PowerSurging to Mac OS X 10.5.8: Power Macintosh 9600 fun

[Intell]

At one point I did. Last I recall it's around 512MB right now

 

[LightBulbFun]

Graphics card? What graphics card?!

it took a little bit of fudging but I got 10.4.11 to Boot with the 9600s stock IMS Twin Turbo 128 PCI video card

 

[DearthnVader]

Graphics card? What graphics card?!

View attachment 795154

it took a little bit of fudging but I got 10.4.11 to Boot with the 9600s stock IMS Twin Turbo 128 PCI video card

As I recall, Apple put a restriction on graphics cards with an 'NDRV' before some date, and there was a command you could set to get it to use older 'NDRV's

 

[LightBulbFun]

As I recall, Apple put a restriction on graphics cards with an 'NDRV' before some date, and there was a command you could set to get it to use older 'NDRV's

Bingo

I was hoping for it at-least to just ignore the NDRV and run on the OF framebuffer giving the broken greyscale you see on reduced ROM ATI cards with no NDRVs etc

( and the same thing tiger does on a Voodoo5 5500)

but to my surprised tiger could not launch the window-server properly on the 9600/IMSs OpenFirmware Framebuffer (normally OS X is happy to ride on the OpenFirmware frame-buffer)

so I forced the use of Old NDRVs and much to my delight it got the window-server going

(I find it amusing how Graphics/Displays reports nothing, normally it ALWAYS reports SOMETHING LOL)

for giggles ill have to test if this works in Leopard

I also wonder if I can poke at this and get more then 256 colours out of a Kanga running 10.3+

 

[LightBulbFun]

I decided to pop the heatsink off my 300Mhz 604ev CPU card seeing as they aint really any pictures of one of these 604ev cards sans heatsink

and it revealed a couple very interesting surprises

most notably while this is a 300Mhz CPU card, the CPU itself is a 350Mhz part and secondly the CPU gasket was of MPC750 360CBGA package size (the CPU gasket being that plastic/paper ring that surrounds the CPU die on Apple CPUs I removed it in the picture so we can see the CPU package markings)

I suspect both of these are because this 9600 would of been one of the last made so Apple was probably just using up the last of whatever stock they had on hand and just used 750 sized CPU gaskets to avoid ordering more stock for an obsolete product, being the CPU itself is rated for 350Mhz it should mean that I can "overclock" it to 350Mhz without any issues

the CPU itself was made 47th week 1997 pretty much a full year before this 9600 was made so it must of been sitting around for a while, the big LSI IC with the Apple part number on it is the Brick IC I talked about earlier, (it handles the 100Mhz the CPU and L2 cache sit on)

also worth noting the CPU is a "604R" with "604ev" being more of a marketing name by apple. also worth noting strangely is the "AIM015" which stands for Apple IBM Motorola 15th design which is interesting as the "G3" 750/740 is AIM11....

all in all I find this quite intriguing

 

[AphoticD]

Nice work mate. That is a remarkable piece of Apple history you have there.

It will certainly clock up to 350MHz tax-free. I wonder how many times Apple have done this.. They release their "Good", "Better", "Best" model schedule and just underclock the "Better" option, usually running on the same hardware as the "Best" option, less the $500 "full fare" premium

 

[LightBulbFun]

Nice work mate. That is a remarkable piece of Apple history you have there.

It will certainly clock up to 350MHz tax-free. I wonder how many times Apple have done this.. They release their "Good", "Better", "Best" model schedule and just underclock the "Better" option, usually running on the same hardware as the "Best" option, less the $500 "full fare" premium

Thanks generally you only see higher end parts as lower end parts like this when A the lower end part is really selling well and theres a lot of unused higher end inventory sitting around so they will remark a higher end part as a lower end one, or B in the case of the 9600, when your getting to the end of the run for something and it would be cheaper to just use up the higher end parts as lower end ones then order more lower end parts

as for other times iv seen macs with down-clocked CPUs the main one that comes to mind is that all the 867Mhz MDD CPU cards I have seen have had 933Mhz rated 7455s which I have found pretty interesting, esp as its all of the ones iv seen and not just a one off or such.

for those wondering heres the Serial number sticker on the back with exact DOM information

pretty much all the components in this machine date to late 1997 so apple must of had a lot of inventory to clear (sadly I did not get the original HDD to this machine so I dont know what the date code on that was) I wonder if anyone has a 9600 from 1999? I was surprised to see they made 9600s this late.

side fun thing about collecting computers in the UK is the fact a lot of electrical gear have "PAT test" stickers on them that let you roughly date when the thing was last in use

 

[AnonMac50]

Oh wow! The Power Mac 9600 is one of my favourite Macs actually, and I have a Power Mac 9600/200 myself(it’s overseas however)! I’d been attempting to upgrade it for years. Unfortunately it’s all stock except for an extra SCSI shard drive I put inside. It’s now running OS 9.2.2 and 10.1.something-or-other (using an old copy of XPostFactor I found buried on the internet to allow installing with 64 MBs of RAM). Any ideas on upgrades? I’d like to run Leopard and/or Tiger on it but I can no longer seem to find any RAM CPU, or GPU upgrades, and hardly any information online about what kinds I’d need. I don’t even know if I can get USB into this thing. Using floppies and an Ethernet connection to do file transfers gets tiring after a while. Any ideas?

 

[weckart]

Any ideas on upgrades? I’d like to run Leopard and/or Tiger on it but I can no longer seem to find any RAM CPU, or GPU upgrades, and hardly any information online about what kinds I’d need. I don’t even know if I can get USB into this thing.

USB is a trivial upgrade. If you are sticking with MacOS 9 or earlier then I would suggest getting a USB 1.1 card so that you don't have the problems with sleep that you get with USB 2.0 cards.

Processors for these come up on eBay reasonably regularly although not all at a reasonable price. I managed to find an XLR8 slocket card recently that nobody else bidded on, which will take any ZIF G3 or G4 processor. RAM is hard to find and not cheap when you do. Count on paying at least £10/$10 for each 128MB stick.

With a suitable SATA adapter card flashed for Mac you can do better than the onboard SCSI II ports.

 

[LightBulbFun]

@weckart has the basics down pat

as for Graphics card upgrades a good cheap option for Classic Mac OS that gives you a VGA port would be a Rage 128 plenty of those floating around from G3 BW/G4 Yikes!

if you want something with DVI and a bit more power theres the Radeon 7000 and Radeon 9200 Mac edition PCI Video cards, they show up on ebay from time to time and flashing PC Radeon 7000 cards is a cheap and popular option

for OS X 10.3 and above you need 96MB of RAM or more, as mentioned above sadly finding RAM is Royal PITA thats im still struggling with (id like to max mine out at 1.5GB )

if you want a good Plug and play CPU upgrade option Sonnet is the brand to go for but because of that they can command a price premium especially the G4 ones but there are usually several G3 Sonnet cards of various speeds floating around for $30-50 on ebay at least.

as for storage upgrades id also recommend the ACARD 6280M its a really nice Robust ATA133 card thats handled all the weird stuff I have thrown at it.

 

[AnonMac50]

Thanks guys! I’ll keep a look out and will update if I find something!

 

[TzunamiOSX]

My 9600 is on 10.4.11. It would be nice to bring him to 10.5.8 but i never found the parts form the Leopard beta to get it to work. Perhaps you can help me with a little guide.

System is a:
9600 with Sonnet G4 450Mhz
960 MB Ram
SATA controller with Samsung 128 GB SSD
Firewire 400 and USB card
ATI 9200

So please help, to bring 10.5.8 to it

 

[LightBulbFun]

thats nicely specced 9600 you have there

as for leopard I have a pre made Leopard 10.5.8 image for Pre uninorth Macs you can find here https://mega.nz/#!ZNJzRR4A!mA1svzvbBzWa7dJwH8XlWUjJ-3xiSBAxzeHlWaKgSP4

just clone the image to a HDD or partition of your choice and in xpostfacto make sure to do "install everything" and then use xpostfacto to reboot into it

(I forgot the password I set for the user account in that image so you will have to reset that via Single user mode or such)

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Its WORKING!!!!

So first: Thank you very much! but all language kits are missing, only english is working
Perhaps i can add the german language from my iMacG5 "fingers crossed".

Is the a G4 cache enabler installed?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Its WORKING!!!!

So first: Thank you very much! but all language kits are missing, only english is working
Perhaps i can add the german language from my iMacG5 "fingers crossed".

Is the a G4 cache enabler installed?

glad to see its working for you, feel free to post some System profiler/About this Mac shots

I had to strip out a lot of stuff to cram it onto the 6GB disk image i was using and keep it bellow the 8GB Boot partition limit of Old World ROM ATA controllers so only english is there im afraid

theres no cache enablers installed I recommend you use Sonnets Cache enabler if you wish to try and enable the L2 http://www.sonnettech.com/support/downloads/software/sonnetcache14.pkg.zip

 

[0248294]

From what I remember, it should be easy to add a language to OS X. In the System Settings for language, under the selection screen, it should have minus and plus buttons. Hit the plus, it will open a wizard to add a language. You will need the Leopard installation media attached, either the DVD (or a copy) in the disc drive, or the DMG mounted. Then you can select and install German.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Other little Problems:

Onboard Ethernet is not working, right? (No Problem, i have a 1000BaseT Network Card)
USB Mouse (Logitech and Apple Mouse) is not working, but USB Card is aktive, and driver loaded.

Picture will come when all ist working. So give me some hours^^

@Daniël Oosterhuis

I think LightBulbFun has removed language from the Programm Paks, because german ist selected but all is english

 

[LightBulbFun]

what chipset is your USB card based off of? some of the early USB1.1 chipsets are not leopard compatible

as for ethernet I did patch manage to patch the AppleMaceEthernet.kext to load in Leopard so the onboard ethernet worked but its not included on that Leopard image and sadly it looks like I failed save the kext I patched

at some point ill patch the kext again and also make a better Leopard image (the Leopard image was made without having any real hardware to test it on at the time)

 

[TzunamiOSX]

OK, BIGGER PROBLEMS

can't start any program, all are hanging with a crash at the end. No Cache enabler install possible. report later again

 

[TzunamiOSX]

I give up!

Don't get it to work. Crash over crash when add a new User profile. I think it has something to do with the missing languages.

 

[Traace]

I think that too. OS X itself might be fallback to English if none of the selected language are found on disk, but some applications will crash. Try a ENG only install first, then add your language pack via OSX settings and a full-size leopard image like @Daniël Oosterhuis suggested.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

I think that too. OS X itself might be fallback to English if none of the selected language are found on disk, but some applications will crash. Try a ENG only install first, then add your language pack via OSX settings and a full-size leopard image like @Daniël Oosterhuis suggested.

I can not try an ENG only install. This is a pre-installed System image, written to my Drive with CCC. i can only select ENG when create an account. After creating the account the system is english, but when i look inside the "System Preferences/International" all other languages are present. When i put german on top, and relog, i get an genlish system (half german half english) Finder, Sys Prefs, Dock is englisch, Apple menu is german
[doublepost=1542463177][/doublepost]If i know what parts must be changed, i can clone my iMac 10.5.8 installation and add these parts from LightBulbFun's Image.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Figured this would be a good place to post this, as i know a few people here are looking for G4 ZIFs,

I came across this seller that has (At the time of this writing) about 6 7400/7410 ZIF CPUs for sale, sadly he peeled the labels off of them but most of them are clearly nice sonnet ones (note the speed rating on the die of the CPUs are not always indicative of the speed the ZIF was sold at)

https://www.ebay.com/str/icchina/Motorola/_i.html?_storecat=8133495

(Mod note: not my auction or anything, just came across these while watching another ebay item )

TL;DR: if you have a G3 beige, G3 BW or a Slocket you want to upgrade to a G4 CPU the above link should have you covered

 

[AnonMac50]

Figured this would be a good place to post this, as i know a few people here are looking for G4 ZIFs,

I came across this seller that has (At the time of this writing) about 6 7400/7410 ZIF CPUs for sale, sadly he peeled the labels off of them but most of them are clearly nice sonnet ones (note the speed rating on the die of the CPUs are not always indicative of the speed the ZIF was sold at)

https://www.ebay.com/str/icchina/Motorola/_i.html?_storecat=8133495

(Mod note: not my auction or anything, just came across these while watching another ebay item )

TL;DR: if you have a G3 beige, G3 BW or a Slocket you want to upgrade to a G4 CPU the above link should have you covered

Cool! Would these work on a 9600?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Cool! Would these work on a 9600?

if you have a compatible slocket they will, otherwise no.