What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[Amethyst1]

Set up boot camp on my 2006 MBP. I now have Windows XP and Leopard on the same Mac. It’s been fun using Windows XP again, so much nostalgia.

Yep. That takes me right back to 2006 when I set up XP on my Core Duo MacBook so a friend could check how well it handled WoW.

 

[Amethyst1]

So I've done again what I love doing - making old machines run at insanely high resolutions

That's my trusty 11-inch MBA from 2010 driving some rather bland-looking monitor...

I've wanted one of those to play around with for ages and now it's finally happened! That's 9,437,184 pixels on the UltraFine. If you thought Ultra HD was good, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Yeah, I know, the GPU can only do that rez at 30 Hz but that's beside the point isn't it? (I verified it's indeed pushing 4096×2304@30Hz via SwitchResX.)

But the monitor requires an USB-C input which the poor ol' MBA cannot provide. So... how in the world?!?!?!

This little box takes Mini DisplayPort and USB inputs and fuses them together into USB-C DP Alt Mode. Bingo!

What's so awesome about this setup is that the pixel-perfect HiDPI mode is 2048×1152 (higher-than-native modes aren't possible on the 320M so that's as good as it gets), resulting in 109 ppi which is just perfect. (On my 23.8" 3840×2160 monitor, the pixel-perfect 1920×1080 HiDPI mode is only 93 ppi which drives me nuts.)

I've verified this setup works in Mavericks as well (not on this particular machine though), including the built-in speakers. Brightness control does not work but brightness can be set on a "supported" machine/macOS (Sierra or later) and the monitor remembers it.

Edit: Duh - the monitor doesn't have a camera in the first place. Silly me...

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Installing snow leopard on White Intel iMac 17” from a flash drive. Will play with it a bit then move onto Lion. The ultimate goal is to install retroarch with some vintage cores.

 

[Amethyst1]

Will play with it a bit then move onto Lion.

You can also shove an unofficial Mountain Lion install on there. I used MacPostFactor 1.0.1.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Huh, the full SL DVD image on macintoshgarden kept failing to install (via USB) on my a1208. Will download and try the drop in Leopard to SL image via USB next as it does have 10.5.8 ATM. If that fails, I'll go grab my OEM SL disk at my office and give that a whirl.

I am unsure if I have a Mountain Lion image. IIRC its Mavericks & up what I've grabbed so far and it hasn't been quite 10 years since ML was released so I doubt I'd find it on MG. Oh well, something to look forward to in the future. I'd love to get Mavericks on this thing but I think it's too old even with something like macpostfactor (which is what I used to coerce el Cal on my 1,1).

Fun times.

 

[Amethyst1]

Huh, the full SL DVD image on macintoshgarden kept failing to install (via USB) on my a1208.

What's going wrong?

 

[bobesch]

Huh, the full SL DVD image on macintoshgarden kept failing to install (via USB) on my a1208. Will download and try the drop in Leopard to SL image via USB next as it does have 10.5.8 ATM. If that fails, I'll go grab my OEM SL disk at my office and give that a whirl.

I am unsure if I have a Mountain Lion image. IIRC its Mavericks & up what I've grabbed so far and it hasn't been quite 10 years since ML was released so I doubt I'd find it on MG. Oh well, something to look forward to in the future. I'd love to get Mavericks on this thing but I think it's too old even with something like macpostfactor (which is what I used to coerce el Cal on my 1,1).

Fun times.

I'd look for a cheap SL-DVD and try to get Lion through the App-Store ...
SL to start with is the key to upgrade everything up to Mavericks, Yosemite or ElCapitan. (Beyond ElCapitan the patches provided by @dosdude1 are the far better approach.)
The DVD also holds the BootCamp-Files to start with, whenever Win10 is an option.
So it's good to have a DVD anyway ...
(That's all, what my wits can be helpfull about that)

 

[eyoungren]

So, where I stand now. Not much different than the earlier shot, I just put all the stuff back.

Last report is that my giant table is set to arrive at the end of April. Having done this three times now I have an idea of where I want/need to put stuff.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

What's going wrong?

Yanno I did not take a pic of the specific error. Best I can recollect about 40 minutes into the install, the full DVD install image would throw an error and force a restart. I just successfully installed with the Leopard to SnowLeopard upgrade dmg via USB without issue. Currently installing updates.

Anyhow, that was way more of a bear than I expected it to be. I've owned numerous versions of first gen intel imacs from 17 to 24 and never run into that before. Anyways, all good now

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

So, where I stand now. Not much different than the earlier shot, I just put all the stuff back.

View attachment 1753541

Last report is that my giant table is set to arrive at the end of April. Having done this three times now I have an idea of where I want/need to put stuff.

Where did you buy your giant table from? Will it work in another room should you relocate your setup? From reading previous posts I can see you have a pretty specific work flow.

 

[eyoungren]

Where did you buy your giant table from? Will it work in another room should you relocate your setup? From reading previous posts I can see you have a pretty specific work flow.

American Furniture Warehouse: https://www.afw.com/liveedge-rectangular-dining-table

Of course they had office furniture, but short of buying those huge bulky business office desks there was nothing that had the space I needed/wanted. So, I went with a table. I think 40" deep will work just fine, compared to the average of 20-24 I found in the office section. And it has a real nice looking wood veneer finish. It's MDF of course, but it looks nice I think.

PS. As to my workflow, yeah, I like monitors in front that are as large as I can get and smaller monitors as 'wings' that handle Finder windows and app palettes. If I can have those large too, then all the better, but at the time I was looking the 23" CDs were the only ones in my price range that weren't 'untested' or 'for parts or repair'.

There is one vendor on eBay selling a lot job of 10 30" Cinema Displays for about $850, with $250 in freight shipping. I'd love to have the money to blow on that, but I don't.

I'm pretty happy with what I have right now though.

PPS. When my daughter finally moves out (at least another 5 years) I get her room and the table and computers will all be moved up there along with the shelves of stuff I have in the garage. At that point my wife gets her living room back.

 

[Amethyst1]

I've had some more fun with the UltraFine over the holidays. And I mean it! Connected it to a bunch of older Macs. (Next step is bringing up the eGPU setup again.)

Summary, from oldest to newest Mac:

27" iMac (Late 2009) with ATI Radeon HD 4850:

- 10.6.8: Monitor is detected; several resolutions up to 3840×2160 30 Hz are selectable; screen is black
- 10.7.5: Monitor is detected; several resolutions up to 3840×2160 30 Hz are selectable; screen is black
- 10.9.5: driven at 640×480 60 Hz; only 640×480 and 1920×1440 are selectable
- 10.10.5: driven at 640×480 60 Hz; only 640×480 and 1920×1440 are selectable
- 10.11.6: driven at 3840×2160 30 Hz; comes up in 1920×1080 HiDPI

11" MacBook Air (Late 2010) with NVIDIA GeForce 320M:

- 10.6.8: driven at 640×480 60 Hz; no other modes selectable
- 10.7.5: driven at 640×480 60 Hz; SwitchResX additionally lists 1920×1440 as "not active"
- 10.8.5: driven at 640×480 60 Hz; only 640×480 and 1920×1440 are selectable
- 10.9.5: Monitor is detected; OS says it's driven at 4096×2304 30 Hz, but it's black and GUI is sluggish on internal LCD
- 10.10.5: driven at 4096×2304 30 Hz; comes up in 2048×1152 HiDPI
- 10.11.6: driven at 4096×2304 30 Hz; comes up in 2048×1152 HiDPI
- 10.12.6: driven at 4096×2304 30 Hz; comes up in 2048×1152 HiDPI; brightness slider present and working
- 10.13.6: driven at 4096×2304 30 Hz; comes up in 2048×1152 HiDPI; brightness slider present and working

13" MacBook Pro (Early 2011) with Intel HD 3000:

- 10.6.8: kernel panic due to AppleIntelSNBGraphicsFB.kext
- 10.8.5: driven at 640×480 60 Hz
- 10.9.5: driven at 640×480 60 Hz
- 10.10.5: driven at 640×480 60 Hz
- 10.11.6: driven at 3840×2160 30 Hz; comes up in 1920×1080 HiDPI
- 10.12.6: driven at 3840×2160 30 Hz; comes up in 1920×1080 HiDPI; brightness slider present and working

15" MacBook Pro Retina (Late 2013) with Intel Iris Pro 5200:

- 10.9.5: driven at 3840×2160 60 Hz; comes up in 3840×2160 HiDPI (!); other HiDPI modes selectable via RDM or SwitchResX

Looks like I'm definitely exploring uncharted territory here (and loving it). It's very interesting that the minimum "working" version of OS X differs across machines/GPUs. Fortunately I have one Mac that allows me to use the monitor on Mavericks LOL (but not at full resolution)! The built-in speakers are standard USB audio stuff and work in every configuration I've tried, back to Snow Leopard. I wonder why Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion (and to a lesser extent, Mavericks and Yosemite) don't seem to like the UF on the machines I tried.

 

[MacFoxG4]

Bought iLife '09 off of eBay and installed it on my 2006 MBP. Install went well and I played around with iMove '09 a bit by editing a video I had downloaded using PPCMC.

Other than that, I tried to see if any other Snow Leopard browsers could run Discord well. I had issues with Arctic Fox and Interweb, so I decided to try Spider Web and FF Legacy for Snow Leopard and both encountered a javascript error that prevented Discord from working.

Just for the heck of it, I booted into XP and tried a browser called My Pal and I was actually able to run Discord well with similar performance to what I got using FF Legacy on Lion (both My Pal and the Lion version of FF Legacy are based on FireFox 68, though I think My Pal has some Pale Moon code in it too), which is to say pretty good.

I attempted to make a triple boot with Lion, Snow Leopard and XP by shrinking Snow Leopard's partition and making one for Lion out of the remaining space, but Lion's Disk Utility warned me that Windows may not be bootable if I did that, so I decided to stick with the Snow Leopard and XP dual boot setup. I was going to have Lion on here for Chromium Legacy (which has given me the best Discord performance on this Mac). I think I prefer Lion over Mountain Lion for this particular Mac.

 

[Amethyst1]

I think I prefer Lion over Mountain Lion for this particular Mac.

How come?

 

[mortlocli]

Just got mavericks working on my late 2006 17 inch imac 5,1.
Still have updates to do...and testing.

 

[Amethyst1]

Still have updates to do...and testing.

Keep us posted - I'd be interested in your experience

 

[davigarma]

I just installed Windoze 8.1 on top of El Capitan with Parallels to my Imac Early 2008 (Imac 8.1). Windows 7 is out of date, 10 is heavy, and 8.1 is still getting updates and it is light and smooth. It's amazing how well it works. Although he is 12 years old, these Imacs were "thoroughbreds"

 

[Amethyst1]

I just installed Windoze 8.1 on top of El Capitan

Compared to Windows 8, El Capitan is beautiful!

 

[MacFoxG4]

How come?

I find Lion boots up faster and runs a tad more smoothly overall.

 

[mortlocli]

Keep us posted - I'd be interested in your experience

will do, amethyst1. Gonna be a slight delay..a couple of days waiting for my next data allocation. Theres one final step to do but its important to have updates sorted beforehand, otherwise theres a prob with Finder for some reason??

Just a couple of extra points:
I built the install usb stick using MaxPostFactor on an iMac running OSX 10.13.
This is my 2nd attempt - the first was with MacPostFactor which left me with an iMac running my backup running a minimal snow leopard.
Theres a massive delay in the usb stick build at a
this point here:

mntesd/Packages/BSD.pkg -> /Volumes/OS X Base System/System/Installation/Packages/BSD.pkg

..so much so that I thought it had stalled...and almost shut it down. In stead I wandered off to do other stuff and forgot about it..so was very surprised when I came back and it had gone onto the next step.

anyway mavericks is running. The final step is described as:
"AFTER all OS AND security updates, install the mavlegacygfx.pkg that was copied onto the installer drive. If you accidentally install it before doing updates, the Finder will not open!"

There a couple of glitches:
On boot up theres a rough looking screen that appears to be low res. but disappears once mavericks is loaded.
The cursor has artefacts when in movement.
The inbuilt speakers aren't recognised so theres no sound.

Hopefully the mavlegacygfx.pkg will sort those...but as I said, it will be a couple of days before I find out.

 

[EmlynDewar]

Today I disposed the battery from my early 2008 Macbook Pro
Was clearing some stuff yesterday, and found it had ballooned to enormous size...
Glad it didn't burn my house down.
Check your old batteries!

 

[davigarma]

Compared to Windows 8, El Capitan is beautiful!

Sure !. After the updates Windows 8.1 has become slow and tiresome as ever. I have mounted Linux Mint and another stinky result. You need a virtual machine with many more resources. So, I only have Mountain Lion that I am mounting now (I do not have a Snow Leopard server license). Surely with the 2 gigabytes of memory that I gave Parallels it worked very well

 

[Amethyst1]

I have mounted Linux Mint and another stinky result. You need a virtual machine with many more resources.

Have you tried one of the more lightweight (eg Xfce) editions?

, I only have Mountain Lion that I am mounting now

The lack of graphics acceleration possibly reduces the usefulness of OS X VMs quite a bit, depending on what you use them for.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

I've had some more fun with the UltraFine over the holidays. And I mean it! Connected it to a bunch of older Macs.

[...]

Looks like I'm definitely exploring uncharted territory here (and loving it). It's very interesting that the minimum "working" version of OS X differs across machines/GPUs. Fortunately I have one Mac that allows me to use the monitor on Mavericks LOL! The built-in speakers are standard USB audio stuff and work in every configuration I've tried, back to Snow Leopard. I wonder why Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion don't seem to like the UF on the machines I tried.

Might be worth also trying the nVidia Web Drivers on the Mac with an nVidia card.

 

[Amethyst1]

Might be worth also trying the nVidia Web Drivers on the Mac with an nVidia card.

Would they even take to something as old as the 320M? It's an integrated GPU to boot.