Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs

[NikolaPPC]

Probably not. Lion was a re-write from the ground up in a lot of ways as the first build to be completely devoid of prior Universal binary trimmings (i.e., Rosetta, holdover kexts/frameworks, etc.).

The chances are pretty low then.

Cheers, Nikola!

 

[TechiAlpaca]

Just spent the last 10 mins looking for how to PM @vddrnnr to ask about the ISO. - Anyway, Apologies that this isn't PM. Looking to test on my Powerbook 5,9 G4 1.67 17" (DLSD/HR) and Powerbook 5,2 (1GHz PPC G4).
- Only just today ordered an IDE cable for my 5,9. Would love to test this out.
Apologies :/

 

[ChrisCharman]

Just spent the last 10 mins looking for how to PM @vddrnnr to ask about the ISO. - Anyway, Apologies that this isn't PM. Looking to test on my Powerbook 5,9 G4 1.67 17" (DLSD/HR) and Powerbook 5,2 (1GHz PPC G4).
- Only just today ordered an IDE cable for my 5,9. Would love to test this out.
Apologies :/

This is the link to the dmg created by Lars and previously posted earlier - probably easier to restore that image onto your machines as a starting point, unless you want to modify either the 10a096 or 10a190 installation yourself using the instructions included on the first page of this thread

File on MEGA

mega.nz

 

[Hughmac]

Just spent the last 10 mins looking for how to PM @vddrnnr to ask about the ISO. - Anyway, Apologies that this isn't PM. Looking to test on my Powerbook 5,9 G4 1.67 17" (DLSD/HR) and Powerbook 5,2 (1GHz PPC G4).
- Only just today ordered an IDE cable for my 5,9. Would love to test this out.
Apologies :/

On the first page, click on the Spoiler Known Snow Leopard dev builds and summary of this project’s tests then you can download the ISO of your choice. The ones highlighted in green are currently working the best.

Also there is a link to a freshly patched .dmg of 10A190 at post number 200 - https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/post-28428563

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

 

[TechiAlpaca]

On the first page, click on the Spoiler Known Snow Leopard dev builds and summary of this project’s tests then you can download the ISO of your choice. The ones highlighted in green are currently working the best.

Also there is a link to a freshly patched .dmg of 10A190 at post number 200 - https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/post-28428563

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

OMG Thanks, you're a king! For some reason I was unable to find it - Went through each page too :/
Thanks - Really!

 

[ChrisCharman]

@Larsvonhier

I’ve been following this for a couple weeks now and decided to sign-up so i can more actively contribute. Currently running the dmg imaged onto a Powermac G5 Dual 2.3ghz with 4gb ram and the stock 6600. Experience is as expected and in line with previous PowerMac11,2 reports.

Thanks to all that have contributed thus far - this is an awesome project and one i never thought we would see come to life!

I Have downloaded iso’s for 10a096 server, 10a190, 10a222, 10a261 and 10a380. I also own a physical copy of retail server. I’m currently playing around with parts of each to see what if anything can be copied across to the more stable version of 10a190.

If i have the opportunity, assuming nobody more experienced has already started, i might try and compile from some open source files for 10.6-10.6.8 provided by Apple.

Testing thus far has consisted of attempting to implement suggestions from this thread, trying to install from my library of leopard apps for compatibility and attempting to ‘frankenmac’ using Pacifist, BatChmod and the various different installation iso’s.

Out of interest, has anybody managed to get software update working? I noticed after playing around with the LeopardWebkit instructions earlier in the thread that software update activated on one occasion - it may have been due to updating the security certificates or replacing some files. I haven’t installed anything from software update ti avoid x86 code overwriting my install.

 

[B S Magnet]

@Larsvonhier
If i have the opportunity, assuming nobody more experienced has already started, i might try and compile from some open source files for 10.6-10.6.8 provided by Apple.

Testing thus far has consisted of attempting to implement suggestions from this thread, trying to install from my library of leopard apps for compatibility and attempting to ‘frankenmac’ using Pacifist, BatChmod and the various different installation iso’s.

Please do! Not sure how much of the OS build the open-source components for SL cover, but they could be helpful!

 

[TechiAlpaca]

While Booting (Via USB) My PowerBook G4 5,9 Has a Kernel Panic " You need to restart your computer "
And my 5,2 Starts with a " Circle With a Line through it "

Not sure how to access verbose on these machines, else I'd have more of an idea whats going on. I assume that, this does not work via USB?
Not sure. Booted from OpenFirmware with "boot usb0/disk@1:10,\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX" And I haven't gotten any further.

 

[Larsvonhier]

While Booting (Via USB) My PowerBook G4 5,9 Has a Kernel Panic " You need to restart your computer "
And my 5,2 Starts with a " Circle With a Line through it "

Not sure how to access verbose on these machines, else I'd have more of an idea whats going on. I assume that, this does not work via USB?
Not sure. Booted from OpenFirmware with "boot usb0/disk@1:10,\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX" And I haven't gotten any further.

From what I read here earlier, some had the same boot KP problems and eventually got it booting with a freshly erased (partitioned!) and cloned-to drive. You might start from scratch and succeed, too. If not, pls. boot in verbose mode and send screenshot (photo ;-) of crash...
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Here´s something interesting for our GPU issues. Cannot try it yet myself due to lack of that specific card.
It´s a driver bundle from ATI made for G5/Leopard and X1900!

Someone pls. give it a shot...
edit: My curiosity could not wait, so I opened the installer binary with a hex editor. All the usual suspects are referenced there within! Frameworks that could be extracted for other machine configs as well. Let´s see!

 

[TechiAlpaca]

From what I read here earlier, some had the same boot KP problems and eventually got it booting with a freshly erased (partitioned!) and cloned-to drive. You might start from scratch and succeed, too. If not, pls. boot in verbose mode and send screenshot (photo ;-) of crash...
[automerge]1589435716[/automerge]
Here´s something interesting for our GPU issues. Cannot try it yet myself due to lack of that specific card.
It´s a driver bundle from ATI made for G5/Leopard and X1900!

Someone pls. give it a shot...
edit: My curiosity could not wait, so I opened the installer binary with a hex editor. All the usual suspects are referenced there within! Frameworks that could be extracted for other machine configs as well. Let´s see!

Still don't know *how* to boot a PPC system from Verbose. And I don't have any drives to clone to - my 30GB IDE Died last night while doing that.

 

[ScreenSavers]

Still don't know *how* to boot a PPC system from Verbose. And I don't have any drives to clone to - my 30GB IDE Died last night while doing that.

Cold down Command V, same as an Intel Mac. It will show the Apple logo for a minute and then change to verbose mode. Also works on the boot device selection screen.

 

[Larsvonhier]

Still don't know *how* to boot a PPC system from Verbose. And I don't have any drives to clone to - my 30GB IDE Died last night while doing that.

To clarify: It´s not _from_ Verbose but in verbose mode, you can do that by holding both keys "Apple" and "v" when you turn on your Mac. Hold it from the startup chime to when the Apple logo is replaced by... you guess it! The verbose mode and its screen logging outputs ;-)

 

[TechiAlpaca]

Cold down Command V, same as an Intel Mac. It will show the Apple logo for a minute and then change to verbose mode.

Cheers, I never booted my Intel Mac in Verbose - DC Board died. P.S: Expected it to be an OpenFirmware Command.
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Tried booting on 17" (5,9) - Panic

 

[TechiAlpaca]

Same exact error on my 15" - It's probably just bc I'm booting from USB?

 

[Hughmac]

Same exact error on my 15" - It's probably just bc I'm booting from USB? View attachment 914956

You need to check the image first then restore it using Disk Utility - see posts https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/post-28436831 through to https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/post-28437681

Worked for me, but I was initially restoring to a partition on my firewire drive and booting from that.
Once I knew it was working I made space on my internal drive and restored to that.

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

 

[B S Magnet]

From what I read here earlier, some had the same boot KP problems and eventually got it booting with a freshly erased (partitioned!) and cloned-to drive. You might start from scratch and succeed, too. If not, pls. boot in verbose mode and send screenshot (photo ;-) of crash...
[automerge]1589435716[/automerge]
Here´s something interesting for our GPU issues. Cannot try it yet myself due to lack of that specific card.
It´s a driver bundle from ATI made for G5/Leopard and X1900!

Someone pls. give it a shot...
edit: My curiosity could not wait, so I opened the installer binary with a hex editor. All the usual suspects are referenced there within! Frameworks that could be extracted for other machine configs as well. Let´s see!

From where did you source this installer binary?

 

[Larsvonhier]

From where did you source this installer binary?

It´s somewhat hidden on www.amd.com -> support -> graphics -> Mac Graphics (scroll down to the end of the list above "legacy" ;-)
There is some more stuff for ATI Radeon 7x, 8x, 9x cards but its all the same, regardless of what you select as GPU and if I´m not getting it wrongly, only for classic MacOS.
What really caught my attention was the x1900 G5 OS X installer...

 

[warszawa]

It´s somewhat hidden on www.amd.com -> support -> graphics -> Mac Graphics (scroll down to the end of the list above "legacy" ;-)
There is some more stuff for ATI Radeon 7x, 8x, 9x cards but its all the same, regardless of what you select as GPU and if I´m not getting it wrongly, only for classic MacOS.
What really caught my attention was the x1900 G5 OS X installer...

This is great stuff - its been quite a while since I've been poking around PPC OS X, but I've always lurked here because of some the interesting developments that the community keeps brining including this.

Just a quick one - my mind might be fuzzy on this but back when I was tinkering with my 12" PowerBook I could have sworn there was a driver for Nvidia Cards released for Snow Leopard and, much like the x1900 AMD driver you've found there was some PowerPC drivers and Universal drivers bundled in there. Might be worth digging around Nvidias site and old archives.

At the time I was faffing around with different revisions of the FX5200 drivers from Tiger and Leopard to see if their was any performance difference since the FX5200 was dog slow.

 

[B S Magnet]

It´s somewhat hidden on www.amd.com -> support -> graphics -> Mac Graphics (scroll down to the end of the list above "legacy" ;-)
There is some more stuff for ATI Radeon 7x, 8x, 9x cards but its all the same, regardless of what you select as GPU and if I´m not getting it wrongly, only for classic MacOS.
What really caught my attention was the x1900 G5 OS X installer...

Downloaded and installed:

The utility does provide a prefPane for adjusting a few 3D performance settings on a per-application basis, as well as configuring the display for portrait or inverted layout. These performance settings don’t seem to have much of an impact on running a VLC testing an mp4 reference file, either with 0.9.10 or 2.0.10. This isn’t terribly surprising.





After a restart, there were no changes to the System Profiler, which I suppose might be expected.



I may next try out throwing in the Tiger 10.4.11 kexts for Radeon Mobility 9700 and seeing what happens.

 

[ChrisCharman]

Downloaded and installed:

The utility does provide a prefPane for adjusting a few 3D performance settings on a per-application basis, as well as configuring the display for portrait or inverted layout. These performance settings don’t seem to have much of an impact on running a VLC testing an mp4 reference file, either with 0.9.10 or 2.0.10. This isn’t terribly surprising.



View attachment 915053View attachment 915050View attachment 915051

After a restart, there were no changes to the System Profiler, which I suppose might be expected.

View attachment 915054

I may next try out throwing in the Tiger 10.4.11 kexts for Radeon Mobility 9700 and seeing what happens.

Been using the Ati panel for years on a flashed ATI card on my G4 - it’s very useful for tweaking individual settings for games as you can save profiles for each app and enable features outside of the normal in app graphics settings so long as the card can handle it - things like better antialiasing without performance penalties. Can’t say that i ever noticed any video playback improvements though. The drivers do enable Quartz Extreme under Tiger and Leopard however if supported by the card. You could try a combination of the Ati panel and force enabling Quartz Extreme using the secrets pref pane.

 

[B S Magnet]

Been using the Ati panel for years on a flashed ATI card on my G4 - it’s very useful for tweaking individual settings for games as you can save profiles for each app and enable features outside of the normal in app graphics settings so long as the card can handle it - things like better antialiasing without performance penalties. Can’t say that i ever noticed any video playback improvements though. The drivers do enable Quartz Extreme under Tiger and Leopard however if supported by the card. You could try a combination of the Ati panel and force enabling Quartz Extreme using the secrets pref pane.

No, that (trying to force hardware QE/CI via OSX86 and/or Secrets.prefPane) is not working, which is why I decided to add in this ATI utility to the mix. There is something within the 10A96 build — whether libraries or frameworks or other dependencies — which is not recognizing the 9700 kexts, quite probably because no Apple Intel product that I know of was ever bundled with any of the Radeon 9xxx cards.

But at this point, neither I nor anyone working on this SL-on-PPC project here knows that answer yet.

 

[logout128]

Hello everyone!
I downloaded the .dmg with 10A190 from @Larsvonhier, CCC-ed it to a partition on my 1.33 GHz Mac Mini and it fails to boot - either it goes to grey screen of death or hangs on version info (when verbose booting).

I wasn't sure whether I'm supposed to apply the OS X Snow Leopard Patcher.sh on the restored drive or it's already applied, so I tried and the drive stopped to be seen as bootable by OpenFirmware.

Now I'm trying the thing on 1.2GHz iBook G4...

 

[MacTechAaron70]

How does one update to the last stable build (10.6.3?)?

 

[ChrisCharman]

How does one update to the last stable build (10.6.3?)?

It’s not possible to update to 10.6.3 on PPC currently. We’re currently running unsupported pre-release builds. Intel versions can update via software update or by downloading an update package from Apple downloads.
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No, that (trying to force hardware QE/CI via OSX86 and/or Secrets.prefPane) is not working, which is why I decided to add in this ATI utility to the mix. There is something within the 10A96 build — whether libraries or frameworks or other dependencies — which is not recognizing the 9700 kexts, quite probably because no Apple Intel product that I know of was ever bundled with any of the Radeon 9xxx cards.

But at this point, neither I nor anyone working on this SL-on-PPC project here knows that answer yet.

That’s frustrating. Seems Apple stripped support entirely. I’m not aware of any intel mac that shipped with a gpu from the same family either - only pcie based options. Which of the OSx86 tools are proving useful that you’ve tried thus far? Are there many that run in ppc? I know there are a few nifty ‘Hackintosh’ tools for things like Kext injection and some tricks they’ve used like editing the boot plist for unsupported hardware. I don’t have any experience building them myself but the creative thinking behind the workarounds is definitely something to be admired

 

[vddrnnr]

Hi @B S Magnet,

I've tried the 10.4.11 kexts unfortunately no difference 🙁 .

PS. at least for the 9700

Best regards,
voidRunner