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

[mikeylam]

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.

Fantastic! Having 1080p60 would be awesome indeed.

 

[Smithwick’s]

I'm still hoping MacOS 27 supports PowerPC, those poor G5s have been stuck running Leopard all these years. Surely there's gotta be 1 more update coming... /s

 

[Andrew-R]

on topic of vnc *servers* for os x I found this project, because ppcports/macports nowadays fail to fetch sources via cvs (ticket for macports filed):

Vine Server (OSXvnc) / CVS

sourceforge.net

I wonder if it contain some interesting code (full repo is around 5 mb). History seems to go back to Jaguar days ...

 

[barracuda156]

I would imagine a fully optimized decoder on a Quad G5 using altivec should be able to do 1080p?

As long as it is not AV1 or VP9, the Quad can kinda run 4k 60fps, though it is not really enjoyable.

 

[eyoungren]

on topic of vnc *servers* for os x I found this project, because ppcports/macports nowadays fail to fetch sources via cvs (ticket for macports filed):

Vine Server (OSXvnc) / CVS

sourceforge.net

I wonder if it contain some interesting code (full repo is around 5 mb). History seems to go back to Jaguar days ...

Yes…the history does go back that far.

I used to use OSXVNC (now VineServer) so I could run two G4s at work headless. Used it for years. It was the only VNC app that installed itself as a service so that it was running by the time the login screen appeared. That allowed me to not have to have a monitor connected every dang time I wanted to restart the Mac.

Now of course, that's more built in, but back when Tiger and Leopard were the OS it wasn't so much a thing then.