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

[Amethyst1]

6,830,080 pixels also counting the PB's screen

An update on how my beloved 15in SLSD PowerBook exercises itself on a "4K" screen. I worked out that 2656×2160 is the highest resolution which won't result in a corrupted framebuffer and it's rock-solid at 43 Hz (which requires nearly the same pixel clock as 2560×1600 at 60 Hz, so this is not surprising). I haven't tested yet how high I can go in terms of the refresh rate now the maximum resolution has been determined, but going bold and pushing 50 Hz (~311 MHz pixel clock using CVT-RB) results in dropouts.

To put things into perspective, that VNC session is 2304×1440.

 

[TheMrKocour]

PowerBook G4, 1.67 Ghz with 2 GB RAM and SSD. Running 10.5 and 10.4. When i had regular HDD i had Debian + WindowMaker

 

[weckart]

I've added a Digital Audio to my stable. This one came with a Sonnet Duet 1.6GHz upgrade cpu.



I ran Geekbench 2.1.7 (could not get 2.2.0 to run without freezing) and got what looks like a decent score. There is 512MB of PC133 RAM and an ATI Radeon 9000 inside.

 

[B S Magnet]

For now, this is what I have to offer from the G5.

Since I'm running a bunch of stuff and the mess of my desktop would be too revealing of my productivity habits, you’ll get to see this instead.

 

[reukiodo]

For now, this is what I have to offer from the G5.

Since I'm running a bunch of stuff and the mess of my desktop would be too revealing of my productivity habits, you’ll get to see this instead.

Maybe a proper screenshot will motivate you to clean up your desktop!

 

[B S Magnet]

Maybe a proper screenshot will motivate you to clean up your desktop!

That's just not how my brain works.

Whenever I see these show-offish shots of museum-pristine desks with their desktops and laptops — also barren of files and directories on the screen desktops — my brain just goes… but… how? why? But as soon as my head goes there, I'm all, Hey, you do you. If it works for them, then they should run with it.

I periodically get unsolicited flak from strangers for things like my having over 50 browser tabs open at any given time (many with Tab Suspender holding inactive tabs), and I'm all, "Hey, You're not me. Don't worry about it."

My workspaces aren't those pristine (and I'd add, arguably dull) spaces where it appears as if someone just cleaned out their desk from a firing and left the company workstations inside the cubicle all tidy for their next labour victim replacement, and they probably never will be.

 

[LightBulbFun]

its PowerPC but its not a Mac

one of the 2 Mobos @Amethyst1 kindly donated to me was this untested EFIKA 5200 PowerPC motherboard, well im pleased to report it does work iv not yet figured out if i can boot modern linux on it (while it does run OpenFirmware, YaBoot from a normal PowerPC Ubuntu installer, has a bit of a fit and cant find anything) but it can boot the latest versions of MorphOS, in terms of specs it has a 603e derived SoC PowerPC e300/MPC5200 CPU

its rare to see PowerPC PCs outside of Macs so its pretty cool to have and to play with

 

[Amethyst1]

@LightBulbFun: Awesome that you got MorphOS running on it. What's performance like?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Yeah

thats just booted from the "live installer" iv not yet installed a full version to a IDE HDD yet

but so far it seems to run pretty damn well for whats effectively a 400Mhz 603e with no L2+ cache to speak of

I imagine the acceleration provided by the Radeon 9200 im using helps with that quite a bit

its a shame they dont support MorphOS on any G3 (or older) Mac, as it would run quite well on one, going by how this performs

(it has 128MB of RAM, looks like they may have considered 256MB as theres un used spots for 2 more DDR RAM chips, shame they didn't just integrate a regular SODIMM slot so one could upgrade it)

 

[Amethyst1]

its rare to see PowerPC PCs outside of Macs so its pretty cool to have and to play with

You need to get your hands on a Pegasos

 

[LightBulbFun]

You need to get your hands on a Pegasos

Yeah iv heard and read about those, never actually went looking for one, but I agree would be pretty cool to get one

 

[TheMrKocour]

MorphOS is speedy on 603 because originally it was mainly targeted for Blizzard PPC wich is 603 accelerator for Amiga 1200(also for Amiga 4000 with CyberStorm PPC 604). Most people dont like/know MorphOS because they don't have experience with Amiga. But for us who have Amiga it is really good OS, because you can run 68k and PPC (WarpOS) Amiga Apps on fast and cheap PPC hardware.

 

[pl1984]

its PowerPC but its not a Mac

one of the 2 Mobos @Amethyst1 kindly donated to me was this untested EFIKA 5200 PowerPC motherboard, well im pleased to report it does work iv not yet figured out if i can boot modern linux on it (while it does run OpenFirmware, YaBoot from a normal PowerPC Ubuntu installer, has a bit of a fit and cant find anything) but it can boot the latest versions of MorphOS, in terms of specs it has a 603e derived SoC PowerPC e300/MPC5200 CPU

its rare to see PowerPC PCs outside of Macs so its pretty cool to have and to play with

Can you run Windows NT on it?

 

[weckart]

Can you run Windows NT on it?

NT requires PReP and the Efika follows the later CHRP standard unless I'm mistaken. It might work but PPC NT is the least useful of the NT platforms. There isn't much in the way of application software beyond what is installed with the OS.

[EDIT] Scrub that. NT PPC will pretty much only run on IBM PReP machines or a Motorola Powerstack. Even if you could hack it to install on anything else, it would probably conk out during the boot process.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041212120914/http://web.singnet.com.sg/~ludatan/facts.html

 

[pl1984]

NT requires PReP and the Efika follows the later CHRP standard unless I'm mistaken. It might work but PPC NT is the least useful of the NT platforms. There isn't much in the way of application software beyond what is installed with the OS.

[EDIT] Scrub that. NT PPC will pretty much only run on IBM PReP machines or a Motorola Powerstack. Even if you could hack it to install on anything else, it would probably conk out during the boot process.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041212120914/http://web.singnet.com.sg/~ludatan/facts.html

It was more of an interest than thinking it could be a useful set up. While Windows NT ran on multiple platforms I am unfamiliar with any non-x86 platform upon which it would run. Outside of Macintosh I have no knowledge of PPC based systems thus my question.

 

[mikiotty]

View attachment 816380

6,830,080 pixels also counting the PB's screen

An update on how my beloved 15in SLSD PowerBook exercises itself on a "4K" screen. I worked out that 2656×2160 is the highest resolution which won't result in a corrupted framebuffer and it's rock-solid at 43 Hz (which requires nearly the same pixel clock as 2560×1600 at 60 Hz, so this is not surprising). I haven't tested yet how high I can go in terms of the refresh rate now the maximum resolution has been determined, but going bold and pushing 50 Hz (~311 MHz pixel clock using CVT-RB) results in dropouts.

To put things into perspective, that VNC session is 2304×1440.

That's simply awesome. Never seen so many pixels driven from a PowerPC Mac! How's graphics card handling all that? Any glitches/hiccups?

 

[weckart]

It was more of an interest than thinking it could be a useful set up. While Windows NT ran on multiple platforms I am unfamiliar with any non-x86 platform upon which it would run. Outside of Macintosh I have no knowledge of PPC based systems thus my question.

I understood your query as such. I think it might be interesting as a proof of concept project but pretty arduous. There is a discussion on BetaArchive about getting it to run on PPC rigs and even seemingly suitable hardware fails to boot.

There is someone on this forum that owns one of the rare IBM PowerPC laptops that will run the PPC versions of WinNT and IBM OS/2 3.0. If you have a dig around, you might find the thread.

Out of the non-X86 flavours, the NT for Alpha one is the one I would go for. While you could run 16bit x86 Windows programs under emulation on non-x86 platforms, they went pretty slowly. Alpha could also run 32bit Windows programs under emulation and DEC wrote FX!32 which translated x86 Windows calls to Alpha on the fly as you ran the program and recompiled them so that you would eventually end up with a program that had an increasingly higher Alpha content and would run faster. Microsoft also ported some of MS Office to Alpha and there was some 3rd party Alpha content.

If you see an Alpha Workstation on eBay it will probably set you back well into three figures. I remember when Pentium MMX hit about 200MHz, Alphas were already clocking in at 600MHz but they cost a lot of money.

 

[Amethyst1]

It was more of an interest than thinking it could be a useful set up. While Windows NT ran on multiple platforms I am unfamiliar with any non-x86 platform upon which it would run.

It is possible to run the MIPS version of NT (3.51 and 4.0 IIRC) in QEMU 1.6.0. It's more of academic interest since software for it is very scarce and MIPS support was dropped after 4.0 SP2 but interesting nonetheless. I'll have to check if I still have that VM's image.

EDIT: Here's a tutorial: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_Windows_NT_4.0_on_Qemu(MIPS)

 

[Amethyst1]

That's simply awesome. Never seen so many pixels driven from a PowerPC Mac! How's graphics card handling all that? Any glitches/hiccups?

No glitches, but a little sluggish at times. HERE is an older screenshot of it running the monitor at full resolution (3840×2160 = 8,294,400 pixels); that is glitchy to the point of being unusable unfortunately.

 

[wicknix]

Picked up a DP 2ghz PMG5 a week or 2 ago. Got it set up to triple boot Tiger / Leopard / Lubuntu. It's much faster than my 1.6ghz PMG5!

Tiger:

Leopard:

Lubuntu:

 

[Amethyst1]

@wicknix: Can you share the wallpapers you're using on the Tiger and Leopard installations, respectively?

 

[wicknix]

@Amethyst1 : Enjoy. I added a few others as well. 4mb zip. 9 images.
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=02914132224215886471

Cheers

 

[LightBulbFun]

an OpenFirmware "about this mac" shot kind of (I took this shot on a wim, if i was to do it again id replace the device tree listing, with a property list of the CPU instead)

im happy to report that I finally got a Gazelle based Power Mac for testing 603 related stuff like my custom tiger kernel (it shares the same logic board as the Power Mac 6500 and TAM, and as such is much better supported for general shenanigans then my Power Mac 4400)

this is a Xemplar Power Macintosh ONE, a very rare Mac made for the educational market in the UK, its based off of a Power Macintosh 5500/225 (but lacks an L2 cache DIMM)

the CRT is in good health and is not normally that dim, just in OpenFirmware it is

sadly as it stands currently, it only has 32MB of RAM so will need a RAM upgrade before I can do anything meaningful with it

ideally id just buy a bunch of 128MB EDO 5V DIMMs for this and my 9600 however they have seemingly vanished off the face of the earth OWC no longer does them, 1-800-4 memory did them for a while longer but no longer do sadly

this machine has a max memory capacity of 128MB via 2 DIMM slots, it will work with 128MB DIMMs but only see them at half capacity, but fitting 128MB DIMMs is easier (well was) then trying to find the right 64MB DIMMs for it

as if you get 4K Refresh 64MB DIMMs they will only be seen as 32MB DIMMs

(this is much like the same low density RAM issue that plagues early SDRAM systems)


im currently eying up this set for the 5500 and to flesh out my 9600 some more https://www.ebay.com/itm/230649986649

however the listing does not say if there 2K or 4K refresh

 

[B S Magnet]

this is a Xemplar Power Macintosh ONE, a very rare Mac made for the educational market in the UK, its based off of a Power Macintosh 5500/225 (but lacks an L2 cache DIMM)

I have never heard of this before. This is surreal.
[doublepost=1555138941][/doublepost]OK, time to formally début the PowerBook G4 DLSD 17" I found last month, being sold locally as purportedly sick beyond hope with boot kernel panics.

As you all can see, this PowerBook has a whole mess of fast life left in it, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of its functionality whatsoever.

 

[LightBulbFun]

indeed its quite an obscure Machine, but exists for similar reasons as to why the Bell & Howell Apple II exists

that DLSD is a good find

BTW on the card bus cards, in Leopard if you click PCI cards, PCI based PC cards (aka cardbus) will also show up there, like your wifi card