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Power Macintosh G3 Beige running OS X 10.5.8 Leopard

LightBulbFun

LightBulbFun

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Nov 17, 2013
2,907
3,203
London UK
well as some of you know I own a PowerMac G3 beige Desktop now as some others may also know I got leopard 10.5.4 running in QEMU witch emulates a G3 beige so I have always wanted to run Leopard on my Real G3 beige and Finely after a year of waiting I finally got a G4 ZIF a 400Mhz G4 PowerLogix chip (in a Xlr8 slocket witch was nice) so I popped it in my G3 beige got it working (Had some fun with the Dip switches on it since i could not find a manual for it online) then I imaged my 6GB 10.5.8 Disk image I made in my emulator that works on OWR macs to the first 8GB of the 10GB HDD booted into OS9 then used xpostfacto to reboot me into leopard and what did you know it worked! was so awesome seeing Leopard 10.5.8 running on a Computer from 1998 I had a Radeon 9200 GPU (going to Graphics/Displays in ASP causes a kernel panic I suspect this is due to the onboard video card since it does not KP in the emulator or @bunnspecial G3 Blue and white) it ran very slow on the G3 beige not helped by the slow 10GB HDD and Spot light indexing (I nuked spot light afterwords) well I hope this all makes sense :) its a Nice achievement for me (now its a @eyoungren approved mac since it runs Leopard :p )
 

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Mine KPs if you try to go into the Graphics section of ASP under Leopard too, as you say I think it is probably due to the onboard graphics that seems to cause a lot of problems with all versions of OS X - I used the firmware command that completely disables it as I kept getting random freezes in both Tiger and Leopard with it enabled.

I find the performance isn't too bad actually (with a 1 GHz Sonnet G4), you should definitely get as new a hard drive as you can, the stock one from the beige is pretty slow - also if your G4 upgrade has any cache-enabling drivers like the Sonnet ones do, make sure those are installed.

Is that the 10.5.5 kernel you're running? I could never get the 10.5.8 kernel to work, but I think I remember someone here saying they used a different combination of kexts and might have done.
 
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I tried to disable the onboard Rage Pro but it still showed up in PCI devices and caused the kernel panic when going to graphics and displays (I have never had an issue with it under tiger) I did have a 40GB HDD lined up for this but it died on me today the 10GB HDD is my last PATA HDD and yeah I know about the Cache enablers the CPU I dont think it has a cache enabler specify from PowerLogix but the sonnet one works fine apart from the fact it says i have 2MB of L2 even tho I think this CPU only has 1MB I just have not installed it yet ill prolly do it soonish (the OWC cache enabler xpostfactor has just caused a hard lock up in tiger so i didn't bother trying it in leo) regarding the kernel indeed I am running 10.5.5 I have not yet tried the 10.5.8 kernel yet (its not very easy for me to play with software like this since i lack quite a bit of hardware sadly) Just wondering when you used the 10.5.8 kernel where did your install hang at? if you have a panic maybe you can send a picture? btw very cool to see someone else here running Leo on a beige mac :) (also 1Ghz sonnet ZIF thats a very nice CPU id love to get one some day)
 
With the 10.5.8 kernel it got stuck when booting with the grey Apple logo and the spinning wheel - no kernel panic/error as such. There don't seem to be any issues caused by using the 10.5.5 kernel though. It still KPs on the Graphics tab of ASP even with the onboard graphics disabled in the firmware, presumably it is still seeing some part of it, bit it did stop the freezing for me.

I have the Radeon 9200 as well so I think we have pretty similar setups. You would actually get the best disk performance by using a PCI ATA card as well as a new-ish drive, but I tried one of those once and found that the hard drive gets formatted differently then (as the cards cause the drive to be seen as a SCSI drive by the Mac, even though it's not) and you can't then put them in another machine to do the Leopard install (given that you can't boot the DVD to do the install directly on the beige) as the partitions won't be recognised.
 
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if you still have the 10.5.8 kernel setup on a hard disk somewhere try booting it in verbose mode and seeing where it hangs/stops booting... (Ill see if i can play with it at some point) regarding the PATA card I do have a SATA card that is seen and bootable in the G3 beige but it tends to cause kernel panics (in tiger at least, I think it was clogging up the PCI bus) its a SATA card I flashed from a £10 cheepy (regarding your issue about the ATA drives being seen as SCSI disks while most ATA cards work like this iv never heard of your particular issue I know @bunnspecial was able to install tiger onto a ATA disk in his MDD then install my 604 kernel then move it over to a ATA card in his PowerMac 8600 and it booted up and was seen Just fine) EDIT: one last thing I have seen is in Leopard sonnets Cache kext seems to stop working I have tried it just now and no L2 shows up for me in system profiler or chud tools but in tiger it worked fine (I can see the kext being loaded early on in the boot tho)
 
Interesting, perhaps they aren't all the same then, I remember the one I tried making the disk show up as a SCSI one and then I couldn't access it in a different machine (I was actually using a PC with the disk connected to a Leopard VM - this way did work for installing to the disk that is connected to the beige's built-in ATA).

It was quite a few years ago I installed leopard now so I don't have the 10.5.8 setup any more I'm afraid - I just looked back in my notes and actually it was the grey log without the spinner where it got stuck, so I don't think it got very far - the logo with the spinner was where it got to if I used the 10.5.5 kernel but didn't replace IONDRVSupport.kext with the 10.5.5 version at the same time.
 
I'm sure I have an 80GB IDE hard drive somewhere (3.5"?) - you can either come and get it or have it for the price of postage :)

Cheers :)

Hugh
 
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@Hughmac thanks for the offer :) but sadly I dont have any way to cover postage and im in London so I cant come and collect sadly :( so I will have to sadly decline but thanks for the offer. (I dont have any source of income)

@647156 I Just got done running geek bench on the G3 beige under Leo http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/view/2577580 and surprisingly it got quite a big lead over the same G3 beige with G4 running Tiger... I wonder although no app or system util reports the L2 cache under leopard I wonder if its still being enabled and used? here is my tiger result http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2577530 (BTW what Rev G3 Beige is your one as I see your one is AAPL,PowerMac-G3 where as mine is AAPL,Gossamer)
 
Yes, mine does appear differently for some reason, I don't know if the combination of XPostFacto and other kexts can change the model identifier though, as later versions of OS X aren't supported on OldWorld hardware at all it could be that the model identifier needs to be faked to help it run - but then again I assume you're using the same combination of kexts:

ASP.jpg


It's definitely not the original revision beige, I don't think there's a way to check from OS X but I'm pretty sure it's a revision 3 as the manufacture date is late 1998.
 
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I haven't yet installed Leopard on my G4 beige, but here's a screenshot I sent Dez earlier this week. Interestingly enough, I had to install Sonnet's cache enabler to get the L2 and L3 cache to show up, although they didn't make a difference in the Geekbench score.

IMG_2062.jpg
 
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AAPL,Gossamer and AAPL,PowerMac-G3 are all Open firmware names xpostfacto does not change those during normal booting (xpostfacto does fake them when booting from a install DVD to by pass its checks) but otherwise its not changed in anyway (this AAPL,Gossamer and AAPL,PowerMac-G3 is something I have been trying to figure out... they use different NVRAM patches too and are called differently in Linux Gossamer for the Gossamer one and Silk for the PowerMac-G3 one with the id being 48 and 49 respectively) quick way to check witch rev you have is boot into OF if your OF rev is 2.4 then you have a Rev C Rage pro turbo model G3 beige (I have a Rev B Rage pro G3 beige)
 
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I remember reading that somewhere... the Rage Pro turbo had something over the normal rage pro but it did not apply to Macs so in this case they where basically identical... here we just use the graphics chip to determine which rev Beige someone has (Rage II+ is Rev A Rage Pro is Rev B and Rev C is Rage pro turbo) the rev C G3 beiges have OpenFirmware 2.4 compared to the 2.0F1 of the rev A and rev B G3 beiges, the Rev B G3 beiges have some Bugs patched in the ROM
 
ATI cheated - they put out an optimised driver that performed better in the favoured Windows benchmarks of the time. The hardware was identical, therefore gaming performance was identical outside of the benchmarks.
 
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Bingo I solved the Graphics/Display panic sort of... at frist I tried to disable the onboard rage pro while the normal way did not disable it (still showed up as a output in OS9 in xpostfacto) I was able to disable it using the 8500 way by removing it from OF completely but sadly OS X is too smart for its own good it still sees it as PCI Display (altho a lot of stuff is missing from its listing in PCI devices) so after trying a few things booting in safe mode etc I decided lets remove the Radeon 9200 and remote into the computer since i know the Rage pro has a Phantom CRT display and what do you know it worked! i was able to go to Graphics/Displays without a Panic it seems the Radeon 9200 plus the rage pro and its phantom CRT dont play nice together next ill try a Rage 128 PCI card and see if that works
Screen Shot 2015-11-15 at 15.59.12.png
 
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well I put in my Rage 128 PCI card and connected my VGA LCD screen to it and I was able to view Graphics/Displays with out any Panics... one thing thats interresting is in tiger the onboard video had no phantom display but now in Leopard it does... very interesting
rage-pro+128.png
 
I played around with disabling the onboard video on the G3 beige some more, I was able to completely nuke it off the PCI Bus (did not show up PCI Devices or Graphics and displays) but when I go to Graphics/Displays I still get a kernel panic with the Radeon 9200 (but it works fine with my Rage 128) So I think the problem here is between the G3 beige Logic board running Leopard and the Radeon 9200 I dont think the On board video has any play in this
 
Hmm, interesting :) I have the Radeon 9200 too so maybe it is an issue with this card (I do have an original Radeon Mac Edition boxed up as well which I used to use, though I can't quite remember if I used it with Leopard or not - if I did then I had the same issue). The beige G3 board/firmware certainly seems very quirky so I wouldn't be surprised if it has some kind of odd issue with these cards (though as far as I know it is fine pre-Leopard).

I disabled the built-in video this way (gets rid of the phantom display), was this what you did too?

For one boot only:

setenv pci-probe-list fffbffff


Permanently (until PRAM is reset)

nvedit [enter]
setenv pci-probe-list fffbffff [delete the "hex" text that appears before entering the command]
[enter]
[Ctrl+C]
nvstore [enter]
setenv use-nvramrc? true [enter]
reset-all [enter]
 
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if you could try your Radeon 7200(it was retroactively named 7200) in Leopard on the G3 beige and see if it panics that would be very helpful (the Rage 128 I have has no drivers under Leopard so it just acts as a basic frame buffer with NDRV support) when I was disabling the onboard video I did try the setenv pci-probe-list fffbffff but it would not affect the onboard video in any way so I brute force disabled it using " " delete-property (example: dev /pci/ATY,mach64_3DUPro [eneter] " name" delete-property [enter]. I did this for lots of properties till the GPU it self was not seen in any form in OS X) indeed the Radeon 9200 works fine in 10.2.8 and 10.4.11 for me in my G3 beige
 
NB - the YouTube video by "BeigeG3", the PDF written by 647156 and in fact all of the things he claims he worked out as 647156 on here (as I've been catching up) were originally a steal of the work and write I up did of this for the winning Mac Mod 2008 competition.

I spent a while actually helping him via email (some attached to this post) with him to get his setup working!

Whilst I'm all up for sharing ideas and progress and standing upon the shoulders of others (like Ryan Rempel and Xostfacto) informally like we all do on forums and groups he essentially took a load of hard work and without permission turned it into a guide and video which he wanted first credit for doing.

The description of the video states "For many months after the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, everyone thought that installing it on any Mac older than a G4 Sawtooth (the first AGP tower, still far below Apple's official specification of an 867 MHz G4) was impossible. But finally, it has been done, and here you can see a Beige Power Macintosh G3 booting a fresh installation of Leopard (the retail build of course) for the first time.".

Don't get me wrong I'm up for sharing and collaborating but not stealing work and claiming credit for yourself and then denying it when challenged.

I'll save you the details but essentially he banned me from his YouTube channel and said that he would remove all reference to "my input" in his PDF. As you can tell I'm still a bit sore that within a month he had taken 6 months of hard work and claimed it for himself both on various forums and by issuing a PDF guide with like for like text copied.

And unfortunately I can see that has continued in the forums. I'm sorry to raise this up again - but can't stand people claiming credit for work they have not done.

You can see how each discovery and kext and use of open firmware make sense in this write up: https://web.archive.org/web/20130924163750/http://www.mactech.com/2008/09/23/leopard-pre-agp

[MOD NOTE]
Attachment with personal information has been removed.
 
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aww shame things went like that

But awesome to see you on here!

iv been well aware of your work for many years now and it was and is a inspiration to me :)

(and indeed iv used your 2 kext packages :) )

I was aware you did the initial 10.5.0 to 10.5.4 work and I had thought the PDF guy had continued where you had left off in getting 10.5.8 booting

shame to see to the way things happened there :/
 
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jimjamyaha said:
NB - the YouTube video by "BeigeG3", the PDF written by 647156 and in fact all of the things he claims he worked out as 647156 on here (as I've been catching up) were originally a steal of the work and write I up did of this for the winning Mac Mod 2008 competition.

I spent a while actually helping him via email (some attached to this post) with him to get his setup working!

Whilst I'm all up for sharing ideas and progress and standing upon the shoulders of others (like Ryan Rempel and Xostfacto) informally like we all do on forums and groups he essentially took a load of hard work and without permission turned it into a guide and video which he wanted first credit for doing.

The description of the video states "For many months after the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, everyone thought that installing it on any Mac older than a G4 Sawtooth (the first AGP tower, still far below Apple's official specification of an 867 MHz G4) was impossible. But finally, it has been done, and here you can see a Beige Power Macintosh G3 booting a fresh installation of Leopard (the retail build of course) for the first time.".

Don't get me wrong I'm up for sharing and collaborating but not stealing work and claiming credit for yourself and then denying it when challenged.

I'll save you the details but essentially he banned me from his YouTube channel and said that he would remove all reference to "my input" in his PDF. As you can tell I'm still a bit sore that within a month he had taken 6 months of hard work and claimed it for himself both on various forums and by issuing a PDF guide with like for like text copied.

And unfortunately I can see that has continued in the forums. I'm sorry to raise this up again - but can't stand people claiming credit for work they have not done.

You can see how each discovery and kext and use of open firmware make sense in this write up: https://web.archive.org/web/20130924163750/http://www.mactech.com/2008/09/23/leopard-pre-agp
Click to expand...

Sad to hear this. I'd love to say there aren't more lifters like @647156 around, but this kind of thing has happened to other PowerPC projects, where collaborations turned into plagiarization. All for the glory of running something on, well, irrelevant hardware by now, or OS skinning. Oh well.
 
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