What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[srp]

That’s what I was kinda doing with Copilot and GitHub when working on some fixes: do it on a modern Mac, push from it, pull on a PowerPC, test, repeat. But if I could do it from a PowerPC directly, it would be more convenient (just for that chat is fine, I don’t let/want LLM to commit anything by itself). Copilot provides decent functionality via their educational program, so I can access good models for free.

Good news is that most of the models you can work with in Copilot you can work with through each provider's respective API as well, although it will end up costing more in the long run. Cursor and Copilot are providing really great value right now and I have a feeling that won't last forever.

When I'm ready to release this app do I need to sign it or anything? Just build as Release and put it on Macintosh Garden or something? edit: and PPCPorts

 

[zenmacx]

My PowerBook G4/500 (Titanium) sits idle, quietly being admired for how well it served me many years ago.

 

[barracuda156]

Good news is that most of the models you can work with in Copilot you can work with through each provider's respective API as well

Yeah, but Copilot Education is free, I can’t afford subscriptions (sure not multiple).

When I'm ready to release this app do I need to sign it or anything? Just build as Release and put it on Macintosh Garden or something? edit: and PPCPorts

For PPCPorts (or basically any BSD-kind package manager) ports should build from source. Our target systems neither care nor support code-sign, so that’s redundant. (I do not really know if that is needed on modern systems; if we want to support those too, perhaps check some existing examples in MacPorts in aqua directory.)

 

[milliectl]

Perhaps not with a PPC Mac but for my PowerBook G4 17" DLSD - a USB-C adapter for charging 🙂

I had a broken 65W power brick that I got with the PowerBook with a somewhat mangled tip and I couldn't get it to work so I snipped the cables, opened up the shell of the tip, soldered new cabling, added a 3D printed shell I found online and added a USB-C inducer on the other end with a simple shell for it made on my iPad.

Turns out these charge and work fine under load on 20V. No special need for 24V. Under load with Minecraft Fast SP and charging the battery I saw 48W of power at the peak, with ~30W idle at max brightness.

 

[Nightphase]

I managed to make Tiger use the OpenSSH sshd for remote login. Although i couldn't get password authentication to work. Atleast hostkey login works fine.

 

[DisraeliGears]

Finally got my iMac G4 700mhz working last night. Put in a new fan, SSD, and DVD drive. Of course the DVD drive tray is too large for the slot, so I'm going to need to go in and replace again but after a bunch of tinkering I got an install of 10.3 running on the SSD. It was quite a science experiment with an eMac G4 in target disk mode acting as the operating system and an external firewire hard drive as the imaged boot disk.

One thing I ran into though is for the life of me I can't get 10.4 Tiger installed. Both Tiger install versions I've found and tried to use result in a kernel panic before getting into the installer. Any suggestions on a Tiger image that would work for me?

 

[srp]

Chat frontend for LLMs is coming along pretty well - I added support for more API providers (Groq and OpenRouter), syntax highlighting in code blocks, and a more native looking UI.

Most of my work this last week has been on an agentic code editor just like Cursor (not pictured here) with support for opening a folder into a workspace, and invoking tool calls with models supporting the Responses API - so far I can get it to do some basic things like reading and diff-editing files, but I'd like to support being able to create PRs, add some basic Git functionality in-editor, etc.

My end goal with this tool and the code editor is to make it easier to onboard new hobby developers - as an intermediate-level Windows developer, AI has been a very useful tool in getting familiarized with not only Mac development and Obj-C in general, but also at knowing the quirks/limitations between Leopard's SDK and the latest macOS version's. I could probably even write some scripts to bundle with this app that automate the downloading and installing of Xcode, MacPorts + git/basic developer tools, etc...

Considering that ports are the product of tedium, having the ability to open up a workspace right on the Mac and get to making changes would probably streamline a lot of people's workflows (if the tooling implementation is good enough, and if they're willing to pay for API credits!) and make the process less intimidating to someone who may only have half-a-Saturday to tinker around.

If the model itself is web-capable, you can also imagine how well it can bridge modern web resources to the old-school PPC platform without necessarily needing a fancy new JS engine or having to port a whole modern web browser over (good luck with that). I think there's a lot of potential for AI on the PPC platform just from invoking APIs. Hopefully I'll have some time to finish this up and release it next week.

 

[GMShadow]

Finally got my G5 2.3DC back out of storage and hooked up (ideally for good) this time. Had to fiddle with the RAM a bit but all slots are reading again - I'm hoping the sticks had just vibed out of perfect a bit on the drive home. As long as they all keep working I'll go ahead and order enough to get it up to 16GB (has 10 right now) just for good measure, and then set about getting some more software.

 

[Lastic]

Perhaps not with a PPC Mac but for my PowerBook G4 17" DLSD - a USB-C adapter for charging 🙂

I had a broken 65W power brick that I got with the PowerBook with a somewhat mangled tip and I couldn't get it to work so I snipped the cables, opened up the shell of the tip, soldered new cabling, added a 3D printed shell I found online and added a USB-C inducer on the other end with a simple shell for it made on my iPad.

Turns out these charge and work fine under load on 20V. No special need for 24V. Under load with Minecraft Fast SP and charging the battery I saw 48W of power at the peak, with ~30W idle at max brightness.

I would be interested in reproducing this.

Could you please elaborate on the materials used ?

From what I gather , an USB-C inducer + correct wiring to a Powerbook/iBook charging tip ?

What USB-C charger are you using for this setup ? ( Just to have a baseline )

 

[Lastic]

And on the topic's note.

Clearing out my hoard, last year I sold off a lot of my Powerbooks , PowerMac G5's, Xserve's , etc ...
Being busy a lot with Atari 8-bit/16-bit machines, Amstrad CPC these past 5 years.
Did pick up a Powerbook 145B this year (yup in a bit of an M68K phase of life).

My current remaining PowerPC's are

1 x 14" iBook G4 latest model but ripped off the power button connector when trying to install an mSATA to IDE (grmph)
1 x 14" iBook G4 latest model , RAM maxed out, mSATA installed, which was my MorphOS machine but it suddenly died

1x 12" iBook G4 1.33Ghz latest model , maxed out RAM, with an mSATA installed, currently running latest MorphOS

And the last machine which brings me to this topic.
12" iBook G4 1.07Ghz , still the WD IDE HDD, 1.25 GB RAM

Reinstalled my clean OS X 10.5.8 image I took in 2019 apparantly , deleted MacPorts and installed PPCports.
Currently compiling gcc10-bootstrap which seems to take more than 8 hours already .
Ah the memories of long compilations 🙂

From what I've seen (still kept up with the forum updates) , I must applaud barracuda156's enormous work put into this and look forward to rediscovering the usability of an iBook in 2025 after a 5 year period of plunging into other retro-machines.

 

[Forest Expertise]

And on the topic's note.

Clearing out my hoard, last year I sold off a lot of my Powerbooks , PowerMac G5's, Xserve's , etc ...
Being busy a lot with Atari 8-bit/16-bit machines, Amstrad CPC these past 5 years.
Did pick up a Powerbook 145B this year (yup in a bit of an M68K phase of life).

My current remaining PowerPC's are

1 x 14" iBook G4 latest model but ripped off the power button connector when trying to install an mSATA to IDE (grmph)
1 x 14" iBook G4 latest model , RAM maxed out, mSATA installed, which was my MorphOS machine but it suddenly died

1x 12" iBook G4 1.33Ghz latest model , maxed out RAM, with an mSATA installed, currently running latest MorphOS

And the last machine which brings me to this topic.
12" iBook G4 1.07Ghz , still the WD IDE HDD, 1.25 GB RAM

Reinstalled my clean OS X 10.5.8 image I took in 2019 apparantly , deleted MacPorts and installed PPCports.
Currently compiling gcc10-bootstrap which seems to take more than 8 hours already .
Ah the memories of long compilations 🙂

From what I've seen (still kept up with the forum updates) , I must applaud barracuda156's enormous work put into this and look forward to rediscovering the usability of an iBook in 2025 after a 5 year period of plunging into other retro-machines.

@Matias_ provides binary archives here: https://kemonomimi.nl/ppcports/
If you want to save compilation time. I know some people want to compile from source though.

 

[barracuda156]

This took the whole day, and I hate mysql. BTW, in MacPorts mysql8 is broken on all systems prior to Catalina.

 

[ediflorianus]

I finished my "Salvage" operation of the 4TB SSHD drive with the OSX 10.5.8 Leopard on it! 😎 ("Good as new" - as it was last seen working... , even with the opened folders)

"I can Relax now , JOB DONE". (after a few mo.)

 

[srp]

Took a break from my Quad and rebuilt the LCS on my DP 2.5. It leaked a few years back and got one of the CPU daughter boards real bad.

After messing up and getting the wrong o-rings, losing and then finding the mounting screws, and several other unfortunate events, I finally got it all back together. Blue coolant and clear tubing are pretty. Still no boot. Exhibiting the same symptoms as before (power on, fans spin, solid power LED, no boot). If I try with just one CPU it’s completely dead - no fan spin, power etc. If I boot without RAM I get the typical LED flashes so at least there’s some life.

Pretty sure this CPU board is just toast. Power supply is dry and free of corrosion and even though it doesn’t boot, it’ll run and warm up as long as I let it.

Gonna have to keep an eye out on eBay for a replacement. The label on the edge of the board says “820-1621-A”.

 

[DisraeliGears]

Brought in all the stuff from the shed this evening before we hit freezing temps. That got me to plug the iMac G4 back in and try my hand at Tiger again to no avail. Tried two different installers, both PPC versions. Used Disk Utility to restore the images on a Firewire drive for booting, and immediate kernel panics as seen below. Any thoughts as to what I'm doing wrong?

 

[ediflorianus]

Brought in all the stuff from the shed this evening before we hit freezing temps. That got me to plug the iMac G4 back in and try my hand at Tiger again to no avail. Tried two different installers, both PPC versions. Used Disk Utility to restore the images on a Firewire drive for booting, and immediate kernel panics as seen below. Any thoughts as to what I'm doing wrong?
View attachment 2588317View attachment 2588318

Q: srp: - SRP what cooling liquid did you use (blue?) automotive antifreze? (I have one of those dual G5's , AGP with liquid , but it had water and it errored out if I left it at 2.7 or so ghz... so I set the machine asside)... Need to rework the cooling with new liquid (hope it won't dripp , was put in a box about 7 years back). If you are good with electronics you can try and fix your cpu (I would just start with a WD40 bath than contact claner bath or brake cleaner than if still not clean use some IPA)... search for short circuit with a ohm meter.... set on diode mode... (caps and other small smds are easy to change with some minimal skill).

Regarding the G4 iMac , mine had a broken ram and still gave cpu error , also had a split copper heatsink , but after a repaste the machine worked (so think of changeing the 256MB DDR module inside and do a repaste) is if error remains (boot from a good known drive that has a good working 10.x os x). PS. You can also fix the OS with my tutorial I wrote on my post ...

 

[srp]

Q: srp: - SRP what cooling liquid did you use (blue?) automotive antifreze? (I have one of those dual G5's , AGP with liquid , but it had water and it errored out if I left it at 2.7 or so ghz... so I set the machine asside)... Need to rework the cooling with new liquid (hope it won't dripp , was put in a box about 7 years back). If you are good with electronics you can try and fix your cpu (I would just start with a WD40 bath than contact claner bath or brake cleaner than if still not clean use some IPA)... search for short circuit with a ohm meter.... set on diode mode... (caps and other small smds are easy to change with some minimal skill).

Regarding the G4 iMac , mine had a broken ram and still gave cpu error , also had a split copper heatsink , but after a repaste the machine worked (so think of changeing the 256MB DDR module inside and do a repaste) is if error remains (boot from a good known drive that has a good working 10.x os x). PS. You can also fix the OS with my tutorial I wrote on my post ...

I opted to use regular PC coolant instead of automotive. I used Thermaltake T1000 but I think any kind should work.

That daughterboard has been soaked in IPA and scrubbed thoroughly with a toothbrush/gently with a wire brush in 2 passes. It looked much worse when I pulled it. You can see the solder mask damage (some probably from the scrubbing) and some of the leftover corrosion still bridging components together. My main concern is that I'm going to scrub too hard and knock a component off the board. I haven't tried using a multimeter and individually testing for shorts like you suggest, so that may be what I do next.

 

[DisraeliGears]

Regarding the G4 iMac , mine had a broken ram and still gave cpu error , also had a split copper heatsink , but after a repaste the machine worked (so think of changeing the 256MB DDR module inside and do a repaste) is if error remains (boot from a good known drive that has a good working 10.x os x). PS. You can also fix the OS with my tutorial I wrote on my post ...

Hmm, yeah I do need to take it apart again to do a DVD drive swap so I might just unplug the internal 256mb stick. I did add new thermal paste to the heatsinks when I was in there last.

The interesting thing that I perhaps didn't make clear is that it runs 10.3.8 just fine. Was up with it for an hour or two and ran like a charm. Just doesn't like any 10.4 image I try to utilize. Also what OS tutorial post are you referring to? Would love to check it out.

 

[ediflorianus]

Hmm, yeah I do need to take it apart again to do a DVD drive swap so I might just unplug the internal 256mb stick. I did add new thermal paste to the heatsinks when I was in there last.

The interesting thing that I perhaps didn't make clear is that it runs 10.3.8 just fine. Was up with it for an hour or two and ran like a charm. Just doesn't like any 10.4 image I try to utilize. Also what OS tutorial post are you referring to? Would love to check it out.

Those original 256 DDR PC2x00 fail (read somewhere , mine did - not passing memtest on any pc , I put a 1 gb duble side and it sees 512 of it /or was it single hmm... not opening it-g4-imac- again for that.). - my post regarding saving my OS (10.5) - Regarding 10.4 , be sure it's correct Tiger image... hopefully from the archive or macgarden... the one version for the imac g4 support & drivers....

srp - Don't scrub 2 hard... it's a cpu, use a fine toothbrush or a haircutter mini-brush... You can also use a wipe under the brush to soak up anything (contact cleaner/disk brake cleaner/wd40). BTW (L.E.) Did you try (if the cpu is not in short) holding the power button for more than 40s when powering up? (and is the white lite on? main indicator that you have a G5 cpu connected to the board, also 3.5v on main bat should be important , mine refuses to start first try with a bad bios battery).

On other note I changed my combo back to a dvd-rw on the PowerMac G5... to write dvd's , still have issues with some software like macfuse not working-unable to run finish script(for ntfs) and the other app works but will expire oh well.. time will tell....

 

[Lastic]

And on the topic's note.

Clearing out my hoard, last year I sold off a lot of my Powerbooks , PowerMac G5's, Xserve's , etc ...
Being busy a lot with Atari 8-bit/16-bit machines, Amstrad CPC these past 5 years.
Did pick up a Powerbook 145B this year (yup in a bit of an M68K phase of life).

My current remaining PowerPC's are

1 x 14" iBook G4 latest model but ripped off the power button connector when trying to install an mSATA to IDE (grmph)
1 x 14" iBook G4 latest model , RAM maxed out, mSATA installed, which was my MorphOS machine but it suddenly died

1x 12" iBook G4 1.33Ghz latest model , maxed out RAM, with an mSATA installed, currently running latest MorphOS

And the last machine which brings me to this topic.
12" iBook G4 1.07Ghz , still the WD IDE HDD, 1.25 GB RAM

Reinstalled my clean OS X 10.5.8 image I took in 2019 apparantly , deleted MacPorts and installed PPCports.
Currently compiling gcc10-bootstrap which seems to take more than 8 hours already .
Ah the memories of long compilations 🙂

From what I've seen (still kept up with the forum updates) , I must applaud barracuda156's enormous work put into this and look forward to rediscovering the usability of an iBook in 2025 after a 5 year period of plunging into other retro-machines.

So trying to compile QMPlay2 from source from PPCports since 6 days ago it now stopped with a verify checksum error on trying to get cmake ?

 

[barracuda156]

So trying to compile QMPlay2 from source from PPCports since 6 days ago it now stopped with a verify checksum error on trying to get cmake ?

That has been long fixed. Run port sync, and it will work:

svacchanda@Sergeys-Mac-mini ~ % sudo port clean --all cmake
Password:
--->  Cleaning cmake

svacchanda@Sergeys-Mac-mini ~ % port file cmake
/opt/local/var/macports/sources/macos-powerpc.org/macos-powerpc/PPCPorts/ports/devel/cmake/Portfile

svacchanda@Sergeys-Mac-mini ~ % sudo port -v -n patch cmake
--->  Fetching distfiles for cmake
--->  CMake-3.31.9.tar.gz does not exist in /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/cmake
--->  Attempting to fetch CMake-3.31.9.tar.gz from https://distfiles.macports.org/cmake
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--     0
--->  Attempting to fetch CMake-3.31.9.tar.gz from https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v3.31.9
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:01 --:--:--     0
100 11.1M  100 11.1M    0     0  1278k      0  0:00:08  0:00:08 --:--:-- 2484k
--->  Verifying checksums for cmake
--->  Checksumming CMake-3.31.9.tar.gz
--->  Extracting cmake
--->  Extracting CMake-3.31.9.tar.gz
Executing:  cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/cmake-76f0ddff/work" && /usr/bin/gzip -dc '/opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/cmake/CMake-3.31.9.tar.gz' | /usr/bin/tar -xf - 
--->  Applying patches to cmake

 

[Eightbitgamer757]

I spent some more time messing around with my iBook G4 last night for funsies. Tried loading a youtube video on TFF, video page wouldn't load and I caused a kernel panic by trying to force TFF closed with the activity monitor. (note: I'm not sure if TFF is even still the go to solution for a PPC browser anymore, I know it's depreciated and haven't really looked into alternatives), after that I tried some minecraftPPC edition. The poor iBook doesn't run it well, I think if I set up a server for it to connect to I could make it playable, but I'm not in a rush to use that computer for anything serious. Finally settled on watching a DVD to finish the night, which thankfully was very uneventful. I need to look into options for a good SSD upgrade so I can go from Tiger to Leapord/Sorbet Leapord, but that's also not super high on thr priority list.

 

[barracuda156]

I spent some more time messing around with my iBook G4 last night for funsies. Tried loading a youtube video on TFF, video page wouldn't load

I wouldn’t expect it to work in a browser, TBH.

The closest to a browser experience would be to use QMPlay2. Otherwise there are a few TUI/CLI apps which allow searching and pass the playback to mpv or alike (or, optionally, download videos): yewtube, ytsurf.
YouTube is putting some efforts to hurt users, so at any given moment that may or may not work (this applies to modern systems too, not only legacy ones).

If the point is to watch music videos, wiliwili might be an acceptable alternative.

I cannot say to what extent this can work on an iBook, but on G5 all of the above are usable, including HD streaming (FHD with caveats, but on a G4 that won’t work anyway).

I'm not sure if TFF is even still the go to solution for a PPC browser anymore, I know it's depreciated and haven't really looked into alternatives

AquaFox is the current stable browser.
WhiteStar (Palemoon fork) is WIP, though again, it may or may not run acceptably on slower hardware.

 

[ediflorianus]

I spent some more time messing around with my iBook G4 last night for funsies. Tried loading a youtube video on TFF, video page wouldn't load and I caused a kernel panic by trying to force TFF closed with the activity monitor. (note: I'm not sure if TFF is even still the go to solution for a PPC browser anymore, I know it's depreciated and haven't really looked into alternatives), after that I tried some minecraftPPC edition. The poor iBook doesn't run it well, I think if I set up a server for it to connect to I could make it playable, but I'm not in a rush to use that computer for anything serious. Finally settled on watching a DVD to finish the night, which thankfully was very uneventful. I need to look into options for a good SSD upgrade so I can go from Tiger to Leapord/Sorbet Leapord, but that's also not super high on thr priority list.

InterTube is still working, sort of, at low p....
My Mac os X leopard is asking for a update....some apps(including safari,so I don't know W.T.D.)...very weered ...(I can't believe that is a coincidence...)
In other news I am backing up movies to dvd's and ext.drive... & running permissions repairs on my salvage drive...(ain't fixed yet 100%).

 

[DisraeliGears]

Took apart my G4 again yesterday to pull my suspect 256mb RAM out and pop off the disc tray cover for the DVD drive I put in it. It still gives the same kernel panics trying to boot an image of a 10.4 installer, but taking the drive tray cover off gives enough clearance for the DVD drive to work, woo!

Was able to use my 9.2.2 install disc to reinstall Classic and get that working, plus I upgraded to 10.3.9. I need to go burn a Tiger installation DVD to try that method, I just haven't had a chance yet (the house is quite full for the holidays and taking up multiple tables with old Macs is a bit of a lift haha).