HrutkayMods
New Tinkerer
This video I introduce my iMac based Late 2004 G5 Power Macs and build one to use... I also transfer the Jive into it in the video
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2024 PowerPC Challenge
- Thread starter Branchus
- Start date
Day 15
G5 Dual revisit
So i have the dead water cooled 2.5GHz G5 dual, and an air cooled 1.8GHz G5 dual. I got a replacement power supply from eBay for the liquid cooled Dual G5 2.5GHz, but it still showed no signs of life, then discovered the coolant leak. Hence the FreeGeek salvage 1.8 dual was purchased as a boot problem project. I found out the 1.8 dual had mismatched processors, so... following the guidance of @HrutkayMods in this video, I converted the Dual 2.5 water cooled to air cooled.
Cleaned all the residue I could find off the 2.5 motherboards and put the air coolers from the 1.8 onto them. This is my bath of IPA 91% and toothbrush action residue.
So, to start, I tried the 2.5s in the 1.8 motherboard (with the assumed solder flex issue) and it powered up but no chime. I then tried the 1.8s in the 2.5 dead motherboard and it actually powered on with no chime. First life in that motherboard detected, so put the air cooled 2.5s back in the original 2.5 motherboard, and it gave me an abruptly cutoff chime, no video. Reading some other forums, they said to let it run for 10 minutes and then restart.... bingo! The video card came to life and I was able to boot off my external rugged LaCie Firewire drive.
Once booted, I confirmed both processors were actually detected.
Then I pushed its limit by trying Xbench. Somewhere in the middle of the graphics 3D OpenGL test the machine went completely silent. I thought it had died, but in fact it just went into power save mode? The front panel power light was still white, so I pressed it to turn it off and it came back to life, right back in the middle of the graphics test. Xbench completed and I was able to screen shot a comparison.
I pushed my luck by trying to select a different boot volume (10.5.8) and restarted with no video again. So, there is life, but its very inconsistent at this point. I am wondering if the performance test did a thermal shutdown because the water cooler pump is not attached? More testing to come.
G5 Dual revisit
So i have the dead water cooled 2.5GHz G5 dual, and an air cooled 1.8GHz G5 dual. I got a replacement power supply from eBay for the liquid cooled Dual G5 2.5GHz, but it still showed no signs of life, then discovered the coolant leak. Hence the FreeGeek salvage 1.8 dual was purchased as a boot problem project. I found out the 1.8 dual had mismatched processors, so... following the guidance of @HrutkayMods in this video, I converted the Dual 2.5 water cooled to air cooled.
Cleaned all the residue I could find off the 2.5 motherboards and put the air coolers from the 1.8 onto them. This is my bath of IPA 91% and toothbrush action residue.
So, to start, I tried the 2.5s in the 1.8 motherboard (with the assumed solder flex issue) and it powered up but no chime. I then tried the 1.8s in the 2.5 dead motherboard and it actually powered on with no chime. First life in that motherboard detected, so put the air cooled 2.5s back in the original 2.5 motherboard, and it gave me an abruptly cutoff chime, no video. Reading some other forums, they said to let it run for 10 minutes and then restart.... bingo! The video card came to life and I was able to boot off my external rugged LaCie Firewire drive.
Once booted, I confirmed both processors were actually detected.
Then I pushed its limit by trying Xbench. Somewhere in the middle of the graphics 3D OpenGL test the machine went completely silent. I thought it had died, but in fact it just went into power save mode? The front panel power light was still white, so I pressed it to turn it off and it came back to life, right back in the middle of the graphics test. Xbench completed and I was able to screen shot a comparison.
I pushed my luck by trying to select a different boot volume (10.5.8) and restarted with no video again. So, there is life, but its very inconsistent at this point. I am wondering if the performance test did a thermal shutdown because the water cooler pump is not attached? More testing to come.
HrutkayMods
New Tinkerer
Yeah just IPA bad suggestion... white vinegar to neutralize it then IPA to remove the vinegar.... figured that out here:
The Pismo was my first thought, because it has SCSI and USB built-in. But since I couldn't get it online to download Retrospect, I figured I would start with my 9600/350. I picked it up early last fall, but had yet to see if it worked. Now was the perfect opportunity. It has SCSI and... well, that's as far up the process tree I went.
"I am so smart! S M R T !"
I started by using the 9600 to re-catalog the DDS3 tapes from the SCSI-based HP ShureStore DAT24 tape drive. It was going well and I was ready to start pulling the files off those tapes. However, I didn't have a drive to transfer the gigabytes worth of files to. I figured I would use a USB hard drive, but after installing the USB card I bought for the 9600, it's not compatible. Probably should've tested that before I started re-cataloging the tapes.
So now what?
My revision 1 B&W G3 was my next choice. It has built-in USB and two PCI SCSI cards, one of them being SCSI-2. Perfect! But that was a no-go. The SCSI card wouldn't recognize my known-working SCSI hard drive and, therefore, likely wouldn't recognize the tape backup drive either.
Well, crap. I'm running out of ideas.
So let's take a second look at the Pismo. Despite me giving it a static IP address or using DHCP, I can't get it online. But would I could do, is transfer the Retrospect installer and the re-cataloged files and from the 9600 to the B&W G3 via Ethernet. From the B&W, I'd copy the files onto a USB hard drive. Then the USB hard drive connects to the Pismo, where I would not only have all of the files I needed, but could then have a place to offload the tapes' data to.
NOW we're cooking with gas.
I'm now trying to re-catalog three last tapes, all from one project. They're taking forever. I mean, AAAAALLL DAAAAAY to do one tape. If I can't get the files off, it's not a huge deal. It contains my friend's wedding I shot for her sometime in 1999. She already has it on DVDs and probably doesn't need to see it again, but it would be cool to pull the exported file and make a clean MP4 from it.
To do that, i'll have to figure out what version of Adobe Premier I was using. I believe it was 5.1, if I'm not mistaken.
The CHALLENGE continues...
Day 16
G5 Dual 2.5 rebuild
I tried to do some more benchmarks, but it keeps going into thermal sleep, after 10-15 seconds.
I aborted the Cinebench test, and downloaded ASD 2.5.8 and burned the CD. I could not get it to boot into Open FIrmware, but the OS version booted. Of course the CPU tests kept going into thermal sleep, so I would wake it up every now and then, hoping some cool off time would keep it running longer. It still took almost 90 minutes to get the "Passed" green.
I figured what could it hurt to completely disassemble it again, redo the thermal paste on the back of the motherboard, dowse the CPU cards in white vinegar a la @HrutkayMods and then rinse with IPA 91%. After a thorough dry time in front of fans, I reassembled everything. Powered on nice and quiet, no chime. One red light under one cpu. So waiting 10 minutes for it to warm up, then will try another restart.
I have tried to threaten by cursing in as many foreign languages as possible, but if it won't comply... Goodbye Johnny-Five.
G5 Dual 2.5 rebuild
I tried to do some more benchmarks, but it keeps going into thermal sleep, after 10-15 seconds.
I aborted the Cinebench test, and downloaded ASD 2.5.8 and burned the CD. I could not get it to boot into Open FIrmware, but the OS version booted. Of course the CPU tests kept going into thermal sleep, so I would wake it up every now and then, hoping some cool off time would keep it running longer. It still took almost 90 minutes to get the "Passed" green.
I figured what could it hurt to completely disassemble it again, redo the thermal paste on the back of the motherboard, dowse the CPU cards in white vinegar a la @HrutkayMods and then rinse with IPA 91%. After a thorough dry time in front of fans, I reassembled everything. Powered on nice and quiet, no chime. One red light under one cpu. So waiting 10 minutes for it to warm up, then will try another restart.
I have tried to threaten by cursing in as many foreign languages as possible, but if it won't comply... Goodbye Johnny-Five.
HrutkayMods
New Tinkerer
In my experience once they do thermal shutdowns like that the cards are usually pretty toasted. If the cards were not cleaned perfectly the first time around, they just start calming apart with heat cycles and shorting and stuff. I would look over the both cards as closely as I could. It may do another IPA on them and let them sit overnight to make sure they’re extra dry. There’s a chance everything still salvageable if anything the CPUs just may not be seated properly. In fact, try to push down on the heat, sinks and see if it comes on. If not, I’d also check the sockets and make sure there’s no bent pins.
A project a few years in the making. A G3 mini tower upgraded to a 500Mhz G4. I had cooling issues with the G4 for a while, which lead me to making modifications. Any time a chip or component tries to steal my fingerprints, I put a heatsink on it. Heat management in old computers was absolutely dreadful, especially on these 90's Macs. So here's the thing, "Titan". Though, he may be renamed to Ettin for reasons.
Overview, you can see what has been done. Dedicated CPU fan, additional heatsinks on the CPU cache chips, heatsink for the bus chip, as well as one for the on-board GPU and some colorful RAM heat shields. A bit overkill in some cases, but the CPU no longer has a thermal shutdown issue. I wanted to replace the heatsink on the CPU with something else entirely, but the size isn't common, Socket 7 heatsinks don't work with it. It has clips on the side much like a Socket 7, but it's smaller than Socket 7.
The bottom of the case also makes a lot of heat, as it has an entire PC on a card as well as well as a GPU. More on those in a moment.
There are two fan mount points that I put fans in, blowing air into the case and at the PCI cards. This makes sure everything down there runs cool. You can also see the dirty little secret, the fans are powered off of 4-pin Molex connections. Apple has its own connectors that go their own places, and I don't care to modify the fan connections. CPU, 2 inlet fans and the exhaust fan have been replaced with Noctuas. They run at a faster RPM, but are quieter. It's quite nice.
The GPU bothered me, so I put some heatsinks on parts, not very dignified, but I sleep better at night.
This is where the name change "Ettin" could come into play. This is an entire PC on a card, that can be swapped too with a key combo. Not only do I have a 500MHz G4 PowerPC, but a 450Mhz AMD K6-2. The card has a heatsink on its GPU, as it has an on-board GPU as well. The stock CPU heatsink and fan combo have been replaced with a copper block and slim fan, because there's not a lot of room down there.
I know that the PowerPC challenge has a lot to do with making it work, but I feel like I've got that down pretty well. Once you have a Raspberry Pi sidecar, it's basically done. Install Webone, network shares, SSH, it all falls into place. I might try to install Shuriken Tiger, I can't imagine it runs any worse than Jaguar. I just don't want to lose functionality, I heard regular tiger can be Xpostfacto-ed on to one, but you lose SCSI and some other things, which I don't want to lose. If I try it, I'll try to document it.
Overview, you can see what has been done. Dedicated CPU fan, additional heatsinks on the CPU cache chips, heatsink for the bus chip, as well as one for the on-board GPU and some colorful RAM heat shields. A bit overkill in some cases, but the CPU no longer has a thermal shutdown issue. I wanted to replace the heatsink on the CPU with something else entirely, but the size isn't common, Socket 7 heatsinks don't work with it. It has clips on the side much like a Socket 7, but it's smaller than Socket 7.
The bottom of the case also makes a lot of heat, as it has an entire PC on a card as well as well as a GPU. More on those in a moment.
There are two fan mount points that I put fans in, blowing air into the case and at the PCI cards. This makes sure everything down there runs cool. You can also see the dirty little secret, the fans are powered off of 4-pin Molex connections. Apple has its own connectors that go their own places, and I don't care to modify the fan connections. CPU, 2 inlet fans and the exhaust fan have been replaced with Noctuas. They run at a faster RPM, but are quieter. It's quite nice.
The GPU bothered me, so I put some heatsinks on parts, not very dignified, but I sleep better at night.
This is where the name change "Ettin" could come into play. This is an entire PC on a card, that can be swapped too with a key combo. Not only do I have a 500MHz G4 PowerPC, but a 450Mhz AMD K6-2. The card has a heatsink on its GPU, as it has an on-board GPU as well. The stock CPU heatsink and fan combo have been replaced with a copper block and slim fan, because there's not a lot of room down there.
I know that the PowerPC challenge has a lot to do with making it work, but I feel like I've got that down pretty well. Once you have a Raspberry Pi sidecar, it's basically done. Install Webone, network shares, SSH, it all falls into place. I might try to install Shuriken Tiger, I can't imagine it runs any worse than Jaguar. I just don't want to lose functionality, I heard regular tiger can be Xpostfacto-ed on to one, but you lose SCSI and some other things, which I don't want to lose. If I try it, I'll try to document it.
Day 17
G5 maybe later...
Swapped CPU locations, ensured they were seated all the way... still iffy on the booting, power up and it chimes, but no video... let it speed up the fans for 10 minutes and restart and I get some life...
Finally got ASD to boot OF...
But it lies and tells me its all good... so I try the thermal calibration anyway... and wait...
10 minutes... 30 minutes... can't move the mouse (expected as its CPU intensive), but no progress... One of the CPUs red light is on again...
Put it back in the scrap pile to look at another day.
G5 maybe later...
Swapped CPU locations, ensured they were seated all the way... still iffy on the booting, power up and it chimes, but no video... let it speed up the fans for 10 minutes and restart and I get some life...
Finally got ASD to boot OF...
But it lies and tells me its all good... so I try the thermal calibration anyway... and wait...
10 minutes... 30 minutes... can't move the mouse (expected as its CPU intensive), but no progress... One of the CPUs red light is on again...
Put it back in the scrap pile to look at another day.
Day 17 post 2: Hot, Pink on Pink Action!!!
I decided to pull out the Strawberry iMac tray load and benchmark it against my 3D printed mini iMac. I am still working on the mini mouse and mini keyboard (original puck mouse for scale). The mini is powered by a 4x4 inch Intel NUC running hackintoshed Ventura. I downloaded Sheep Shaver and a hard disk image of 9.0.4 and loaded up Speedometer 4.
Getting setup... not a lot of free space in my hack workspace...
Running Speedometer...
Ran both at 800x600 and the results... Pinkception wins!
and thermal pics after the benchmarks:
iMac
and mini
Hot enough for you?
I decided to pull out the Strawberry iMac tray load and benchmark it against my 3D printed mini iMac. I am still working on the mini mouse and mini keyboard (original puck mouse for scale). The mini is powered by a 4x4 inch Intel NUC running hackintoshed Ventura. I downloaded Sheep Shaver and a hard disk image of 9.0.4 and loaded up Speedometer 4.
Getting setup... not a lot of free space in my hack workspace...
Running Speedometer...
Ran both at 800x600 and the results... Pinkception wins!
and thermal pics after the benchmarks:
iMac
and mini
Hot enough for you?
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Day 18
Today I will try to do some 3D modeling refinement on my next 3D printed miniature: G3 "Blue and White" and I will be using my G4 Mac Mini.
Loaded up Lightwave 9.3 and opened my model.
The filament is closer to Bondi Blue than the "blue and white"
And here is a look from the inside/back
I have to print the handles and an internal mounting bracket for a 2.5" SSD. It has a working locking mechanism and the NUC is mounted just like a real motherboard on the fold-down side. Mini amplifier and speaker will also be internal, as well as a cage fan. Miniature CD-ROM drive? Not going to happen. I suppose I could try an SD card reader to look like a miniature ZIP drive, but I may not have the clearance from the motherboard to add that.
Today I will try to do some 3D modeling refinement on my next 3D printed miniature: G3 "Blue and White" and I will be using my G4 Mac Mini.
Loaded up Lightwave 9.3 and opened my model.
The filament is closer to Bondi Blue than the "blue and white"
And here is a look from the inside/back
I have to print the handles and an internal mounting bracket for a 2.5" SSD. It has a working locking mechanism and the NUC is mounted just like a real motherboard on the fold-down side. Mini amplifier and speaker will also be internal, as well as a cage fan. Miniature CD-ROM drive? Not going to happen. I suppose I could try an SD card reader to look like a miniature ZIP drive, but I may not have the clearance from the motherboard to add that.
HrutkayMods
New Tinkerer
Nice, I'm a heavy ProtoWeb user but I had never heard of WarpStream until now!
NOOOOO! As soon as I saw Action Retro's post I was gonna take out the G4 MDD and install it (tried to install last year, didn't work) but maybe some TechTuber will come out with a new guide on how to install.
Day 19
PPC progress
I decided to try another 1.8Ghz processor off eBay for $16, so waiting for that to arrive. Stopped by FreeGeek, their dual 1.8Ghz G5 dropped price to $20, so if it is still there next week, I will probably bring it home. No other great purchases, but did get these from the FREE pile:
iSight in box (torn), with cable and most adapters.
Global Village modem
and a GeoPort adapter
If anyone is interested in these modems, I will gladly hand them over for shipping costs.
PPC progress
I decided to try another 1.8Ghz processor off eBay for $16, so waiting for that to arrive. Stopped by FreeGeek, their dual 1.8Ghz G5 dropped price to $20, so if it is still there next week, I will probably bring it home. No other great purchases, but did get these from the FREE pile:
iSight in box (torn), with cable and most adapters.
Global Village modem
and a GeoPort adapter
If anyone is interested in these modems, I will gladly hand them over for shipping costs.
Update #6:
I apologize for the prolonged absence, I am still enjoying beefing up my iBook with the latest versions of software written for it that I could find! In fact, I've been spending the past week searching, downloading, and eventually installing dozens of programs (and that's not hyperbole!). Most of which are not found on the Macintosh Garden or Macintosh Repository, so much so that I'm actually considering uploading a lot my findings to the Garden (probably not all, I'll have to take the Garden's uploading rules into consideration just in case there's any conflict). I wish I could post as much as @phunguss has been, but this search (mainly augmented and made possible thanks to the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine to restore old links and sites I found) has exhausted much of my free time recently.
I won't bore you with listing off all of the software I installed so far, and to be honest, I don't remember all of what I installed since my last update since it was quite a lot (and I'm not even done yet!), so I'll just give the highlights as I have always been doing in this forum thread.
Previously, I had expressed dissatisfaction with the program "Mighty Mouse" from Unsanity. Another program with a plentiful amount of skins is Audion, an audio player. This one actually is available for download on the Macintosh Garden, just to clarify. It's also available from Panic's official website, along with all of its prior versions and skins. This one had a considerable amount of skins that I combed through to see which ones weren't gaudy, weird, or a just plain user interface nightmare and keep the slick ones I liked that didn't inhibit functionality. The selection was far more desirable to me than Mighty Mouse in that regard. I ended up keeping a dozen or so, enough for me to keep Audion installed on my iBook. What you see in the picture below is an archival/unzipping utility called Stuffit Expander, which I think is also available on Macintosh Garden, but this one incidentally was already left installed by the previous owner. Stuffit Expander frequently crashed, seemingly at random, when extracting files from the .sit.bin archive files. At a later date, I installed the open source (now closed source) application The Unarchiver, from the same group that made my favorite open source (now closed source) image viewer for older Macs, Xee 2.2. Version 3, which is the only version available on their website, is not open source. The Unarchiver is much more capable, stable, and far newer than the version of Stuffit Expander provided by the previous owner. The Unarchiver can be seen in the last picture below. Here is a picture of the progress I made in sorting through which Audion skins I wanted and didn't want (Audion is in the top left corner):
Continuing with expanding my music library on the iBook, I sought out .sid files and a .sid player to play "Commodore64 music". The best option was the open source SIDPLAY, which fell out of development in 2016. Version 3.4.1 is the latest that is compatible with OS X Tiger. Their website is still active, too. You can download a version of SIDPLAY compatible with your system here: http://www.sidmusic.org/sidplay/mac/. The High Voltage SID Collection offers a sizable collection of .sid files for you to download:
www.hvsc.c64.org
. I got their entire library as a ~70MB .7z file. It wasn't the latest #80, it was #79 I downloaded, which came in a .7z (7zip) file that couldn't be unzipped by Stuffit Expander, which is why I took the liberty to install The Unarchiver to the iBook. During the lengthy process (it took about 10 minutes to extract the thousands of files contained within the .7z file), the iBook's fans ramped up (I had configured G4FanControl to activate the fans once temps reached 49 degrees Celsius) and practically all of my RAM was allocated to The Unarchiver. Finder couldn't even open a new window, I just had to sit there and watch as my iBook stressed itself to decompress this .7z file. The Unarchiver left such an impact on my iBook that I had to restart it just to get it back in order, and even then the iBook had to think before executing my command to restart. What a doozy, but a humorous one to observe. About 434MB worth of over a thousand files were extracted from the ~70MB .7z archive. On my 2017 MacBook Pro (non-touchbar), unzipping this archive was near-instant. Here is a picture of SIDPLAY 3.4.1 behind The Unarchiver during its process of unzipping the archive of .sid files:
You'll notice that both pictures list the date as "Thursday", but the first picture was taken on the 11th, whereas this one was taken on the 18th.
I apologize for the prolonged absence, I am still enjoying beefing up my iBook with the latest versions of software written for it that I could find! In fact, I've been spending the past week searching, downloading, and eventually installing dozens of programs (and that's not hyperbole!). Most of which are not found on the Macintosh Garden or Macintosh Repository, so much so that I'm actually considering uploading a lot my findings to the Garden (probably not all, I'll have to take the Garden's uploading rules into consideration just in case there's any conflict). I wish I could post as much as @phunguss has been, but this search (mainly augmented and made possible thanks to the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine to restore old links and sites I found) has exhausted much of my free time recently.
I won't bore you with listing off all of the software I installed so far, and to be honest, I don't remember all of what I installed since my last update since it was quite a lot (and I'm not even done yet!), so I'll just give the highlights as I have always been doing in this forum thread.
Previously, I had expressed dissatisfaction with the program "Mighty Mouse" from Unsanity. Another program with a plentiful amount of skins is Audion, an audio player. This one actually is available for download on the Macintosh Garden, just to clarify. It's also available from Panic's official website, along with all of its prior versions and skins. This one had a considerable amount of skins that I combed through to see which ones weren't gaudy, weird, or a just plain user interface nightmare and keep the slick ones I liked that didn't inhibit functionality. The selection was far more desirable to me than Mighty Mouse in that regard. I ended up keeping a dozen or so, enough for me to keep Audion installed on my iBook. What you see in the picture below is an archival/unzipping utility called Stuffit Expander, which I think is also available on Macintosh Garden, but this one incidentally was already left installed by the previous owner. Stuffit Expander frequently crashed, seemingly at random, when extracting files from the .sit.bin archive files. At a later date, I installed the open source (now closed source) application The Unarchiver, from the same group that made my favorite open source (now closed source) image viewer for older Macs, Xee 2.2. Version 3, which is the only version available on their website, is not open source. The Unarchiver is much more capable, stable, and far newer than the version of Stuffit Expander provided by the previous owner. The Unarchiver can be seen in the last picture below. Here is a picture of the progress I made in sorting through which Audion skins I wanted and didn't want (Audion is in the top left corner):
Continuing with expanding my music library on the iBook, I sought out .sid files and a .sid player to play "Commodore64 music". The best option was the open source SIDPLAY, which fell out of development in 2016. Version 3.4.1 is the latest that is compatible with OS X Tiger. Their website is still active, too. You can download a version of SIDPLAY compatible with your system here: http://www.sidmusic.org/sidplay/mac/. The High Voltage SID Collection offers a sizable collection of .sid files for you to download:
HVSC - Commodore 64 music for the masses!
You'll notice that both pictures list the date as "Thursday", but the first picture was taken on the 11th, whereas this one was taken on the 18th.
Day 20: Reminisce the old days
A few years back someone was cleaning out their storage and happened upon an Apple IIe and IIc, and gave them to me. I had to buy the power supply for the IIc from eBay, and disassembled them both before powering them on. I had some old floppy disks from the 1980s in High School, so I found the wiring diagram and ADTPro to transfer them to my modern mac. I haven't thought of those in years...
So for the PPC Challenge, I looked around for Apple II emulators... sure there is nice web based one where you can play online, but I wanted a PPC native one. Virtual][ is a pretty good emulator, but their website is focused on the present and they don't have an old PPC version there. I did find one on the Way Back Machine for PPC labeled v5.8.5, and it does load, but extremely slowly to boot the first time. Running on my Mac Mini G4 1.42GHz. (I see v3.5.1 is on Macintosh Repository, but the website appears to be migrating: "Sorry, we're currently migrating files in to the new server. Most files will be available around January 21st, 2024.")
Once running, I loaded up some old disk images and had a look around.
A program I wrote with a high school history teacher, called "Badger Bits & Bytes" was a trivia game based on Wisconsin history (almost 40 years ago).
Cavern Lander was my take on Moon Lander written in Apple Basic (ProDos 3?)
It worked in mono or color
And for some reason I seemed to have some early Pr0n disks... Strip Poker and something called a "Santa disk"
A few years back someone was cleaning out their storage and happened upon an Apple IIe and IIc, and gave them to me. I had to buy the power supply for the IIc from eBay, and disassembled them both before powering them on. I had some old floppy disks from the 1980s in High School, so I found the wiring diagram and ADTPro to transfer them to my modern mac. I haven't thought of those in years...
So for the PPC Challenge, I looked around for Apple II emulators... sure there is nice web based one where you can play online, but I wanted a PPC native one. Virtual][ is a pretty good emulator, but their website is focused on the present and they don't have an old PPC version there. I did find one on the Way Back Machine for PPC labeled v5.8.5, and it does load, but extremely slowly to boot the first time. Running on my Mac Mini G4 1.42GHz. (I see v3.5.1 is on Macintosh Repository, but the website appears to be migrating: "Sorry, we're currently migrating files in to the new server. Most files will be available around January 21st, 2024.")
Once running, I loaded up some old disk images and had a look around.
A program I wrote with a high school history teacher, called "Badger Bits & Bytes" was a trivia game based on Wisconsin history (almost 40 years ago).
Cavern Lander was my take on Moon Lander written in Apple Basic (ProDos 3?)
It worked in mono or color
And for some reason I seemed to have some early Pr0n disks... Strip Poker and something called a "Santa disk"
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Here's my attempt in this year's PowerPC Challenge. I intended on using the iBook G4 again. But for some reason, the wifi card aka. AirPort Extreme card stopped working and I didn't want to bother buying a replacement card for it. So, I brought out the 866 megahertz PowerBook G4 12-inch instead. And, it was great to put it to the test to see what tasks it would do. I was amazed that it can still go on Google Docs with little issues. I've written a comic script on it.
https://youtu.be/Zc1jyjPoY3M
https://youtu.be/MTwqCXagdL4
And yes, that DVD got finished. Thus, ending the PowerBook G4's service. Expect to see me again on Marchintosh as I have something special planned for that month.
https://youtu.be/ZCmgHMDrcxo
https://youtu.be/Zc1jyjPoY3M
https://youtu.be/MTwqCXagdL4
And yes, that DVD got finished. Thus, ending the PowerBook G4's service. Expect to see me again on Marchintosh as I have something special planned for that month.
https://youtu.be/ZCmgHMDrcxo
There's another emulator, that Apple produced back in the early PPC days. Gus 1.0b4. Emulates a ROM 3 IIgs. Even runs the IIgs self-test routine, obviously saying "System Failed" at the end, since the hardware isn't recognized by it.