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Snow Leopard on PowerPc Macs??

C

chillined1212

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 16, 2009
40
0
Ok. So i have been on google look for this but no answers. I was wondering if anyone is going to figure out how to put Snow Leopard on a PowerPc Mac?? Someone has made a program to put leopard on PowerPcs. So it there a way we can code something so we can install Snow Leopard on PowerPc's. I have an emac 1ghz and I am going to want to install Snow Leopard Server or regular Snow Leopard When it comes out, but I need help.

Please Help!!
:confused:
 
There will be no way to put Snow Leopard on PowerPC.

Leopard was officially released for PowerPC so no one had to figure that out. The only thing I can think of is someone made a program that modified the system check in the leopard install that allowed it to be installed on computers that didn't meet the minimum system requirements of speed or RAM. No one has ever made it run on an unsupported architecture.
 
yippy said:
There will be no way to put Snow Leopard on PowerPC.

Leopard was officially released for PowerPC so no one had to figure that out. The only thing I can think of is someone made a program that modified the system check in the leopard install that allowed it to be installed on computers that didn't meet the minimum system requirements of speed or RAM. No one has ever made it run on an unsupported architecture.
Click to expand...

well the older PowerPc Emac you had to boost up the processor speed so will there be a way to make it bypass the intel chip in the installer
 
You simply cannot install Snow Leopard on a PowerPC machine. Apple will only be shipping binaries that run on Intel chips. No amount of trickery will get you what you want.
 
The curret Leopard ships as Universal binaries, which contain both PPC and Intel code. This is how it works on PPC. Snow Leopard ships as Intel only code and some of the size saving on install comes from lack of PPC code. Forget Snow Leopard on PPC
 
Maybe It'll run on VirtualPC which emulates intel on PPC using software emulation. :)
 
aliher said:
Maybe It'll run on VirtualPC which emulates intel on PPC using software emulation. :)
Click to expand...

Why not just use Rosetta? Transitive (now IBM) created a version that runs x86 apps on PPC. It would actually run better that way, because PPC has 4 times as many registers as x86.
 
Amdahl said:
Why not just use Rosetta? Transitive (now IBM) created a version that runs x86 apps on PPC. It would actually run better that way, because PPC has 4 times as many registers as x86.
Click to expand...

I always thought that Rosetta was a technology which allows to run PPC code on Intel, not vice versa. Did they also made opposite conversion thing?
 
There's no reason to hack Snow Leopard into running an older PowerPC machine.

The main benefit of Snow Leopard is improved performance/efficiency, all of which you'd lose if you were somehow running it in emulation on a PowerPC machine. Even if possible, you'd gain very, very little from it - it would probably be slower and less stable than Leopard.
 
aliher said:
I always thought that Rosetta was a technology which allows to run PPC code on Intel, not vice versa. Did they also made opposite conversion thing?
Click to expand...

That is exactly what Rosetta is, the ability to emulate a PPC platform on an Intel chipset - hence the reason that it only exists on Intel Macs.

There is no way to get Snow Leopard to work on PPC macs - it will not work and it will not install.
 
Snow Leopard will not support PPC. You could hack Leopard onto an older PPC because it had PPC code, just not support for older PPC chips. SL will have no PPC code at all, so just buy a new machine. Even the cheapest Mac Mini right now can run circles around the fastest PPC Mac while it's idle.
 
Short answer: no.

Even if the Applications are still Universal Binaries (for some reason), the OS 10.6 kernel and many of the kernel-mode drivers (kexts) come in two flavors of i386 (x32 and x64) only--no PPC. 'Nuff said.
 
aliher said:
I always thought that Rosetta was a technology which allows to run PPC code on Intel, not vice versa. Did they also made opposite conversion thing?
Click to expand...

Rosetta is actually QuickTransit, from Transitive Corp. (now IBM)

QuickTransit is available in many different versions. IBM uses the x86->PPC version on their POWER servers. There are also SPARC->AMD64 version. Plus MIPS->Itanium, and SPARC->Itanium.
 
there really is no point other than if you want exchange support, its all about optimizing 64bit intel chips and some modern gfx cards so pointless for ppc
 
Cheaper to buy a Mini than try to hack Snow Leopard onto the PPC machines.

Especially since you'd have to steal all the code, and hack that plus save it as universal binaries.

And the jail sentence on the industrial espionage case definitely ain't worth the cost of a Mini, Plus the time alone spent hacking all the code to replace the hooks they eliminated in the rewrite of some of the toolboxes is likely worth more than a few hundred.

---

All Snow Leopard means is basically all the Apple Apps you have now are fully upgraded, and you won't be able to use any 2010 versions -- since those will likely be Intel only.

Bye, bye PPC ... you've are EOL in a couple weeks. Run em til they die with the current apps.
 
curious

I think this might be possible to do in some limited fashion. It may not be useful to just about anyone but it would be an interesting project. Many of the new features would probably have to be disabled. Performance could also be worse than Tiger or Leopard. It would most likely not be stable. Still, just to get it working in some fashion would be an achievement.

You could create a highly optimized and updated version of Leopard that might actually be useful. Getting snow leopard to work on PPC would be a much greater feat just for the novelty of it.



There is another thread with more recent discussion on this topic but it was closed. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/773940/
 
Tsk...

Once upon a time, there was a mere PPC processor in all Macs, and no Intel in sight.
Some enterprising individuals got together and used the open source Darwin project to hack together an Intel compatible version of OS X. The Hackintosh was born, and everyone ahhhhh'd.

IS it possible to get Snow Leopard running on a PPC Mac?
Probably, but so few people have G5 Towers it would hardly be a worthwhile project. While it might run badly on lesser systems, it would just be a huuge cluster @^#$.

As for power, Intel has far surpassed what was possible on the old PPC architecture. It was true that PPC was better, right up until Intel started mixing portions of CISC and RISC processing to create something far better, even while maintaining x86 compatibility. Run 10.4.11 on a PIII hackintosh and you'll get some pretty sweet speed.

As for me, the 13" MacBook is a pretty cheap deal, I've still got my Black one, but when 10.7 comes along it'll be time to upgrade.
 
splatula said:
Some enterprising individuals got together and used the open source Darwin project to hack together an Intel compatible version of OS X. The Hackintosh was born, and everyone ahhhhh'd.
Click to expand...

Did they sell it to Jobs then so he can start working on Intel hardware?
 
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