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What have you done with a PowerPC today?

Powered up my G5 after some 12 day long pause. Surprise - no chime! But pushing both 2gb ram sticks back into their slots fixed that.

Set PPCPorts to update, and after 7 hours and some manual intervention (ffmpeg7 and ffmpeg8 demand different versions of libsdl2) everything updated.

Now I have plan to get this LSI adapter locally, hopefully single instance of it still left in second-hand computer parts store will be functional (new parts can be surprisingly expensive, I guess due to their server nature).
 
Andrew-R said:
Set PPCPorts to update, and after 7 hours and some manual intervention (ffmpeg7 and ffmpeg8 demand different versions of libsdl2) everything updated.
Click to expand...

Good to know.

Re ffmpegs. That shouldn’t be the case, unless you installed either as +x11.
I.e. if you just install ffmpeg${whichever}, identical libsdl2 is used by default.

What may pull +x11 is via some other port that uses that variant by default. (For example, katana apps.)

P. S. The current setup for sdl2 handling isn’t ideal, but rewriting it may introduce other issues, so I left it alone for now.
 
As I am about to try to resurrect a PowerComputing Mac clone I went and inventoried some of my storage boxes which I remember having some ancient PPC stuff in them.

What I found:
- one big box of internal SCSI cables of all kinds + some SCSI -adapters like 50pin to 68pin + other random cables/adapters
- one big box of external cables, mostly SCSI and ADB, some serial too and SCSI terminators
- and third same size box full of Mac diskettes and 5pcs of ZIP 100 disks
- half a dozen or more Mac display adapter plugs
- several Apple ADB keyboards and mice, also a Kensington Turbo Mouse ADB
- 5 SCSI hard drives + 2 installed into SUN Microsystems external SCSI HD cases. Wonder if any of them still work after 25 years of storage?
- 3 SCSI PCI cards
- 9600 200MHz CPU card, cannot remember if I upgraded the cpu back in the day?
- Lacie external Firewire 400 DVD-burner

I hope to get some of this used in the project.

Couple of Adaptec 2940 Mac cards and a FWB Jackhammer (I am sure I saw another FWB diskette somewhere just couple of weeks ago):
Adaptec-2940-cards.jpg
FWB-Jackhammer.jpg
 
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After weeks of work, I have finally gotten everything I needed for an initial release done. This has been so exhausting, I am not a macports maintainer but have recreated their entire infrastructure on my own server just for tiger. Custom ports tree served by rsync server. Custom base package pointed to customer server with distfiles, binary packages, and my own versioning of the hard fork. My server even syncs with my github ports tree every 15 minutes like theres to pull down changes and serve updates to my base and ports directly like legitimate macports
Screen Shot 2026-07-17 at 1.57.17 PM.png


Now just to write the text for the website
 
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Just sharing that I released an update for the Source Engine Configurator...

Here's a gameplay video and some screenshots of Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2....


1784169562909.png

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Seven new games were added for you to try, and the engine has been optimized quite a bit, especially for G5s, which now leverage multicore rendering properly.

Team Fortress 2 is also included and has a dedicated server with bots ready to go:

1784345791088.webp
 
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barracuda156 said:
Quick news:

QMplay2-devel is building in its latest release now (26.06.27)

dav1d and libvpx got altivec implementations for decoding
Click to expand...

I spotted dav1d altivec patch on your github, but libvpx one still not quite ready, because libvpx still show last commit 5 months ago? I think you need to specify libvpx on ffmpeg cmd line to get it used over ffmpeg/libavcodec internal native decoder ... We (cinelerra-gg) have override for such cases 😉 not sure about software like qmplay2 ...
 
Andrew-R said:
I spotted dav1d altivec patch on your github, but libvpx one still not quite ready, because libvpx still show last commit 5 months ago? I think you need to specify libvpx on ffmpeg cmd line to get it used over ffmpeg/libavcodec internal native decoder ... We (cinelerra-gg) have override for such cases 😉 not sure about software like qmplay2 ...
Click to expand...

I will push updates today. Yesterday a disaster was discovered (unrelated to powerpc as such) that most/all anime streaming/downloading apps are dead (rot in hell, Cloudflare), so I had to get at least something of those working.
 
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Andrew-R said:
I spotted dav1d altivec patch on your github, but libvpx one still not quite ready, because libvpx still show last commit 5 months ago? I think you need to specify libvpx on ffmpeg cmd line to get it used over ffmpeg/libavcodec internal native decoder ... We (cinelerra-gg) have override for such cases 😉 not sure about software like qmplay2 ...
Click to expand...

I hope I did not break anything, I am brain dead right now, but ports were copied from powerpc machine where they worked.
I will push the updated source tomorrow, but commits are available now:

github.com

dav1d: update Altivec patches, revbump for powerpc · macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports@76f1a36

Overlay repo with fixes to use with MacPorts on macOS PowerPC - dav1d: update Altivec patches, revbump for powerpc · macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports@76f1a36
github.com github.com
github.com

Enable AltiVec on powerpc, revbump · macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports@ffea464

Old sources come from https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox/tree/51ec6270e2872da493b2c66497c05dc1659eadb9/media/libvpx
github.com github.com
github.com

libvpx: update AltiVec patches, revbump · macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports@9dadc19

Overlay repo with fixes to use with MacPorts on macOS PowerPC - libvpx: update AltiVec patches, revbump · macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports@9dadc19
github.com github.com
github.com

QMPlay2-devel: update to 26.06.27 · macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports@9d6a862

Closes: https://github.com/macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports/issues/173
github.com github.com
 
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I reimplemented SteamDepotDownloader in C - now I can setup live Steam3 connections on my PPC devices, and use that connection to fetch licensed Steam CDN data directly and legitimately.

I am working on building this functionality directly into Source Engine Configurator, so you can login to Steam securely on Leopard and download supported Source games. This way you can have a truly standalone installation flow, without being dependent on another device.

1784522560680.png

1784522593599.png


I am also exploring the possibility of adding support for Tiger.. here's Half-Life 2 on 10.4.6.

1784561897370.png
 
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I'm 4 days in compiling gcc14 and git binary archives for tigerports on a G4 mini so that I can upload them and no one else has to wait a week to install them. I also have a Mac mini 1,1 (with original box! score) coming for intel builds. Then I'm going to start integrating PPCPorts updated software, and we will see after that. But the goal is to always have binary archives available before those are merged into the user facing ports tree.
Screen Shot 2026-07-20 at 11.48.27 AM.png


Back in 2021 we 'only' had gcc 4.8, if anyone remembers the before times 🙂 so this is pretty surreal

Anyone know how much faster would this be with a G5? I also know there is the possibility of cross compiling on a tiger intel machine?
 
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alex_free said:
I'm 4 days in compiling gcc14 and git binary archives for tigerports on a G4 mini so that I can upload them and no one else has to wait a week to install them. I also have a Mac mini 1,1 (with original box! score) coming for intel builds. Then I'm going to start integrating PPCPorts updated software, and we will see after that. But the goal is to always have binary archives available before those are merged into the user facing ports tree.View attachment 2646770

Back in 2021 we 'only' had gcc 4.8, if anyone remembers the before times 🙂 so this is pretty surreal

Anyone know how much faster would this be with a G5? I also know there is the possibility of cross compiling on a tiger intel machine?
Click to expand...
Quad G5 is probably roughly 7 times faster than the fastest Mac Minis for compiling, compilation is heavily parallel.
You might consider these binary archives from @glebm https://github.com/glebm/macports-tiger-ppc-binary-archives which date from almost the period you are currently recreating (April 2025 vs end of January 2025). I don't know whether the builds were super clean ( sudo port deactivate active sudo port install ) or not, so if that is your standard it could be worth doing yourself. In practice, super clean builds are not necessary in my experience, but they are technically most correct.
Technically you can build universal on Tiger Intel (+universal variant), but not all ports can be built universal and they may not work if so. Also, Tiger Intel is likely in worse shape than PowerPC, so some things may not work at all.
 
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Forest Expertise said:
Quad G5 is probably roughly 7 times faster than the fastest Mac Minis for compiling, compilation is heavily parallel.
You might consider these binary archives from @glebm https://github.com/glebm/macports-tiger-ppc-binary-archives which date from almost the period you are currently recreating. I don't know whether the builds were super clean ( sudo port deactivate active sudo port install ) or not, so if that is your standard it could be worth doing yourself. In practice, super clean builds are not necessary in my experience, but they are technically most correct.
Technically you can build universal on Tiger Intel (+universal variant), but not all ports can be built universal and they may not work if so. Also, Tiger Intel is likely in worse shape than PowerPC, so some things may not work at all.
Click to expand...
what about ppc only builds (arch set in macports.conf) on intel?

ideally I want to have a macpro1,1 and powermacg5 next to each other under my desk cranking out binaries 😉 but for now the current setup will be 2 mac minis (late 2005 1.33ghz g4 and early 2006 core duo 1.66ghz).

I appreciate the binaries, I already pulled in your ld fixes and what not. For now I'm so far into the builds I'm gonna keep going. But after these initial ones finish the focus will be on updating the ports tree.

The fun thing about Intel tiger is ime it's easier to get things working (no big endian issues, usually assembly optimization stuff works/is more tested, etc).
 
alex_free said:
what about ppc only builds (arch set in macports.conf) on intel?

ideally I want to have a macpro1,1 and powermacg5 next to each other under my desk cranking out binaries 😉 but for now the current setup will be 2 mac minis (late 2005 1.33ghz g4 and early 2006 core duo 1.66ghz).

I appreciate the binaries, I already pulled in your ld fixes and what not. For now I'm so far into the builds I'm gonna keep going. But after these initial ones finish the focus will be on updating the ports tree.

The fun thing about Intel tiger is ime it's easier to get things working (no big endian issues, usually assembly optimization stuff works/is more tested, etc).
Click to expand...
Building through Rosetta is much more likely to work, which I believe is what happens with the arch set to PowerPC on Intel. I would double check with @barracuda156 on that, as I haven't any Intel macs and have no direct experience. But I know a lot of stuff worked on Rosetta on Snow Leopard from the macports tickets.
The issue with Intel Tiger is that I have specifically been fixing things for PowerPC Tiger in PowerPC ports. So you will have ports where the fix for Tiger is within a PowerPC block in the Portfile. You will want to move those fixes into a generic darwin 8 block.
Other than careless breakages like that, it wouldn't surprise me if Intel Tiger is easier to work with.
 
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Forest Expertise said:
Building through Rosetta is much more likely to work, which I believe is what happens with the arch set to PowerPC on Intel. I would double check with @barracuda156 on that, as I haven't any Intel macs and have no direct experience. But I know a lot of stuff worked on Rosetta on Snow Leopard from the macports tickets.
The issue with Intel Tiger is that I have specifically been fixing things for PowerPC Tiger in PowerPC ports. So you will have ports where the fix for Tiger is within a PowerPC block in the Portfile. You will want to move those fixes into a generic darwin 8 block.
Other than careless breakages like that, it wouldn't surprise me if Intel Tiger is easier to work with.
Click to expand...
Interesting I will attempt this once I get an Intel Tiger setup and report back as well. I’m pretty sure it ‘is supposed to work’ but idk how well it was tested. I mean with Rosetta even the cross compiling tests wouldn’t fail I’d think…

That makes sense as well, I’ll have some good references for sure 🙂
 
Forest Expertise said:
Building through Rosetta is much more likely to work, which I believe is what happens with the arch set to PowerPC on Intel. I would double check with @barracuda156 on that, as I haven't any Intel macs and have no direct experience. But I know a lot of stuff worked on Rosetta on Snow Leopard from the macports tickets.
The issue with Intel Tiger is that I have specifically been fixing things for PowerPC Tiger in PowerPC ports. So you will have ports where the fix for Tiger is within a PowerPC block in the Portfile. You will want to move those fixes into a generic darwin 8 block.
Other than careless breakages like that, it wouldn't surprise me if Intel Tiger is easier to work with.
Click to expand...

My gcc16 packages without +G5 variant are literally built on 10.6.8 x86_64 via Rosetta in a VM.

(I also did that initially for 10a190 before we fixed native builds, and still build a few Xcode-using ports in Rosetta now.)

What won’t work in Rosetta at all are Ruby, OpenJDK, GHC, SBCL.
 
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