Using VNC to make your PowerPC "run" the modern macOS.

[DearthnVader]

I just want to say that you can run VNC from Leopard's built-in ScreenSharing to "run" the modern macOS on you PowerPC Mac.

If you setup a user account to login to on you modern Mac the VNC login will not effect the screen of the modern Mac, so you can still use another login on that system with the VNC user logged in and running only on you PowerPC screen.

Leopard 10.5.4 ScreenSharing App is the best to use as you can run a Terminal command to active more features like full screen and display quality slider. Leopard 10.5.4 SS will run just fine with 10.5.8 update just copy it somewhere like the Applications Folder before you update to 10.5.8.

Performance is pretty good and and I use SwitchResX to change the Screen Resolution to the native 1024x768 for my iBook G4. The real limiting factor is the CPU of you PowerPC but you can adjust the quality slider to lighten the load for slower Macs or network connection.

Really it's a great way to run Mail and Safari, but unless you have a really fast PowerPC you won't be doing any 3D games or things that require a really fast frame rate without really lowing the quality of the NVC display via the slider.

Post here if you need help or more details.....

 

[velocityg4]

If you setup a user account to login to on you modern Mac the VNC login will not effect the screen of the modern Mac, so you can still use another login on that system with the VNC user logged in and running only on you PowerPC screen.

Wait. Are you saying. The modern Mac can do something like Terminal Services by using VNC. So, each user can login to their own user desktop space simultaneously. With the Mac doing all the work. While each person can work with the only drawback being and increased use of system resources.

 

[DearthnVader]

Wait. Are you saying. The modern Mac can do something like Terminal Services by using VNC. So, each user can login to their own user desktop space simultaneously. With the Mac doing all the work. While each person can work with the only drawback being and increased use of system resources.

Yes, my desktop host system stays logged into one account while VNC logs into another.

That's the beauty of a true multi user OS.

 

[velocityg4]

Yes, my desktop host system stays logged into one account while VNC logs into another.

That's the beauty of a true multi user OS.

I didn’t know they added that ability. It was something I was disappointed that they didn’t support in 10.0. I was hoping to replace an old Xenix mainframe with a G4 and terminals. Way back when.

 

[AdamBuker]

If you're already on 10.5.8, is there any way to get the app to work or do you have to do a reinstallation from scratch? The reason I ask is that I'm having trouble even getting the 10.5.8 version of screen sharing to connect to my other Macs.

 

[DearthnVader]

If you're already on 10.5.8, is there any way to get the app to work or do you have to do a reinstallation from scratch? The reason I ask is that I'm having trouble even getting the 10.5.8 version of screen sharing to connect to my other Macs.

What version of the macOS are you running on the host?

Did you enable VNC on the host?

System Preference>Sharing>ScreenSharing>>Computer Settings>VNC viewers may control screen with password:

No issue connecting to Big Sur form 10.5.8, and the version of ScreenShare I linked in the first post is the one from 10.5.4 that you can enable features like full screen, it runs just fine under 10.5.8, but it won't help you connect.

 

[AdamBuker]

On my M1 Mini running Mavericks, I have VNC control enabled with password. Both it and the PowerBook are on the same WIFI network. The Powerbook just shows "Connecting to <IP address>" with an indeterminate progress bar. I wonder if my router is not allowing this somehow. I can screen share in the other direction just fine. The same holds true for my other macs which are 2009 mini on 10.6.8 and 2010 Mini that can dual boot Sierra or Mojave. All macs are on the same WIFI network.

 

[DearthnVader]

On my M1 Mini running Mavericks, I have VNC control enabled with password. Both it and the PowerBook are on the same WIFI network. The Powerbook just shows "Connecting to <IP address>" with an indeterminate progress bar. I wonder if my router is not allowing this somehow. I can screen share in the other direction just fine. The same holds true for my other macs which are 2009 mini on 10.6.8 and 2010 Mini that can dual boot Sierra or Mojave. All macs are on the same WIFI network.

Try and ping port 5900 from your lan, or check the firewall on your Mac running the VNC server is not blocking screen sharing

 

[Doq]

I used to do this on the Companion. The problem I've run in to though with it and most of the 15" PBs is that you won't be able to set the correct resolution for it. 1280x854 is not a resolution presented by macOS, and even haxies like BetterDummy won't show this resolution (it'll give you 1270x850 and 1290x860-- not ideal). Not an issue for any other PowerPC mac (as all of the others use a standard resolution display), but my Companion has little mini-scrolls because of it.

ed-
Mere minutes after I posted this, I found out that BetterDummy (now BetterDisplay) allows for custom resolutions and now I look like a fool.

 

[Amethyst1]

I used to do this on the Companion. The problem I've run in to though with it and most of the 15" PBs is that you won't be able to set the correct resolution for it. 1280x854 is not a resolution presented by macOS, [...]

You can also try creating a scaled 3:2 resolution of 1280×854 on the target Mac using SwitchResX.

*sits in front of two lovely 3840×2560 3:2 displays*

 

[Doq]

You can also try creating a scaled 3:2 resolution of 1280×854 on the target Mac using SwitchResX.

I could, but I'm quite particular about scaling and native resolutions, such that anything that isn't native is almost completely unacceptable. My M1 mini also runs headless, so there's not really any displays to configure-- something that BetterDisplay solves because it creates fake displays at whatever resolution I want.

 

[Amethyst1]

I could, but I'm quite particular about scaling and native resolutions, such that anything that isn't native is almost completely unacceptable. My M1 mini also runs headless, so there's not really any displays to configure-- something that BetterDisplay solves because it creates fake displays at whatever resolution I want.

Forgive my ignorance (I haven’t yet dabbled with Apple Silicon) but does BetterDisplay not create a virtual display with the resolution you want, which would provide the same visual result as creating the equivalent scaled mode in SwitchResX and telling macOS to use that?

If BetterDisplay gives you a 1280×854 HiDPI mode, you can get that by creating a scaled 2560×1708 mode in SwitchResX.

I get that things may be different on a headless machine.

 

[Doq]

Forgive my ignorance (I haven’t yet dabbled with Apple Silicon) but does BetterDisplay not create a virtual display with the resolution you want, which would provide the same visual result as creating the equivalent scaled mode in SwitchResX and telling macOS to use that?

If BetterDisplay gives you a 1280×854 HiDPI mode, you can get that by creating a scaled 2560×1708 mode in SwitchResX.

I get that things may be different on a headless machine.

It could do that, yes, absolutely. However, my configuration is a LoDPI 1280x854 mode. Being connected mostly over wifi means that if I can push 25% of the pixels than normal, then I absolutely will. Also, my VNC client of choice (Chicken) doesn't do display scaling, at all (this might be different for the Leopard Screen Sharing app), so connecting to a HiDPI configuration just makes things look big.

I'm not all that familiar with SwitchResX, but from my research (which was just looking around the website) it looks like it requires a connected display, which is the problem I run in to when running my mini headless.

 

[AYates]

Why wouldn't you just use X forwarding over ssh to just run the browser specifically?

 

[Doq]

X11 Forwarding is slow. Very slow. It does not have any sort of compression like you can have with VNC or similar. It's also very, very finicky to configure and if it's not configured correctly, no X11 for you.

Using X11 forwarding also implies that the X11 client (the SSH server) is actually capable of running X11 applications, which unless you've explicitly specified to do this in macOS, isn't going to happen if you connect to macOS.

It may be more viable if the machine you're SSHing to runs Linux or a traditional BSD (I actually tried this using MachTen in OS 9), but if you want that macOS feel, you're gonna want macOS, and the best way to do that is Screen Sharing and VNC.

 

[Amethyst1]

Why wouldn't you just use X forwarding over ssh to just run the browser specifically?

macOS doesn't use X11 unless you explicitly set this up. And then you can only forward X11 apps.

 

[kuyman]

X11 forwarding runs smoothly with 10/100 Ethernet though. I successfully ran Firefox over X11 from a Raspberry Pi server to my emac (USB 2) earlier this year. Airport on my emac is abysmal, and there screen sharing compression may work smoother than X11.

 

[AYates]

macOS doesn't use X11 unless you explicitly set this up. And then you can only forward X11 apps.

You are absolutely right, I was half asleep and thinking he was VNC'ing to Linux not Mac OS.

 

[Project Alice]

On my M1 Mini running Mavericks

Hold up.

I’m assuming you mean Monterey.

My Mac Pro is on Monterey, and I can VNC over to it on my PPC Macs. You probably have a network configuration problem or VNC might not be enabled properly.

 

[AdamBuker]

Yes, I meant Monterrey.😅

 

[travsG5]

This absolutely works, even with patched 10.5.8. Just place the Screen Sharing App (shared in OP post) in your Applications folder and it will work. If you try and open it from there though, it will crash, but it doesn't matter, you never have to actually open the app:

Obviously, turn on screen sharing on both systems. Then, just open Safari on your PowerPC, type vnc://x.x.x.x/ (IP of the target system) and press enter. Enter your password for the remote sysem and there you go! I'm currently typing this on a G5 Quad VNC'd to a Mac Pro 7,1 running Tahoe and using Microsoft Edge. I'm plugged in on ETH2 to ETH2 directly and can stream youtube video with very good performance. It works great over just my local network too, which is mixed ethernet and wifi.

If you really want to maximize the experience you can route audio from your remote system either over the network (blackhole to VLC stream--a little lag) or just run an aux cable between the two systems. I used a USB-C apple headphone adaper as a secondary audio output on my 7,1, with a 6 foot aux cable into the audio input of my G5. Works great, with no audio latency. In theory, you could do perfect sound over Toslink if you wanted to, but you'd need a cheap USB to Toslink cable.

I think it is cool, but obviously it would make more sense if the systems weren't next to one another lol.

 

[Andrew-R]

I just installed Xquartz 2.6.3 (last official for Leo) and connected just compiled in Termux cinelerra-gg to it.

Project plays at 4 fps, lol, but my tablet is on cheapest side

So, fun!

 

[srp]

Just thought I'd put this here: I recently improved Moonlight game streaming in AquaCenter - 720p 60FPS streaming on my G5 devices, and controller passthrough with less than 10ms of added latency. This allows me not only to stream my desktop for DRM content like Hulu/Disney+, but I can also use my Windows PC to play most of my PC library directly on my Mac which I keep in a different room than my gaming PC.

Compared to VNC, Moonlight offers much lower latency video streaming with higher framerates and audio/controller passthrough via ENet, which makes it great for gaming and video streaming, while VNC can be pretty choppy and can lack audio passthrough.

I can use it for productivity/everyday tasks:

G5s can handle this great, especially on a wired connection where I can push up to a 60mbps bitrate - on my iBook G4 it'll do about 20-30 FPS in 480p at 5mbps - I've got room to optimize this further though.

You can stream a modern macOS or Linux device using Sunshine/Moonlight too. Really opens up a lot of possibilities. I've been using my G5 as a Remote Play device for the past couple of days and it's been awesome.

Daily driver challenge in 2026 would be very interesting and a lot more viable now...

 

[mikeylam]

Just thought I'd put this here: I recently improved Moonlight game streaming in AquaCenter - 720p 60FPS streaming on my G5 devices, and controller passthrough with less than 10ms of added latency. This allows me not only to stream my desktop for DRM content like Hulu/Disney+, but I can also use my Windows PC to play most of my PC library directly on my Mac which I keep in a different room than my gaming PC.

Compared to VNC, Moonlight offers much lower latency video streaming with higher framerates and audio/controller passthrough via ENet, which makes it great for gaming and video streaming, while VNC can be pretty choppy and can lack audio passthrough.

I can use it for productivity/everyday tasks:
View attachment 2633782

G5s can handle this great, especially on a wired connection where I can push up to a 60mbps bitrate - on my iBook G4 it'll do about 20-30 FPS in 480p at 5mbps - I've got room to optimize this further though.

You can stream a modern macOS or Linux device using Sunshine/Moonlight too. Really opens up a lot of possibilities. I've been using my G5 as a Remote Play device for the past couple of days and it's been awesome.

Daily driver challenge in 2026 would be very interesting and a lot more viable now...

View attachment 2633776
View attachment 2633778

Hi this is indeed very impressive and can be useful for many things. May I ask when you say you get 720p60 to work on a G5 device, which one of your G5 in particular (I see you have a few)? I would imagine a fully optimized decoder on a Quad G5 using altivec should be able to do 1080p?

 

[srp]

Hi this is indeed very impressive and can be useful for many things. May I ask when you say you get 720p60 to work on a G5 device, which one of your G5 in particular (I see you have a few)? I would imagine a fully optimized decoder on a Quad G5 using altivec should be able to do 1080p?

I have tested 720p60 on my Dual 1.8GHz, Dual 2.5GHz and Quad PowerMac G5s. I have 1080p30 working stable, and 1080p60 technically works but it starts dropping frames and/or dynamically lowering the bitrate depending on the policy I am setting.

There's some additional overhead in a Moonlight stream compared to a 1080p 60FPS video streams like on Twitch - those play at 60 FPS with no issues. Moonlight adds a remote input layer that I have to sync up with the OpenGL canvas and handle Cocoa event polling from (mouse + keyboard + controller), as well as the low latency component which requires some additional tuning on the decoder side.

The reason I say this can be optimized further is because I am currently applying more conservative decoder settings that increase decode time but increase visual quality. I'm also still working to better understand ENet and input passthrough - there are a lot of opportunities to improve the event handling.

It will take some time to test and experiment on my end to create better tuning and a lag compensation policy that doesn't start jumping or dropping frames when it hiccups. Considering it's just H264, I could probably even get 1440p 60FPS working stable.