try garageband3 on it as well - see how well it tracks live and software instruments. Also, it was noticed that there's some weirdness with the system specs and identifier so perhaps this one was tinkered with to bump up CPU speed from 1.25 to 1.5ghz (not my doing) - something like this.



Anyhow, a fun week end distraction.

 

My new-to-me 17" iMac G4. Paid $20 for it, and it works perfectly:

--- Post Merged, Apr 8, 2018 ---

The 1.25 ghz Minis don't seem to work very well overlocked to 1.50 ghz. 1.42 ghz works quite well, though. I've done it myself and it's quite stable.

 

Here's my "free to me" G4 mini. Putting it through it's paces with Tiger, and other than heavy web browsing it handles everything else quite well. Mainly using it for audio recording / editing at the moment.

 

My 15" DLSD workhorse, with the LeopardRebirth "About This Mac" screen. Currently listening to a podcast, using GMail chat via iChat, and browsing the forum.

 

My 333mhz upgraded Bondi iMac running Tiger, with no help from XPostFacto and no OS 9 install:

 

One of my latest acquisitions: A PowerMac 9600 MP showing the About BeOS screen. You can see both processors running in the Pulse application.

 

very nice find! are you going to try getting Linux on there? I THINK linux can use both CPUs as well,

im actually quite curious as to how each CPU is setup in the OpenFirmware device tree on a 9500/9600 MP machine, if you can could you boot it into OF, and type "dev / ls" and send a picture of the output please? sadly OS X does not see the second CPU on 9500/9600MP machines, But I wonder if its possible to get it to use both CPUs...

BTW did you get this 9600 from the ebay seller "dogdog_ham" ? I spotted him selling a 9600/200MP that was collection only and I dropped him a message asking if he was willing to ship the Mac, which he sadly said he could not, only for him to later list a 2 Mac tower Bundle (8500 and 8100 IIRC) with shipping! that annoyed me a little... but I did notice the 9600/200MP did get a couple bids still so im wondering if you managed to grab it (I sadly have no mode of transportation so I cant collect things from ebay... my search for a 6500/9600 is still on going.)

 

How well does BeOS balance the load / SMP?

I'd love to get my hands on another 604 one day. I always liked the form factor of the 8600/9600. The closest I ever got was the top-of-the-line 8500/180 AV. (Seen in the lower right corner in my workstation shot from 2002 on this post).

Beige Power Macs rarely make an appearance around here.

 

I did. When I turned up he had three other towers next to mine and asked me if I was interested in any of them. I took the 6400. Did I tell you he had a 6400 for sale? I didn't know either. I think the 8500 might have been a 9500 but not 100% sure. I just didn't have room for them at home and not that much in my car, either. To be fair to the seller, he clearly wasn't into shipping any of these but the fact that I was the only bidder on the 9600 and he presumably had not had any interest in the others spurred him into bothering to ship. He is also not a Mac person and got these with a joblot but is much more into consoles so you could negotiate on the other towers if they haven't gone already.

The condition of both wasn't wonderful, very yellowed and filthy with some water ingress/corrosion in the 9600 on the floor but luckily in perfect working condition. The 6400 also boots but for some reason the ATA bus doesn't show so cannot use it as is. I might butcher it and use the PSU for one of my dead 6500s.

That's some bad news on OSX, since after several attempts, I just managed to successfully solder EEPROMs onto two generic SATA cards and flash them with the Firmtek/SeriTek firmware. I might try one of the OSX previews and see how that goes with the processors. Mac OS 8.5.1 sees both processors in SysProf but I understand only certain applications like Photoshop can make use of both.

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You live in a hot country (at least in most parts), so I wonder how many old computers die of heat exhaustion compared with our Arctic climate. Apple PSUs seem to be a bit delicate in my experience. Having said that, the 9600 has a substantial PSU so might be one of the more robust ones.

I haven't tested anything in anger yet. Still seeing if I can get a SATA drive in there since BeOS only recognises the internal slow SCSI bus. Intel BeOS supports an AHA-2940 card but PPC BeOS turns its nose up at the PowerDomain equivalent I have slotted in. I might downgrade to BeOS 4 or 4.5. I have read that BeOS 5 was optimised for Intel and buggy in some ways on PPC.

 

well im glad you managed to save it at least and give it a good home

Nice work on the SATA cards, the SeriTek firmware works all the way back to System 7.5 which can be quite fun (System 7.5.3 on an SSD with a Radeon 7000 driving a 23 inch cinema display anyone?) I will say for whatever reason 10.2.x always leads to a Kernel panic with the SeriTek firmware cards I have only been able to get Classic Mac OS and 10.3+ working with them. while their firmware (aka OptionROM) is much better the other SATA card firmware people flash here, i have noticed the OptionROM (and its embedded OS X driver) can still be a bit pokey at times. (for example the SeriTek firmware will not work Boot an OS from OpenFirmware on my 4400, and theres the aforementioned 10.2.x bug)

I do have an ACARD AEC-6280M which is a Dual channel ATA133 card that apple them selfs includes drivers for in OS X (rather then the card having a kext in the OptionROM) and also works in System 7-9.2.2, it has a Really robust OptionROM thats handled even the weirdest crap I have thrown at it (hanging CF Cards with OS X 10.2.8, off it in 4400s example ) I would highly recommend picking a 6280M up if you can

as for OS X, i dont think any version (even Rhapsody/OS X Server 1.x) ever supported the Second CPU sadly, since from what I read its not actually an SMP setup. (hence why im really curious as to how its setup in OpenFirmware)

and as for the PSUs yeah the 9600 has a pretty robust PSU I have not heard of many reports of them dying luckily BTW out of curiosity does your 9650 WGS have a 390W PSU or the mythical 560W PSU?

 

Just trying to initialise a small 16GB SSD and it is hanging OS 8.5.1. Hmm. Pleased to hear that all the way back to Sys 7.5 is supported as I thought it was just OS 9.x. I missed out on a rare 6280M recently. Should have bid more. I actually had a Sonnet Tempo HD recently but had to send it back as someone had somehow overwritten the Mac firmware with the Windows firmware. Sonnet would not help me restore it. That card supported 4400s and up.

Will dig out the 9650 and look.

[edit] BeOS doesn't recognise the SeriTek card and the PSU in the 9650 is the bog standard 390W. Bah!

 

OK, now I have my first bug with this box. I just cannot get it to boot into OF. I have swapped keyboards, graphic cards and video cables but holding Cmd+Opt+O+F just results in a black screen and the monitor going to sleep until I give up, lift my fingers from the keyboard after which it starts to boot again. Have zapped the PRAM, reset CUDA etc. Anything else I can try?

 

im not surprised you got a blank screen since you dont have a serial terminal hooked up on most OWR macs they default to outputting/inputting via Serial, you can open Xpostfacto and change the input to "keyboard" and the output to whatever video card your using, then you should be able to boot into OF via typical means (or while your in xpostfacto turn auto-boot to false, that will cause the machine to automatic drop into an OF prompt on subsequent boots)

starting with the PowerBook 3400c apple set the keyboard as the default input and the video card/display as the default output making getting into OF a little easier

Just more OWR Mac quirks you have to battle with when messing with these machines

 

Thanks. Echoes of Sun hardware, which does the same if your TOD (aka PRAM) battery dies. I would try the serial route to capture the output via a Windows terminal emulator but I don't have the right cables. How best to capture the output via display. I suppose a photo?

 

at least on a PowerMac if the PRAM battery goes bad you dont have to do open heart surgery on the RTC chip

Yeah a simple picture of the screen is perfectly fine, if you want it to be super clear you could hook the 9600/200MP up to a high Rez LCD screen via DVI on your Radeon 7000/9200 or use a capture card... (I Have done that with my 4400 and a Radeon 9200, Mac OS 7.6 at 2048x1152 is fun since you do have a Radeon 7000 you should be able to do that, and have full driver support too, the 9200 works in 7.6 but theres no drivers for it, the 7000 has drivers for 7.6 if not even 7.5.5 )

 

I actually have a Mac Radeon (original) in this one (a 7200, I think) but it is only outputting to 1280x1024 even with drivers at the moment although 1920x1080 shows up as a recommended resolution. I have that to sort out first. Will get something to you on Sunday though as am away at the moment.

 

Took a while. It seems OF will not display via DVI on this setup. Not sure how informative this output is. I had to capture this via slow-mo as this scrolled over the screen. Apologies therefore for the poor quality.

 

Well... I couldn't handle Tiger any more on the mac mini g4. Ahh, back to Leopard. Much better.
Installed the sierra theme, then i installed parts of mountain leopard theme over that to get rid of the flat look and get my aqua scroll bars back.
Also changed a few app icons to look more up-to-date, and changed about this mac a smidge.



Cheers

 

very interesting, this is the 9600/200MP right?

the second CPU is nowhere to be found in the OpenFirmware device tree, it explains why OS X can only use one CPU. also furthers the thing where I read that the 9500/9600MP does not actually run in true SMP. (in that 1 CPU is master and the second one is slave)

also interestingly it says PowerPC,604 rather then PowerPC,604e im curious if its just the 9600s OF calls 604e CPUs 604 or if you actually have 604 rather then 604e CPUs? (I would expect the 200MP to be 604e based) if you can punch this into OF: dev /PowerPC,604@0 then .properties and post the output here? ill be able to see what the CPUs PVR is and check exactly what CPU you have

 

No need for that. The About BeOS screenshot above shows 2x604e as does About Mac, which I haven't uploaded. I was a bit surprised to only see one entry in OF for the processor, which makes me wonder whether it takes an OS to switch the other CPU on.

 

GREAT Job!!!

 

I got OS X Server 1.2v3 booting on my Pismo, complete with millions of colours take that Lombard! (edit: for those who dont know OS X Server 1.2v3 normally only runs on a very small selection of hardware which does not include the Pismo normally )

 

Simple hack?