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Finally installed ArchPOWER on my 1.67GHz PowerBook 17". Works like a charm thus far - using IceWM to keep X11 low on resources and the overall feel is relatively snappy - at least on par with Leopard on the same machine. I'm impressed! Only issues so far are 3D acceleration sometimes pooping out (surprising for the ATI card, I figured NVIDIA would've given more headaches as usual). ArcticFox in the repo is broken but downloading from GH worked just fine.
 
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This is more "...for my PowerPC" than "...with a PowerPC", but I was annoyed when my iPhone would drop my Duo 2300’s hotspot connection due to inactivity so I vibe-coded a little app which pings a site every 5 minutes.

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Spotted a good deal on a PowerMac for just 2.79, but I suspect it’s a scam. No specs mentioned beyond 6g Fiber which I’m guessing is network related but I have never heard of PowerMacs ever having it. No mention of memory or storage either. Plugged a monitor and keyboard in and got nothing out of it.🤷‍♂️
 

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Spotted a good deal on a PowerMac for just 2.79, but I suspect it’s a scam. No specs mentioned beyond 6g Fiber which I’m guessing is network related but I have never heard of PowerMacs ever having it. No mention of memory or storage either. Plugged a monitor and keyboard in and got nothing out of it.🤷‍♂️
Also in unrelated news, I’m no longer allowed in Hy-Vee.
 
This is more "...for my PowerPC" than "...with a PowerPC", but I was annoyed when my iPhone would drop my Duo 2300’s hotspot connection due to inactivity so I vibe-coded a little app which pings a site every 5 minutes.

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Very cool! The folks at MacOS9Lives! and System7Today would probably be very interested in this.

Out of curiosity, how are you connecting to your phone as a hotspot? BlueSCSI? I can't imagine there's AirPort in the Duo (I'm unfamiliar with much of the 68k/early PPC era) and even if there was, modern password tech isn't useable by Classic MacOS.
 
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Very cool! The folks at MacOS9Lives! and System7Today would probably be very interested in this.

Out of curiosity, how are you connecting to your phone as a hotspot? BlueSCSI? I can't imagine there's AirPort in the Duo (I'm unfamiliar with much of the 68k/early PPC era) and even if there was, modern password tech isn't useable by Classic MacOS.
Yeah, I'm using blueSCSI. The 2300 is IDE natively but since its logic board was offered as an upgrade for the earlier ones it actually has both a SCSI and IDE port on it so Im using a HD cable from a SCSI Duo to connect it.
 
I never asked for this...
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This is a port of cdcEngineDXHR, a work-in-progress decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

It's not the full game, just a level and cutscene viewer for now. Maybe in 2027, it'll be playable 😉

This is definitely a "G5-only" kind of thing.
 
My DLSD + a fresh MorphOS 3.20. A bit faster. A bit stable. With lots of new features. One of the biggest update in OS history.

https://www.morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.20

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Worth asking, i suppose, since release notes are a lot to parse 😂: how have you noticed the difference as a user? And is the base install more fully featured than before without having to fine the Chrysalis Pack (which I could never reliably find)?

I ask because I’ve installed MorphOS on my iBook G4 and 1.67 PBG4 and on both occasions i found it snappy and certainly Wayfarer was amazing… but that was about it for usability.
 
Haven't found any codec for H.264 on MacOS 9.2.2 yet, so I've taken it upon myself to try and port h264bsd using CodeWarrior and a little help from Claude... OK, maybe a good bit of help 😅 (is this what the kids call "vibe coding"?)

In any case, the errors have been tapered down and it actually does survive a make. Still gotta fix issues and it's nowhere near finished. Also doing it natively on a 500MHz PowerBook Pismo. I've been generally dismissive of AI but I'm actually quite impressed with Claude's ability to walk me through elements of coding on an architecture that officially was put to sleep almost 25 years ago like it's a totally current and normal thing.
 
Apologies for the double post but I think it warrants it!

Current success of this project is quite impressive even to me. A standalone SIOUX harness is able to read the compressed H.264 test video in the h264bsd repo and translate it to h264bsd which decodes it frame by frame and writes the raw yuv output to disk!

The current draft build was able to successfully decode all 73 frames (a short clip from Big Buck Bunny) at 640x360 with zero errors. Verified bit-exact using ffmpeg in the Tiger partition.

H.264 has been ported, at least in the simplest raw way, to MacOS 9.

The next big test is actually attaching that ability to bigger content and crafting a QuickTime component.

The real question, of course, is whether this will be useable in practice even if it works technically. I’m leaving the former secondary to the latter, whether it’s possible to do at all. That’s looking more and more likely.

All this got started, funny enough, because I was so miffed that s60tube would stream to QT on OS X but not OS 9 😂
 
Haven't found any codec for H.264 on MacOS 9.2.2 yet, so I've taken it upon myself to try and port h264bsd using CodeWarrior and a little help from Claude... OK, maybe a good bit of help 😅 (is this what the kids call "vibe coding"?)

In any case, the errors have been tapered down and it actually does survive a make. Still gotta fix issues and it's nowhere near finished. Also doing it natively on a 500MHz PowerBook Pismo. I've been generally dismissive of AI but I'm actually quite impressed with Claude's ability to walk me through elements of coding on an architecture that officially was put to sleep almost 25 years ago like it's a totally current and normal thing.
what tier Claude subscription are you using or is it all on free tier?
 
(Qualified) success! Installed an mSATA to PATA adapter with a 128GB SSD in it to replace the dead 40GB hard drive in this 2003 900MHz 14.1" iBook. The issue is… the Universal Mac OS 9.2.2 installer CD I used came out before this hardware did, so while it boots with the entire screen utilized, once it gets into Mac OS 9 it lacks the graphics drivers necessary to correctly interpret the hardware. So it winds up thinking there are “two” displays attached and running “one” of them at 640 x 480, with no way to change it. So I’m gonna have to find some more CD-R media and burn the system restore discs that came with it in order to install both Mac OS X 10.2.x Jaguar and the necessary OS 9 support files in order to have this thing behave 100% correctly.

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All this got started, funny enough, because I was so miffed that s60tube would stream to QT on OS X but not OS 9 😂

Interestingly, I’m contemplating an opposite approach: some way to make a minimum viable web interface that will work in old browsers for the Plex API and use QuickTime Streaming Server with MPEG-4 to play back media with real time transcoding on Mac OS 9. Lol
 
...So I’m gonna have to find some more CD-R media and burn the system restore discs that came with it in order to install both Mac OS X 10.2.x Jaguar and the necessary OS 9 support files in order to have this thing behave 100% correctly.
Wouldn't it be a matter of reformatting the drive with the OS9 Boot drivers installed and then just downloading a complete OS9 install which can be used for both OSX Classic and to boot into OS9?
 
Or give this one a try.
Gave that a shot but booting it resulted in the same behavior: screen starts at 1024 x 768 during the boot and splash screen but then sizes down to 640 x 480 once the extensions load.

The good news is that by downloading the 5 disc image set for this machine, I was able to extract the OS9General.dmg image from the hidden `.images` folder and convert it into a .img file that Toast 5 Titanium could mount on the iBook. Then I renamed the installed System Folder to “System Folder (old)”, copied the entire System Folder from the disc image, blessed it, and rebooted. Worked perfectly!
 
Over the weekend I moved PPCPorts to gcc-16

The base has to be updated in order for compiler choice to work as intended. For 10.6.8 ppc the installer is here. For 10.5 please build it from the port. Assuming you have an earlier version of PPCPorts (and bootstrap_curl; if not, install these first from the website), do the following:
Code:
sudo port deactivate active
sudo port sync
sudo port -v pkg MacPorts +external_curl
The pkg installer will be produced in the build directory inside /opt/local/var/macports/build. Move it wherever and run normally, clicking through the installation.

If something fails in the process, feel free to open an issue.

(For the record, 10.5 is passively supported from my side. Everything is more or less guaranteed to work on 10.6, which is the recommended system and which has most of ports as pre-built packages.)

P. S. There was a minor issue during past two days due to a switch of gcc to a newer ABI ([emu]TLS is now enabled), which by now has been resolved. Few ports that were found to be affected are fixed, the compiler and runtime work normally.
 
Gave that a shot but booting it resulted in the same behavior: screen starts at 1024 x 768 during the boot and splash screen but then sizes down to 640 x 480 once the extensions load...
I'm glad it's sorted.

FYI, that was happening to me with Sheepshaver, the Application Prefs were set to 1024x768 but it would revert to 640x480 when booting. I (accidentally) fixed it by changing the res to 1024x768 with the ControlStrip resolution control; not sure if changing res with the Monitors control Panel would have also fixed it, but probably.
 
P. S. There was a minor issue during past two days due to a switch of gcc to a newer ABI ([emu]TLS is now enabled), which by now has been resolved. Few ports that were found to be affected are fixed, the compiler and runtime work normally.
Are we still affected by the bad codegen for -mcpu=970? I am currently working around this with -mno-powerpc64.
 
I'm glad it's sorted.

FYI, that was happening to me with Sheepshaver, the Application Prefs were set to 1024x768 but it would revert to 640x480 when booting. I (accidentally) fixed it by changing the res to 1024x768 with the ControlStrip resolution control; not sure if changing res with the Monitors control Panel would have also fixed it, but probably.
The annoying part was that the monitors control panels would pop up like there were two separate monitors, one called “Color LCD” which only listed 1024 x 768, and that was selected, but then also “Monitor 2”, which only listed 640 x 480, and that seemed to be the one that was “winning”. Popping on the System Folder from the disk image on the restore discs for this hardware sorted it immediately. Now the Monitors control panel brings up only a single window which shows the icon for the iBook instead of a generic screen, and lists all three modes as selectable.
 
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Are we still affected by the bad codegen for -mcpu=970? I am currently working around this with -mno-powerpc64.

I don’t know, since this flag solves the issue and is non-problematic on 32-bit, while on ppc64 the codegen is fine and therefore flag is unneeded.

We need to try compiling something on a g5 for 32-bit and without disabling 64-bit insns.
 
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