2026 PowerPC Challenge, is it happening?

[Certificate of Excellence]

"We shall see what we will see." lil' trivia bit, quote from what movie?

Victoria?

edit: I think I'll try new thermal compound for the first time on the QS when the MDD slides in. It's so nice that each time I've needed to replace my main OS9 graphics suite machine, I've had an upgrade backup ready and waiting to bring online. Looks like I've finally reached the end of the line some twenty years later: DA466 -> QS Dual 1GHz -> MDD '03

I've not deviated from AS5 for all my macs except the few instances where I used 2mm thermal pads. AS5 works really well for me. I thought about trying Grizzly Kryonaut as it does test as superior but what Ive read is that it is really stiff and hard to spread. I seem to have squirelled away a lifetime supply of partially used AS5 tubes around here so I've not been too tempted as of late.

I dont use OS9 really but the machine I have it on is a QS ... I have a separate installation on an ext fw drive too. Pretty snappy box & OS.
I can see how folks like classic macos for productivity and photography work.

 

[Trash80toG4]

My recollection of my Mac mini 1.42 is that it runs native OS9 (installed via the Mac9Lives CD) pretty well, but is a bit sluggish in Classic mode in OSX. It seemed mostly a matter of the slow HD, which hampers OSX rather more than it seems to slow OS9.

Yep, I thought I recalled them getting it running on a mini. Was almost tempted into trying it on the 12" AlBook. But for the speed hit, I'd probably prefer to have menus on its 1024x768 panel and 1600x1200 as my work screen than the mini's 1920x1200 on only a single screen. A 320 pixel strip on the wide screen side of things is pretty much wasted IMO. 4:5 workspace is far superior for my work anyway. 1024x768 on the side is over twice the screen real estate as that less than what I would consider useful strip of pixels on a wide screen.

 

[Trash80toG4]

Victoria?

Nope, not the one I'm thinking of, but maybe there too. Think Erica Eleniak in an action movie.

Got linkage for your ASS of choice? Heh! Now that I look again with readers on, I'm thinking Arctic Silver #5?

 

[phunguss]

Nope, not the one I'm thinking of, but maybe there too. Think Erica Eleniak in an action movie.

Got linkage for your ASS of choice? Heh! Now that I look again with readers on, I'm thinking Arctic Silver #5?

Under Siege (Steven Segal)?

 

[Trash80toG4]

Yep! He was still spry and not such a head case at that point in his career. I think it was a Gary Busy line?

Man, am I ever exhausted! Moved the MDD from my temporary bench over the futon onto the rolling filing station that lives in front of the TelCo rack. All done single/wrong handed. Recovering from shoulder surgery sucks, then again Workman's Comp is paying me to waste away this toy time when I'm not doing PT sessions at home or there. Moving all the crap out of the way to roll the cart out there and back was the worst of it, but I did get the main workstation area and more vacuumed up while I was at it!

And now to order the pair of DVI -> HDMI cables needed to hook it up to the new 4K HDMI USB3 KVM Switch.

 

[PowerRCP-G3]

Here is what happened on Day 9.

Day 9: I bought an IDE to SD card adapter for my Power Mac G4 and have done some PCSX testing.

 

[iBookSpeedster88]

It seems that interest in PowerPC is waning...

The 2022 and 2023 and 2024 challenges were all right on time with an announcement from the site founder Branchus, but the 2025 challenge was delayed by several days but still received the usual announcement from Branchus...
and now the 2026 challenge is not even happening at all!

Well... it seems that the members of the Tinker Different forum have taken it upon themselves to do the PowerPC Challenge anyways.

I find that even the MacRumors PowerPC sub-forum has essentially boiled down to only talking about getting PPCPorts and MacPorts to work and the occasional mumbo jumbo of jerryrigging a Debian Sid installation. Big whoop.

But, I am still here! Even if I don't contribute to forums as often as most others (I'm the same way in real life), I am no poser! My PowerPC Macs are still with me (hopefully for a long time, I'd rather not any of them fail) and I shall be sharing with Tinker Different my challenges in showing to the world what can still be done with these machines in this modern era!

Before I begin with the 2026 PowerPC Challenge, I want to share with the forum some of the more notable things I did in 2025 with my PowerPC Macs that I believe would be of interest to you all:

This is but a sneak peek for now

 

[phunguss]

Day 10 so far...

I dug around and found some spare parts for G5 towers (screws, drive sled, fans from the drive bay, etc). I Reinstalled the dual 2.3GHz processors in the Unit E (that was previously working fine, then crashed). MLB and CPUs passed.

So trying to run the Thermal Calibration, but it looks like it may have frozen on CPU1.

I will get started on the cleanup to my 2.5GHz Quad G5 Liquid Cooling System.

Other possibilities this challenge:

• Upgrade a 6100 to G3
• Fix a dead iMac G4
• Test out a 7300
• Fix a MDD that is not booting
• Open up an eMac to clean it out and other maintenance
• Revisit some iBook 12" projects
• 3D print a display frame in retro platinum to convert iBook 14" LCDs to VGA monitors for old beige macs

 

[Trash80toG4]

Wanted to get the spec on the JackHammer in the Radius 81/110. Managed to get the side panel off and pull the card. Meanwhile I found next year's PPC challenge project . . . unfortunately.

Had a serious flood in the apartment a few years back and a minor one not long after. It doesn't look like the water made it over the gunnels of the big metal box and luckily water doesn't seem to have gotten up through the pressure fittings for its feets:

Thank heaven above that the Radius Thunder IV GX 1600 sitting on the bottom of the case in the pink bubblewrap shows no sighs of corrosion or damage at all! The HPV2/4 was sitting safe on top of that and the JackHammer was up in the top slot. Water level doesn't appear to have come anywhere near the logic board, but I have a backup for that. Thankfully, none of the Accelerators or PDS passthru adapters for the project were stored in the can at the time.

I'll be looking for the FWB Hammer SCSI-2 card to bring it up to the full System 100 spec. The JackHammer on hand is from 1991/1992, so not sure which level of NuBus it supports?

Here's why it's postponed until next year. I'll be able to lift the Luggable off its outrigger shelf well before then, but there is no friggin' way I'm humping that Macintosh Portrait Display off its support on the AppleDisplayUnit™ until my shoulder's fully recovered. Or humping that tank of a Clone off the floor and onto the bench for that matter.

note: I post images full size for a couple of days and then thumbnail them, LOVE the unlimited edit window here for stuff like that!


Breaking News!!!! ______________________________________________________

OMG! It IS a battery bomb! Thanks for that suggestion in your reply and getting me to take a second look @phunguss. I owe you one. It's tough for me to get down there to look/take pics, so I pulled the spare board out for a look first.

Sure enough, look what sits directly above all that rust that I can't see inside that case without disassembly. So managed to take a look:

I'll have to have someone come in to get that thing out of there! I have a bottle of MaxellBOMBS sitting, just waiting for one of them to blow and none has. If I find one in there I am gonna be so p****d at myself!

Thank heavens for scrounging spare logic boards over the years! Thankfully there's not all that much going on in that drip zone, it looks like a salvage job might work out?

TMS44400DJ-7 is Fast Page DRAM, they used that crap in the 8100 in place of VRAM? Memory banks should be easy enough to noodle out, there's no schematics for the 8100 out there?

 

[phunguss]

Meanwhile I found next year's PPC challenge project . . . unfortunately.

That is just case rust, no damage on the motherboard? Almost looks like a battery bomb. I love the Jenga pile from floor to ceiling. Good thing that case didn't rust more... You may want to put that side panel back on for vertical support of that stack!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Time has been limited with everything going on around here. I did manage to get a Netac 120Gb SSD into an Orico drive sled and installed into my a1047 PMG5 (2.0Ghz dual cpu, 4gb ram max - the neutered PCI model) and partitioned for a Shuriken 10.4.12 and Sorbet 10.5.9 install. Ive gotten Shurien installed with the Sierra theme along with some neat apps.

Funny story (to me anyways) I dont spend all that much time in Tiger - 99% of Daily driving exists in Sorbet, MX23, El Cap, or Sequoia. That was part of the allure of getting the most updated Tiger onto a reasonably fast dual cpu G5 and having some fun with that - seeing what I could do with a 20+ year old Macos. That and if I ever get my hands on a cube, thats what it will be running Anyways, speaking of fun, I was using INTHEBOX and was giving the ITB instances custom icons for their dedicated, intended use. These icons for whatever reason had a box around them and I was trying to figure out the root of that fuginess so I was in syspref hunting/thinking that dock shadowing was turned off or something along those lines causing that fill in. Anyways, while in accessibility, I mustve accidentally maxed contrast to 100% because in 2.5 seconds ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing! I was presented with this lol.

With contrast maxed out, the enhance contrast slider was invisible. I had no idea what had happened and what had caused this was invisible to me. I initially assumed contrast (I mean thats exactly what it looks like lol) so I ctrl-option-apple+8 but that only changed whacko colors selection #1 to whacko colors selection #2. I then suspected the Sierra theme as I have experienced repeated instability and gui borking weirdness with it bundled with Sorbet on an a1117 specifically. Fun times. It took me some time futzing around vanilla Tiger on an ibook G4 to realize what I did and correct the issue - me and my fast mousing tendencies. Figured it out but holy heck, I was getting close to calling it quits and reinstalling which for anyone installing Shuriken knows, to do so, it entails like a bazillion entries of your password which gets really old really fast. Anyways, its all figure out now.

Im trying to figure out how to get discord lite to work. I picked up the most recent build on github and it installs fine but I get a greyed out reCAPTCHA window that is useless and unfortunately gatekeeps entry so I cant get it. Anyone know a fix for this?

Fun times

and it is no big surprise that the 2026 PowerPC Challenge has dropped off here and you are right, it also has dropped off at MacRumors>PowerPC Subforum. Most of the folks around here are into beige & compact macs and despite the broadening of the event to include 68k, I think most of the 68k crowd aims for Marchintosh vs the January PPCC. Whatevs, we're having fun with it. That's all that matters.

 

[Trash80toG4]

That is just case rust, no damage on the motherboard? Almost looks like a battery bomb. I love the Jenga pile from floor to ceiling. Good thing that case didn't rust more... You may want to put that side panel back on for vertical support of that stack!

Yep, no apparent damage to the board . . . nope BATTERY BOMB see above! . . . I have a second one for backup anyway. Side panel's already back in place. And thanks, have I posted pics of the AppleDisplayUnit™ over here yet?

Took a shot of the original mechanical KVM switch from the mid-nineties. Thinking of starting a topic about my 40 year love affair with the damn things. Still worked last time I used it. It supports the swing out shelf for the mouse pad. The swing out 'BookShelf sits on the next level. Baseline setup was G4/Book/Dock at the twist of the knob. I could hook up anything on the unit in lieu of the DuoDock. Umbilicals included power, serial and network cables.

Umbilicals are all braided and color coded of course!



edit: Quadra 950's all plastic at flood level, no?

 

[phunguss]

Day 10 part 2 - more G5

I decided to tackle the LCS from the Quad G5. Warning: I am not a user (I am a Tinkerer).

I removed the hose clamps.

Since there was crust showing at some of the rubber to aluminum joints and I could not get the rubber to come off, I cut it off. Yuck!

After draining what I could get out of it, I ran regular hot water through it to see what else would clear. The radiator lets water flow, but I am guessing there is some restrictions in there. I will have to see what kind of solvents could remove that gunk.

Here is the sediment from the original drained fluid (yellowish).

Look at all those failure points in a closed loop system. Add the two CPU interfaces and the drain/fill plug and that makes 19 failure points.

Here are the disassembled CPU coolers.

Lots of sediment in there too.

I will use my ultrasonic dental tool to clean what I can, but I may have to invest in one of those 10 liter ultrasonic cleaners.