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PowerPC Pet Peeves

lepidotós

lepidotós

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 29, 2021
677
751
Marinette, Arizona
Is there something your Mac is doing that's just getting your goat? Soft, hard, or firmware, all pocket-sized problems and atomic annoyances with our marveous, mature, maybe mini Mac machines are welcome to be aired, and hopefully someone will come along and suggest some sort of salve.
Personally, I hate in Mac OS X how, when the Dock is hidden, maximizing a program still leaves a buffer between the side of the progam and the side of the screen, meaning in the best case scenario you have to move your window to the side and manually resize it. I would like to have all of the promised screen real estate, if possible.​
 
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lepidotós said:
Is there something your Mac is doing that's just getting your goat? Soft, hard, or firmware, all pocket-sized problems and atomic annoyances with our marveous, mature, maybe mini Mac machines are welcome to be aired, and hopefully someone will come along and suggest some sort of salve.
Personally, I hate in Mac OS X how, when the Dock is hidden, maximizing a program still leaves a buffer between the side of the progam and the side of the screen, meaning in the best case scenario you have to move your window to the side and manually resize it. I would like to have all of the promised screen real estate, if possible.​
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Linux quirks on some of these systems are outright annoying and is more involved than most of us want to put time into to get it working.
 
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heh, annoying is putting it lightly at times. Sound on my PM g5 under ubuntu 16.04 just straight up doesn't work no matter what i try. I even threw a sound card in and still got nothing. I guess a real annoyance for me would be u-boot, having messed with some ppc dev boards. God I hate u-boot
 
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r34per said:
heh, annoying is putting it lightly at times. Sound on my PM g5 under ubuntu 16.04 just straight up doesn't work no matter what i try. I even threw a sound card in and still got nothing. I guess a real annoyance for me would be u-boot, having messed with some ppc dev boards. God I hate u-boot
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Try getting Linux fully running with GUI on an eMac or iMac G3… pure torture for no reason at all when equivalent PCs are a breeze to setup.
 
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sparty411 said:
Game performance on these machines is horrendous. Games that run perfectly fine on windows with similar hardware, run like complete ass on PowerPC OSX.
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I heard that they're just horrible ports, but horrible ports they are indeed. Quake 3 probably shouldn't be stuttering on a computer in the over-gigahertz range, and the Sims 1 doesn't run much better on a 900MHz G3 despite the Lombard being current when it released.​
 
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sparty411 said:
Game performance on these machines is horrendous.
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Respectfully disagree. :)

sparty411 said:
Games that run perfectly fine on windows with similar hardware, run like complete ass on PowerPC OSX.
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In some instances yes, but from my experience, that's not an accurate description of the entire PPC Mac gaming scene. Admittedly it took the arrival of AltiVec on the G4 before the gap was closed with the Pentium II and III but the Mac was still able to pull off good results.

A case in point: this thread was started by me and it discusses gaming on PPC Macs - old titles and new, emulated and Mac native. So far it's four pages in length with recommendations and mini-reviews. Nothing in there runs "like complete ass" I can assure you of that. :D

Most of the games that I've included were tested on the lowest end machines available to me: G3's with 500Mhz and 350Mhz CPUs in order to ensure that if a game ran fine at that spec, then owners of more powerful machines could be certain that they wouldn't face any problems. The performance ranged from good to outstanding, with DOOM and GLQuake ports running at an equivalent pace to that of my contemporaneous PC.

Have a look through the thread, you might change your mind. ;)
 
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1. While this one might sound a little unfair, I'll put it up anyways: back when I used a Mac mini G4 as my main machine (from 2005 to 2009), the (IMO) unusably slow performance of Virtual PC annoyed me to no end, forcing me to still have an x86 machine handy.

2. Why doesn't the Mac mini G4 have dual-link DVI? It's more than capable of running high resolutions.

3. Why don't iBooks have DVI?

4. Why do the 12" PowerBooks have crappy GPUs?

5. Why don't all PowerPC Macs capable of booting from USB list USB drives in the boot picker?

6. Why is OpenFirmware's syntax so counter-intuitive? :p
 
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Amethyst1 said:
I still want to experience a Sony GDM-FW900 someday. I'm not the only one though.
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I haven’t seen one of those before, but your mention of Sony CRTs made me go do some digging.

With my very first Mac, the Yikes! G4 (which I ordered with the built-in Zip drive!), I had two CRT monitors — one I bought together with the Mac (a Hitachi model which went as high as 1280x1024, and which failed in less than four years), and one which was given to me, re-purposed as a secondary display (this was, ironically, the only time I’ve ever had a multi-display workstation). Although I have no immediate memory of this, I must have configured-to-order two video cards for the Yikes!, because the Rage 128 could only support only one display.

That second display was limited to 1024x768, 19" (just like the 1999 Hitachi), but it was a Sony GDM-1952.

Below are pics from one of the only visual sources I can find of it (there was also a GDM-1953 with similar appearance — see shell in the last pic — but I think those came out in 1990; mine was made in 1989).

1641532271276.png

$_86.JPG



Despite being the same physical size as the Hitachi, the Sony was easily almost twice as heavy (and the Hitachi, as with most CRTs, was already plenty heavy). I cannot overstate how it was incredibly heavy — truly a beast, a monster seemingly made of lead. It was easily heavier than the Power Mac G5 I have now.

The GDM-1952 lacked a swivel base. I remember I used a piece of wood to help prop up the front angle of the display. In fact, it had exceedingly few controls. But aside from the 1024x768 limit, it was a clean, crisp Trinitron display and did the job. Back in its day, the GDM-1952 must have been the absolute top of the line for early design workstations in the days of Scitex and Illustrator 88 — probably perfect for a Macintosh IIx. They were apparently paired with Sun SPARC Workstations of their day.

Not only was it heavy, but from the side, you can see how it was much deeper in construction than later CRTs:

s-l1600.jpg

Even though I got it for free, I had to special order a 5-BNC to VGA cable in order to use it (which I remember being a heck of an obscure challenge, even by then).

EDIT: As with many Sony products, I got the model number completely wrong… until I did a little more sleuthing and found the correct one… as memory serves. (Given how there was a GDM-1950, a GDM-1952, and a GDM-1953 all using the same case and construction, I’m pretty sure mine was the GDM-1952, as I think the GDM-1953 was a 1990 revision).
 
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Okay, I don't know if this is just a Safari thing, but the "look up [x]" menu item in Leopard Webkit is downright infuriating. I keep pressing it forgetting it'll try to bring up a dictionary definition that it will never find because the dictionary circa 2009 didn't contain an entry for "Cooler Master High Performance Thermal Paste" and Wikipedia won't load because TLS 1.3.​
 
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