What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[Doq]

(Sorry for not covering BSDs, I know little about them)

OpenBSD: Just wants it fast, software compatibility be damned. 😛

 

[barracuda156]

Just an outside perspective as a developer getting acquainted to this ecosystem: I would have no problem moving to Snow Leopard PPC if it was more stable <…> toolchain issues (extra patching required)

Just for the record, that is not the case anymore (10a190 needed a trivial patch to darwin.h in gcc config, not needed for 10.6.8).

It doesn't seem to me like there's a clear plan or goal that these issues will be fixed at any point in time

As with everything else, “if you want something to work, fix it yourself” LOL

The problem we face is a lack of people working on it. If I switch to working just on the OS, I could probably fix most of issues eventually, it is just not efficient, since I know nothing about it, so it gonna take time, and in the meanwhile everything else which I maintain currently gonna fall apart.

so while you're correct that `libdispatch` is helpful to have and there are features I would like to use in 10.6, to me there is no point in having working software only on 10.6 if these issues are going to remain.

Well, largely depends on usage context. Local networking issues are pretty annoying, if one has a local network to begin with, but not a stopper. And that’s perhaps the only problem of major relevance. Yes, there are no issues with this on 10.5, but there we got a broken python, which makes some end-user apps unusable.

far worse on Tiger, where threads fall apart under load and you're spending hours to compile only to debug ghosts because anything event driven wants to throw a fit.

Tiger is a pain as a development platform, no doubt here.

In the meantime, anything I'm porting is Leopard-first, and should pretty much work out of the box on Snow Leopard - I think this is pretty efficient.

Should work fine, yes. May result in a few suboptimal choices, but that can be avoided, if attention is paid to macros being used appropriately.

 

[840quadra]

Incredible setup! I lusted over the 1710av for the longest time. The 8500 has always held a special place in my heart too. I had a 7500 in college but loved the look of the 8500 case so much, I bought a case piece by piece and eventually had a bastard version of one.

If you ever decide to part with yours, name the price and I'll buy it straight away. 😉

If it makes you feel better, the case on the 840av and 8500 are TERRIBLE in design, kinda hard to work with, the plastic is made of egshells and you typically have to remove the logic board to do anything significant on them.

But I too love them, I actually installed better speakers in both, and had new power buttons and sleds 3D printed for them by a friend.

I have a soft spot for both, and they make great faternal twins in the collection. I have local family / friends that would kill me if I sold them to anyone else lol!

 

[Matias_]

Can you test new livecd?

Yandex

Finds everything

disk.yandex.ru

45 Mb. just Slackware installer with added tg3 module (and bunch of broadcom modules, and firewire!). But I still might be missing some *firmware* .. if your card uses any - can you post filename? (full linux firmware pkg is ..well, several hundred mbs compressed, a but too big for my taste!)

edit:typos

On my G5 it loaded the kernel and initramfs but got an invalid memory access (I believe this is an issue with ppc32 kernels on the G5 but not sure)

On my G4 MDD it would not load at all, it just directly reverted to the boot picker but messed up it's colors. Needs further investigation.

 

[dmr727]

If it makes you feel better, the case on the 840av and 8500 are TERRIBLE in design, kinda hard to work with, the plastic is made of egshells and you typically have to remove the logic board to do anything significant on them.

Oh yeah, they were terrible to work with. But I just looooved the look. The Quadra 800 was the worst because Apple hadn't figured out that it'd help to have all the connectors along one edge of the motherboard. 😛

 

[Doq]

Yesterday I moved around my Power Macs to better get access to their ports for easy swapping and discovered today that my Quad had angry red lights.

Turns out, you don't even have to turn it on for it to go "no processor installed", as the CPUs were slightly disconnected while in the rearrangement. Reseating them made the lights go away. Very neat.

 

[wm2]

View attachment 2597378

Remind me of the anime Perfect Blue with Macintosh Performa. 🙂

 

[barracuda156]

I got Mono building and working. This is an old version (though newer than officially existed for ppc), but I think substantially newer ones can be also fixed now.

 

[840quadra]

Remind me of the anime Perfect Blue with Macintosh Performa. 🙂

I actually do have an LC575 AIO. I will boot and post pictures later.

Thought it would be off topic, it is a 68K machine 🙂

 

[Andrew-R]

On my G5 it loaded the kernel and initramfs but got an invalid memory access (I believe this is an issue with ppc32 kernels on the G5 but not sure)

On my G4 MDD it would not load at all, it just directly reverted to the boot picker but messed up it's colors. Needs further investigation.

Ow, failure x2. But at least now I have reason to crossbuild 64bit ppc kernel ...

 

[alex_free]

After completing Fallout 1 on my MacBook (fallout 1 even has a OS X port for this era), I’m now playing fallout 2 on the iBook G4. Native 4:3 aspect ratio, really solid port that runs on OS X PPC (fingers crossed this game is notoriously buggy), and if I ever need to I can use Rosetta to play it on an early intel.

There’s actually a really solid amount of commercial retail games that came out during this era of Mac (American mcgee’s alice, unreal tournament, quake II, Bloodrayne 1, even the sims 2). That’s not even including modern ports n stuff.

 

[Andrew-R]

On my G5 it loaded the kernel and initramfs but got an invalid memory access (I believe this is an issue with ppc32 kernels on the G5 but not sure)

On my G4 MDD it would not load at all, it just directly reverted to the boot picker but messed up it's colors. Needs further investigation.

I recreated boot iso (100 Mb) with new yaboot and Debian's 64-bit kernel (yaboot is picky about max initrd size - keep it under 18 Mb. It also seems to dislike "+" sign in Debian's kernel name - I removed it.). Can you test it too? (in my solo "bootabple ppc cd" thread)

 

[840quadra]

8 Hours, 8 Freaking hours for this!! 😡

My QuickAudio™ (Digital Audio inside a Quicksilver Case) lost a large IDE drive the other day. All is fine because the G5 has active copies of the exact same data, and I have a 3rd copy on an external drive. Most of the data were videos complied to share with local systems, install files for Classic macs, and disk images for my later PowerPC systems. What was more of a pain was getting my 2 bootable partitions back online that I lost with the drive failure. 10.5.8 is on a different drive and kept the system bootable.

While some of the time was related to file copies, a HUGE chunk of it was attempting to get 10.4 to install!! In what could be considered a comedy of errors, I was 10 minutes from setting my computer outside for a bit of a "Time out" for poor behavior. it is -22º F outside (air temp) today!

• I forgot older PPC systems don't like to boot from USB, so wasted time making 2 different boot thumb drives
• My burned copy of Tiger DVD was causing kernel panics before I ever got to the install menu
• I copied files off of my only portable Firewire drive so I could make a Tiger install partition. I later found that this drive really isn't supported as a boot device (Thanks Western Digital). I tried building (CC Clone) 3 different images and none were blessed for startup.
• I returned to the Install DVD, it continued to fail at the same point.
• Realizing I had extra hardware installed, I removed my Serial ATA card, and my USB 3.0 card
• Install DVD Still failed.
• I removed 2 memory DIMMS, CD still failed to load
• I tried resetting P-RAM, CD still failed.
• Finally I swapped out my GeForce 5200, and installed a rage Pro 128. IT BOOTED INTO INSTALLER!!
• I get through the install process, and it failed at 99% while attempting to install Oxford Dictionary. Zero idea why, this DVD has worked recently on my B&W G3.
• I restarted the installer with the same DVD. Same issue.
• Wasted time looking up if there were switches or ways to skip some packages (No easy way)
• I downloaded a fresh copy of the install file, this time for 10.4.6
• Realizing I don't have any DVD disks to burn, My FW drive doesn't boot, and it does not like USB booting, I decided to partition my new drive, and made a smaller partition for the installer and CC Cloned the DMG to it.
• FINALLY I WAS ABLE TO GET TIGER TO INSTALL!!
• My build of 10.2 from CD was completely uneventful.

Many of the errors were mine, looking back, had I been smart, I should have made a Tiger install using my 3rd gen iPod (firewire) that I had used MANY times in the past to load OSs on my G3 and G4 systems.

I need an ale now....

 

[alex_free]

8 Hours, 8 Freaking hours for this!! 😡

View attachment 2598583

My QuickAudio™ (Digital Audio inside a Quicksilver Case) lost a large IDE drive the other day. All is fine because the G5 has active copies of the exact same data, and I have a 3rd copy on an external drive. Most of the data were videos complied to share with local systems, install files for Classic macs, and disk images for my later PowerPC systems. What was more of a pain was getting my 2 bootable partitions back online that I lost with the drive failure. 10.5.8 is on a different drive and kept the system bootable.

While some of the time was related to file copies, a HUGE chunk of it was attempting to get 10.4 to install!! In what could be considered a comedy of errors, I was 10 minutes from setting my computer outside for a bit of a "Time out" for poor behavior. it is -22º F outside (air temp) today!

• I forgot older PPC systems don't like to boot from USB, so wasted time making 2 different boot thumb drives
• My burned copy of Tiger DVD was causing kernel panics before I ever got to the install menu
• I copied files off of my only portable Firewire drive so I could make a Tiger install partition. I later found that this drive really isn't supported as a boot device (Thanks Western Digital). I tried building (CC Clone) 3 different images and none were blessed for startup.
• I returned to the Install DVD, it continued to fail at the same point.
• Realizing I had extra hardware installed, I removed my Serial ATA card, and my USB 3.0 card
• Install DVD Still failed.
• I removed 2 memory DIMMS, CD still failed to load
• I tried resetting P-RAM, CD still failed.
• Finally I swapped out my GeForce 5200, and installed a rage Pro 128. IT BOOTED INTO INSTALLER!!
• I get through the install process, and it failed at 99% while attempting to install Oxford Dictionary. Zero idea why, this DVD has worked recently on my B&W G3.
• I restarted the installer with the same DVD. Same issue.
• Wasted time looking up if there were switches or ways to skip some packages (No easy way)
• I downloaded a fresh copy of the install file, this time for 10.4.6
• Realizing I don't have any DVD disks to burn, My FW drive doesn't boot, and it does not like USB booting, I decided to partition my new drive, and made a smaller partition for the installer and CC Cloned the DMG to it.
• FINALLY I WAS ABLE TO GET TIGER TO INSTALL!!
• My build of 10.2 from CD was completely uneventful.

Many of the errors were mine, looking back, had I been smart, I should have made a Tiger install using my 3rd gen iPod (firewire) that I had used MANY times in the past to load OSs on my G3 and G4 systems.

I need an ale now....

please remind me, but do usb optical drives work like on early intel as boot devices? The only OS I can’t install via flash drive on early intel is windows, but I can use a USB optical drive for that if my superburner ever dies. I never once got any PPC booting from any usb flash drive, but I think that always worked with a usb burner? Somehow I’ve been blessed with working optical drives on actually all the old Macs I (still) have. I know I just jinxed it 🤣

 

[840quadra]

please remind me, but do usb optical drives work like on early intel as boot devices? The only OS I can’t install via flash drive on early intel is windows, but I can use a USB optical drive for that if my superburner ever dies. I never once got any PPC booting from any usb flash drive, but I think that always worked with a usb burner? Somehow I’ve been blessed with working optical drives on actually all the old Macs I (still) have. I know I just jinxed it 🤣

Honestly I am not sure. I can test this, but I don't think my G4 or G5 will properly power my external aluminum Superdrive to begin with.

If your PowerPC is a B&W G3, I am confidant the answer is 100% no, but not exactly sure on newer systems.

Thankfully like yourself, my CD / DVD drives all work, and I have backups too!

 

[Andrew-R]

8 Hours, 8 Freaking hours for this!! 😡

View attachment 2598583

My QuickAudio™ (Digital Audio inside a Quicksilver Case) lost a large IDE drive the other day. All is fine because the G5 has active copies of the exact same data, and I have a 3rd copy on an external drive. Most of the data were videos complied to share with local systems, install files for Classic macs, and disk images for my later PowerPC systems. What was more of a pain was getting my 2 bootable partitions back online that I lost with the drive failure. 10.5.8 is on a different drive and kept the system bootable.

While some of the time was related to file copies, a HUGE chunk of it was attempting to get 10.4 to install!! In what could be considered a comedy of errors, I was 10 minutes from setting my computer outside for a bit of a "Time out" for poor behavior. it is -22º F outside (air temp) today!

• I forgot older PPC systems don't like to boot from USB, so wasted time making 2 different boot thumb drives
• My burned copy of Tiger DVD was causing kernel panics before I ever got to the install menu
• I copied files off of my only portable Firewire drive so I could make a Tiger install partition. I later found that this drive really isn't supported as a boot device (Thanks Western Digital).

Any specific reason why some fireware drivers are not bootable? I know modern usb external ones can use 4k sectors, but I think it was not invented yet back when FW drivers were most common?

 

[alex_free]

Honestly I am not sure. I can test this, but I don't think my G4 or G5 will properly power my external aluminum Superdrive to begin with.

If your PowerPC is a B&W G3, I am confidant the answer is 100% no, but not exactly sure on newer systems.

Thankfully like yourself, my CD / DVD drives all work, and I have backups too!

2026 Walmart $30 usb dvd burner is acceptable 🤣

I have one of the best CD-R burner ever made (Plextor PX-708A) usually connected to my Mac mini late 2012 via ide to usb adapter. But if my SuperDrive dies I can’t burn dvds with that, so instantly purchasing that same garbage Walmart burner for $30. Luckily haven’t had to (yet). But if I can remember it’s basically a free pass to install old osx on even PPC. Now B&W probably not, but G4+ I think yes

 

[Andrew-R]

I googled myself back to there here just 10 years ago. People had good luck with FW *enclosures*, as opposed to drives ...

PPC Bootable External Firewire

For my latest project I need one of these. It doesn't have to be a massive capacity -- 20 GB would be enough but more is fine if it doesn't come at a high cost. Anyone have recommendations on external Firewire drives that are known to be bootable by PPC Macs, particularly under Tiger and...

forums.macrumors.com

Did something chaged for the worse since then? With all this "remove legacy!" mindset I easily can imagine someone "simplified" design and saved few cents!

 

[840quadra]

I googled myself back to there here just 10 years ago. People had good luck with FW *enclosures*, as opposed to drives ...

PPC Bootable External Firewire

For my latest project I need one of these. It doesn't have to be a massive capacity -- 20 GB would be enough but more is fine if it doesn't come at a high cost. Anyone have recommendations on external Firewire drives that are known to be bootable by PPC Macs, particularly under Tiger and...

forums.macrumors.com

Did something chaged for the worse since then? With all this "remove legacy!" mindset I easily can imagine someone "simplified" design and saved few cents!

I have booted this machine, and my B&W G3 (using an XpostFacto hack) from external firewire enclosures before.

The issue I was having recently is that my "WD My Passport Studio" external FW800 drive is not supported. This is mostly because WD didn't properly follow the full Firewire / 1394 protocol stack correctly when they built this FW powered drive. It effectively is NOT true Firewire800, and doesn't fully support Firewire800 / 1394 features.

IIRC, I discovered this ages ago when trying to boot my Unibody MacBook pro from it. It would only work on the USB port, not the Firewire 800 side.

Speeds on that drive are also Meh, as compared to my external Firewire 800 3.5" drive enclosures.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I installed Tiger on a rev b bondi iMac g3 via usb SuperDrive over usb 1.1 lol.

It spun up & installed ok iirc.

Another fav method of mine is to use a mini to restore images via TDM. Works great that way too.

 

[joevt]

I installed Tiger on a rev b bondi iMac g3 via usb SuperDrive over usb 1.1 lol.

It spun up & installed ok iirc.

Another fav method of mine is to use a mini to restore images via TDM. Works great that way too.

What version of Open Firmware did the rev b Bondi iMac G3 have?

According to
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...l-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/
you need Open Firmware 3.2.4f1 or later to boot from USB.

Open Firmware 3.2.4f1 is also when FireWire Target Disk Mode was added.

I'm working on an Open Firmware Extender for Open Firmware 2.4 which can load patches and fcode from disk.
I've ported a bunch of stuff from Open Firmware 4.9.6f0

• disk-label - Adds support for GPT formatted disks.
• mac-parts - Adds support for HFS+ partitions.
• mac-files - Adds working dir command for HFS partitions.
• hfs-plus-files - For HFS+ partitions.

Maybe I could port FireWire target disk mode...

I've ported the following from Open firmware 4.1.8f5 (to remove the CHS limit, fix LBA28 support) with updates from 4.9.6f0 (to add LBA48 support):

• ata-3
• ata-disk
• atapi-disk

It includes the disassembler and debugger from Open Firmware 2.0 Copland D11E4.

It can add fcode images to support PCI cards that are missing a fcode PCI Option ROM. I could change this to override PCI Option ROMs.

It has a bunch of patches and added commands:

• "patches/um-mod patch.of" - Fixes 64-bit divide bug that exists in all 32-bit versions of Open Firmware.
• "patches/512MB BAR patch.of" - Adds support for PCI cards with 512 MB BARs.
• "patches/pci-pci-config patches.of"
  • Patch pci-pci-config to probe device numbers up to 0x1F instead of just 0x0F behind a PCI bridge.
  • Also fixes the default value for the cache line size and latency for The rev C version of OF 2.4.
• "patches/ata patches.of" - These patches fix the bugs in the ide devices. They are completely replaced by the ata-3 fcode but I kept this here for completeness.
  • Fix ata-read-blocks to handle the case where start-block is greater than my-capacity.
  • Fix ata-read-blocks to detect lba correctly and set the capacity accordingly.
  • Fix ata-convert-lba to set LBA bit in ATA device head register. Without the LBA28 fixes, IDE hard drives are limited to CHS which may be 7.87 GiB if the HD reports a CHS limit of 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track = 16514064 blocks.
• "patches/create-defaults patches.of"
  • Fix bug where create-defaults sets upc-hex? to false but doesn't restore the value.
  • Fix bug where create-defaults incorrectly places base @ on the stack.
• "patches/(see) patch.of" - Fix issue where see does not like when the behavior of a defer word is another defer word.
• "patches/eieio patch.of" - Adds eieio to these words xl@ xw@ xb@ xl! xw! xb! just like in later Open Firmware versions.
• "ported/New Open Firmware.of" - Stuff from 4.9.6f0 or 4.1.8f5 that the ported fcode images require.
• "source/checksum.of" - Checksums the Open Firmware extender to make sure it loaded correctly.
• "source/Open Firmware Trace.of" - My Open Firmware tracing stuff. Patch some words, call trace-on, execute some code to see the trace of those words (includes stack on input and output), then call trace-off. Also some other useful stuff such as:
  • dump-stacks - dump the amount of space used on each of the stacks.
  • dump-return-stack - dump the return stack (a list of words and offsets of parent callers).
  • list-tokens - similar to dis - lists words and offsets in the compiled instructions of a word.
  • list-words, etc. - list all the words (and their values) for the global word list or the current instance or device list (or a instance in the instance chain for a device).
  • list-all-words - list the global words and the words of all devices.
• "source/print nvramrc.of" - Add .nvramrc for displaying the nvramrc script.
• "source/dumphex.of" - Adds dumphex command, similar to dump.
• "source/dump-instance-chain.of" - Display the instance and devices in the instance chain.
• "source/lspci for Open Firmware.of" - Display the config registers of all devices of the current PCI host device (including devices that are hidden or not in the device tree - but this does not probe devices behind a PCI bridge that doesn't have its secondary and subordinate bus numbers setup correctly). This info can be parsed using lspci from pciutils. It includes which bits of the BAR are writable which determines the size each BAR.
• "source/calc-checksums.4th" - Calculate and verify all 14 checksums of the 4 MiB Old World Power Mac ROM.
• "source/dump available and translations.of" - Dump virtual, physical, and real available ranges (real is similar to physical but for I/O). dump virtual to physical translations.
• "source/probe-ids.of" - Probe the four IDs register of OHare, Hethrow, Paddington chips.
• "source/find mapped mem ranges3.of" - List ranges that a mapped or not mapped.
• "source/Open Firmware list-partitions.of" - List partitions of a device such as ide/disk:0.
• "source/memory tests.of" - Similar to "dump available and translations.of" but uses the properties instead of the queues. mem-alloc and mem-free are methods of allocating and mapping a range of memory.
• "source/Open Firmware Fields.of" - dump-startvec dumps the fields of @startvec. dump-device dumps the fields of a device/package. dump-instance dumps the fields of an instance.
• A patch for the serial ports adds Open Firmware support for baud rates 115200 and 230400 bps. It also changes framing from 2 stop bits to 1 stops bits (10% performance increase).

It greatly increases the amount of memory that Open Firmware can use (room for all these additions and patches). This is useful when connecting several graphics cards or multiple Sonnet Tempo Trio cards (or similar bootable SATA controllers) that have compressed fcode, and embedded classic Mac OS and Mac OS X drivers.

Currently, I'm adding a method to inject kexts like OpenCore does. Hopefully, I can override the ATA kext to support LBA48 hard drives since LBA28 is limited to 128 GiB in Mac OS X.

 

[barracuda156]

Any specific reason why some fireware drivers are not bootable? I know modern usb external ones can use 4k sectors, but I think it was not invented yet back when FW drivers were most common?

FW drives must be bootable, as long as we talk about macOS. (With NetBSD I had no luck, despite they are nominally supported, and OpenBSD does not support FW at all.)

 

[justbsharp]

Woke up before the family today, been a long week at work.
Currently ripping CDs to my 800mhz eMac that I maxed out with ram in hopes I can use this as my dedicated iPod Video (gen 5.5) station Running 10.4.12.

Using Aquafox to download album artwork.

Spinning vinyl in the background and sipping coffee

 

[840quadra]

@Certificate of Excellence Will that system also boot with thumb drives?

I have gone into Open Firmware and forced devices to boot from a USB stick in the past, I swear it also worked with proper flags on my QuickAudio, but it was always a gamble, and one I just decided to evade during my fun couple of days working on the G4.

FW drives must be bootable, as long as we talk about macOS. (With NetBSD I had no luck, despite they are nominally supported, and OpenBSD does not support FW at all.)

Needs to be bootable as in "blessed", but the drive also must have a proper chipset and support all the Firewire / 1394 features. It is unfortunate that some vendors took shortcuts and did produced hardware

 

[joevt]

Any specific reason why some fireware drivers are not bootable? I know modern usb external ones can use 4k sectors, but I think it was not invented yet back when FW drivers were most common?

FireWire booting was added the same time as USB booting: Open Firmware 3.2.4f1.
I don't know why a FireWire drive would not boot if you have Open Firmware 3.2.4f1 or later.
I would check the partition map and partitions with my dumpvols.sh script.

Apple disabled automatic USB booting for Open Firmware 4.8.7f1 / 5.1.7f1 and later but a patch can be added to restore that.