2024 PowerPC Challenge

Gus

New Tinkerer
Jan 1, 2024
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Hi everyone! Also new here, thanks for approving my account. The G5 has been up and running since Monday, rock solid as always.
Even though this is the slowest Power Mac G5 ever (Late 2004, iMac derived board), with some patience it even does Youtube (360p).
Writing this post from the G5...
 

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xzdx

New Tinkerer
Jan 2, 2024
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2
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This is cool, I thought this died off when IMNC retired in 2019.

I guess I'll be attending this? I have work I do with powerpc anyways, its integrated into my workspace. Might as well show people what I do somewhere lol.
 
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xzdx

New Tinkerer
Jan 2, 2024
2
2
1
Hi everyone! Also new here, thanks for approving my account. The G5 has been up and running since Monday, rock solid as always.
Even though this is the slowest Power Mac G5 ever (Late 2004, iMac derived board), with some patience it even does Youtube (360p).
Writing this post from the G5...
If you look up how to watch twitch streams on ppc mac and do the same for yt you can do 720p
 
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cjsebes

Tinkerer
Oct 22, 2021
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I think I've found a worthy project for the PowerPC Challenge.

IMG_2074.JPG
Earlier this year, I picked up a 9600/350 at a Mac repair facility here in New Jersey that was downsizing. They were getting rid of much of their display pieces. and I wasn't going to pass up this gorgeous machine for $60. It even has a built-in Zip100 drive!

Anyway, many years ago, I thought it was a good idea to back up my projects to DDS-3 tape. Of course, some idiot whom shall remain nameless, threw out the tape drive and software in a blind moment of sheer and utter stupidity. Since then, I've (I mean, the whomever that idiot was) wanted to try to recover the files.

With an old copy of Retrospect, a (hopefully working) DDS-3 tape drive, and my old tapes, I'm going to give it the ol' "hold my beer" try and see if I can't recover these files and store them on something more easily accessed. I don't have high hopes, but figured it's as good a time as any to give it a shot.

I believe I have all of the cables I need. Funny how you throw out a bunch of stuff you think you'll never need again, only to be like, "Dammit. I needed that." When you have a small house like I do, it happens often. Of course, now I'm cramming it full of old computers.

Well, here we go!

I wonder if the 9600 even powers on. :unsure: Further bulletins as events warrant.
 

phunguss

Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
229
214
43
Stillwater, MN
Day 3

Long day at work, 100 mile commute, so not a lot of time to play tonight. Lets try to relax. I have some .avi files, wondering if VLC for ppc will play them.

Lacie-RUgged.jpg

Installed VLC 0.9.10 on 10.4 but they would not play. It may be due to the Rage128 Pro graphics card? Now that my Sawtooth is a Dual-500MHz G4, I cloned the 1GHz FP 10.5 installation over to my Sawtooth using my handy Rugged LaCie drive. It has dual 800 FW and a USB3 port. Great for moving legacy stuff as well as FW800 on mid 2010 iMacs and USB3 to anything else newer without a FireWire port.

10-5-cloned.png

10-5-updates.png

Got 10.5.8 running, did some system updates, installed newer VLC 2.0.10, and 3IVX codec. Video will play in QuickTime with no sound, .avi files play sound in VLC with no video. Both at once? QT playing the video and VLC playing the audio... I get about 1 frame every 2-3 seconds. Not watchable.

Picture 7.png

Maybe I won't relax watching some old .avi files....

[Edit 1] The system was lagging because of Spotlight trying to index the drives... added all drives to privacy, then I get 3-5fps when running VLC/QT together.

[Edit 2] Not to be defeated... ffmpeg or handbrake for PPC? Yes it exists... a bit slow on the Dual-500, 12 hours looks like... so I converted on my iMac12,2 with 8 threads in about 10 minutes. If I lower my screen resolution and go full screen with QT, I get 4-10fps with audio on an .mp4 file. Yay!

Handbrake PPC
HandbrakePPC.jpg


Handbrake Intel:
HandbrakeIntel.jpg


Sawtooth QT playback:
Picture 10.png
 
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cjsebes

Tinkerer
Oct 22, 2021
47
53
18
image.jpg
It’s alive! 4GB SCSI hard drive sounds great. DDS tape backup is connected and recognized. Downloaded Retrospect from Macintosh Garden over my fiber connection, albeit at only about 180k/sec. But it’s working beautifully. I’m trying to make a video about it. Should put anyone to sleep.
 

iBookSpeedster88

New Tinkerer
Jan 1, 2024
17
24
3
Update #1:

I used the iBook G4 for an hour and a half, and the battery drained from 95% to 53% at the end of my session. I mostly listened to music. The iBook's speakers don't deliver bass that well in the slightest, and frequently drown out the sound of other instruments when bass is present in a track.

I'm still in the process of backing up and removing the goodies left behind on this iBook from the previous owner and installing my own programs for this challenge. The picture below shows you some of the programs left installed, such as Nanosaur 2, Stuffit 10, and Microsoft Office 2004. I've installed a number of software such as VLC Media Player (also pictured below), iResize, Cog, MilkyTracker, and others. I'm a big tracker music guy, my library is over 600MB in size, so I must be able to play .mod, .xm, and .s3m files to get more enjoyment out of this Mac. Thankfully, there's several options to choose from, most of which satisfy me, so I'm set there.

The program "Xee" is leaps and bounds ahead of Preview in my opinion, and it's one of the first pieces of software I install on any older Mac. Quick Look on Leopard and Snow Leopard, for example, doesn't automatically resize like on newer versions of OS X, and we know Tiger doesn't have Quick Look at all, so Xee does wonders in giving older Macs an excellent image viewer. It tells you the file size, date modified, and image resolution within the window, foregoing the need to CMD + i to see file details, and you can navigate to other images in a folder from the keyboard by using CMD + the arrow keys. You can also delete any image straight from the program by doing CMD + delete on the keyboard as well. Phenomenal software that's surprisingly not on the Macintosh Garden or Macintosh Repository. It's made by the same team that made Unarchiver, and you can still get an older compatible version on various websites.

ibook 1.PNG


When using iResize version 3.1.1 (pictured below), I encountered difficulty, not because the program is hard to use, but because part of the program's functionality has ceased its intended operation. I wrote about it in the picture you see below at the time of using the application. I had tried to use it to perform a resize of an image, but the third window that's meant to appear to control the level of resizing refuses to show. Does it not work at a 1024x768 resolution? I would think that the third window, if there were not enough horizontal space for it to spawn in, would simply appear behind any of the other two auto-populating windows, but it didn't. Even after rearranging the present windows to theoretically make room for the third window to appear after pressing CMD + 3, it didn't populate still. Unless I come across a solution or someone else has a solution, I won't be able to use iResize for now, which is a bummer, because it seemed like a very good time-saving tool and another way to bring even more usability to a PowerPC Mac, since bulk resizing has been a standard native feature in Preview in modern macOS for years now.

ibook 2.PNG
 
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iBookSpeedster88

New Tinkerer
Jan 1, 2024
17
24
3
Update #2:

So, it was iResize 3.1.1 (released in 2010) that was at fault. It bugged out when realizing it was being used on a 1024x768 screen. I was able to find a newer version of iResize online (version 3.2.5 from 2013) and it's still compatible with both Tiger and PowerPC, awesome! The good news is that this version (also not available on MacintoshGarden, only 3.1.1 is, the version I originally downloaded and featured in my previous post) works properly and fixes that incompatible resolution issue and actually displays the third window, allowing me to use it to its fullest capabilities and perform its feature of bulk resizing of images on this iBook. In this version of iResize, there's a new setting that I can toggle to I guess "let it know" that I'm using it on a smaller screen, so it readjusts accordingly, confirming that it was a display resolution problem in version 3.1.1 that I used. Here is iResize version 3.2.5, with the third window present which was missing previously on 3.1.1:

ibook 3.PNG


I also installed "Downsize", an alternative to iResize that performs the same function of bulk image resizing and compression. I think I prefer Downsize over iResize, but Downsize claims to be trial software and carries a $19.95 price tag according to Stunt Software's website, even though the software hasn't been updated since 2010. Version 2.7.2 is still the latest version. It's not even featured on their website's front page anymore. I had to select purchase in the program's menu, which opened Safari and gave me the URL to where one could purchase Downsize. The website's front page does not link you anywhere to that old store page (which is still online), so you had to have known this URL to even access the purchase page for Downsize (for the record, I downloaded Downsize from a different website, so I didn't use the official website to download). Typing in the URL in to a web browser warps you to an older deprecated webpage that looks like it hasn't been updated in years, hence why upon a cursory glance it seems like there's no way to access this part of the site without prior knowledge of its existence. However, when clicking "Support" in the top right corner on Stunt Software's homepage, you are taken to this store to purchase Downsize, among other programs that are also noticeably absent from the homepage. Here is the old store's webpage link in question, which is still online: https://stuntsoftware.com/downsize/
 

phunguss

Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
229
214
43
Stillwater, MN
Day 4

Dual G5 Towers today

If memory serves me, I once purchased a Dual G5 many years ago and stripped the guts to build a hackintosh. I think I gifted that case to one of my children and then later purchased another empty case. The case I originally gutted had a liquid cooling system, and it was just way too crazy to throw away, so I kept it for a future water cooling project. Never happened, I still have it laying around. Now that I am in collector/restore mode, no more gutting.
empty-case.jpg

Of the 14 G5 tower models produced, supposedly only 3 ever had water cooling. All 3 were Dual G5 2.5GHz. Hmmm... both my cases have that designation, but as I said, I don't remember if this empty case is the one I gutted or a secondary one. Either way, the model looks the same as my Dead PSU unit.
dead-PSU.jpg


So, here is a visual comparison of the Liquid Cooled Dual G5 radiators I have in my possession:
Left side is a radiator big enough for a small engine. Pumps were directly on the CPUs. I would call that 16 copper heat pipes? The frame is long gone, so this is incomplete, but still awesome to look at!
Right side is probably the newer model ones, as the pipes are aluminum and thicker, less tubes, fancier radiator.
Liquid-Dual-G5.jpg

fronts
feed the grill.jpg


So I am pulling the dead PSU out to see if I can revive it with my limited electronics skills. Full of bunnies.
PSU-bunnies.jpg


A common reported problem with the liquid cooled Dual G5 were leaks. There are no apparent leaks or spill marks anywhere, the CPU daughter cards look clean with no residue, so lets just hope the dust bunnies shorted something. I also see a lot of info that says the PSU was rated at 750-1000W depending on model... this particular one is listed as 600W (single G5?). So maybe the previous owner already swapped it and the system drew too much and blew this one as well?

[Edit 1] The fuse in the PSU was blown, so soldered in a replacement and upon plugging in power, it sparked, so something is amiss in the PSU. I will stop by my local FreeGeek tomorrow and see if they have any treasures... maybe another G5 tower project laying around? Otherwise I have to decide if it is worth the chance to get a replacement PSU from eBay and pray the motherboard and CPUs are good.
 
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Dana Does Stuff

New Tinkerer
Oct 19, 2021
5
7
3
Minor clarification to rules but figure it is fine. The Apple Network Server doesn’t fit into the definition but does fit the vibe. I assume it will be ok?
I have an ANS as well and on the Mac Yak livestream, we pretty much accepted them as part of the challenge, if people want to try!
 

Pedro Passamani

New Tinkerer
Jan 4, 2024
4
9
3
Power Mac G3 Upgrades
I recently did some upgrades to one of my Blue and White G3s (a 350 MHz Revision 2). Added a fourth 256 MB stick of RAM to bring the machine up to its max 1 GB, and swapped the stock 16 MB Rage 128 graphics card for a 64 MB Radeon 7000.

The system
G3 (3).jpg


The new card up-close
G3 (4).jpg


The specs
G3 (5).jpg


Now, the most eagle-eyed of you might have noticed the Sun Microsystems label on the Radeon. That's because I took it from a Sun Fire V200 SPARC server. The XVR-100, as branded by Sun, is pretty much a Mac Radeon 7000, the only differences being the extra VRAM (64 MB versus 32 MB) and the lack of S-Video out on the Sun.

Being so similiar, I used Graphicclerator (on the G3 itself) to flash ATI's official Radeon 7000 Mac Edition ROM that I got off The Mac Elite. The whole process went very smoothly and worked first try. I then used a piece of software called PCI Extreme to enable Quartz Extreme over PCI and the G3 is now zipping through Tiger's graphical features.
 

Pedro Passamani

New Tinkerer
Jan 4, 2024
4
9
3
My next project
I've gotten my hands on a second XVR-100 (also 64 MB) that I'll use for next project: Trying to get it to work natively, without needing to flash a Mac ROM.

As some of you might now, Sun created and used Open Firmware on their SPARC systems, and that means Sun cards have a degree of compatibility with PowerPC Macs. I installed it in the G3 (without flashing) to see how it would go. To my surprise, the result was better than expected:

G3 (9).jpg


But, when OS X started loading, the graphics were all garbled:

G3 (10).jpg


G3 (11).jpg


G3 (12).jpg


It gave me video, at least! As we can see, the card actually was detected by the system as a display output device (the VRAM amount was wrong though).

I dropped the Rage back in to take a clear look at System Profiler:

G3 (8).jpg


Pretty much the only difference between ATI's and Sun's ROM is that when using the Sun ROM the card reports itself as SUNW,375-3181. Everything else (Vendor, Device ID, Revision ID) is the same.

Now, what about the garbled graphics? As far as I can tell, it's because of missing drivers/kexts. I had the exact same issue happen when I tried running vanilla 10.4 on a 2005 iBook, which lacks drivers/kexts for the Mobility Radeon 9550.

I checked that by booting a Tiger install CD and looking at the System Profiler. It reported "Kext not loaded" under the card's information.

I've now been trying to edit some kexts (ATIRadeon.kext and others) to see if I can add the chipset model and other stuff to get it working. I haven't found a lot of information out there about other people trying this before, so I'm open to any ideas.

PS: I know it says 12/16/2023 as the date, but as this is an ongoing project, I'd hope it qualifies for the challenge.
 
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phunguss

Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
229
214
43
Stillwater, MN
Day 5

I found a dual G5 PSU on eBay for under $25 delivered, so hoping that works out. It should arrive next week. The fuse I cobbled in just blew immediately, photo here:
Fuses.png


So I headed to FreeGeek Minneapolis to see what kind of treasures I could find....

Since the Sawtooth has a zip drive built in, 3x zip100 disks = $6
3Zip100-6dollars.jpg


The Dual G5 only has 2GB of ram, but 6 empty slots... so 4x1GB = $4
4GPC3200-4dollars.jpg


I don't have any apple branded Airport base, so grabbed an extreme gen1/gen2 for $5:
AE12-5dollars.jpg


I already have an AppleTV that I loaded 10.5 Leopard on with an SSD, so grabbed another one to keep original, $10:
ATV-10dollars.jpg


And the last find I got in the "misc retro converters" for $1. New in box listed on eBay for just shy of $100.
Mini-ADB-1dollar.jpg


Now I can use that classic kb and mouse with any PPC mac.
 

cjsebes

Tinkerer
Oct 22, 2021
47
53
18
Got 10.5.8 running, did some system updates, installed newer VLC 2.0.10, and 3IVX codec. Video will play in QuickTime with no sound, .avi files play sound in VLC with no video. Both at once? QT playing the video and VLC playing the audio... I get about 1 frame every 2-3 seconds. Not watchable.

View attachment 14433
Maybe I won't relax watching some old .avi files....

Phungus, for AVI files, give one of these a shot.

Perian:

Flip4Mac
 
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phunguss

Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
229
214
43
Stillwater, MN

V.Yakob

Tinkerer
Sep 6, 2023
63
26
18
Hey!

I want to tell about my Power Macintosh 9600/300.

PM9600-1.png

The plugs have not yet been installed. Soon I should receive a parcel in which the SCSI Zip Drive will be in an unknown state, after checking the zip, this computer will be fully assembled.

Inside is:
BlueSCSIv2 (12.2022) + 128 GB SDXC Card, where there are HD images with different Mac OS and CD images with games
Cisco Aironet 350 series
2-Port USB card with OPTi chip
ATI Radeon 7000 64 MB (PC Flashed) + Apple Cinema Display 23" (Late 2005)
Ultra SCSI JackHammer SE Card

PM9600-3.png

On the other side, it looks like this:
PM9600-2.png

Wi-Fi is used to transfer small files, such as screenshots or small software archives. On Mac Studio, which I use every day, Netatalk is installed and a shared directory has been created to exchange data over the network with old Macs. It is also sometimes convenient to use MR Browser to download small archives over the Internet. Something larger is easier to transfer via SD Card or connect this computer to a wired network. In general, I like the way it works.

PM9600-WiFi.png

Apple Keyboard (A1048) and Apple Mouse (M5769) are connected via USB, and sometimes I connect a USB drive. At first I thought about equipping this computer with a flashed SATA card (Sil3112), but it turned out that it is incompatible with JackHammer - the computer does not start. Despite the fact that I don't have any external SCSI devices, I left this card inside, it's better than just lying somewhere in the box. :) And there's not much sense in Sil3112 in this computer, because the PCI speed is too slow ~20 MB/s. It's faster than SCSI, but I don't see any performance problems.

There are 2 empty PCI ports left, if I come across a compatible network card, and something else that can be used here, I will probably buy it to install here.

Some windows in Mac OS 9.2.2 on this computer:

Picture 2.PNG


This computer runs StarCraft, Tetris and sometimes Prince of Persia.
PM9600 is one of the favorite Retro Macs.


If you are interested in looking at the performance of the Radeon 7000 in PM9600/300, I added an archive with the test results in MacBench 5 to the attachment.
 

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iBookSpeedster88

New Tinkerer
Jan 1, 2024
17
24
3
Update #3:

I tried using Handbrake 0.9.0 to compress video files, but discovered that Handbrake didn’t support the compression of files (only just DVDs at the time) until a later version years later that requires Leopard, I think. Bummer. I won’t be using Handbrake, then, for this purpose. The normal person will just say to use a modern computer that can run the newer version of Handbrake to do what I'm setting out to do here, but I don't want to hold my iBook's proverbial hand by tethering it to a modern machine for every task I wish for it to accomplish. This is the PowerPC challenge, darn it! I will persevere and find a way for my fully capable iBook to stand on its own two legs! Cheesy speech aside, let's move on and try to see what iSquint can do.


iSquint was perfect for the job, it turns out, but the conversion stated it would take over 25 minutes to complete. Typical, I guess, it's an older computer, I thought. It didn’t appear it should have even been a strenuous conversion, since I deliberately made the video's end result far worse in quality than what I started out with. I wanted to give the video the old potato-quality bitcrushed .3gp treatment (HandBrake and iSquint had no .3gp preset I could preload like Any Video Converter that I tried later did, so I had to manually set the bitrate, framerate, resolution, and other variables as closest to .3gp settings as I could remember, see photo below). I paid attention to Activity Monitor to see that my RAM had been reduced to just a handful of megabytes free. I killed VLC Media Player to free a comparatively large amount of RAM (I was listening to a one hour long megamix). iSquint ended up taking only about 4 minutes to complete the conversion, so the estimated time given by the program was just a ruse, thankfully. Unfortunately, after trying 3 different times, all with different settings and options chosen, each and every time the video I converted ended up getting corrupted, or at least I should rather say it gave me a wholly undesirable and non-functioning product. Testing the file, I watched after about 40 seconds of normal footage the post-conversion video just goes blank as the audio continues to play for the remainder of the video's duration. We got farther than with HandBrake, but this is still not ideal…

ibook 1.PNG


I next installed what I deemed a rather shady program, by comparison, featuring broken english sprinkled in its menus and company website which did not instill confidence in me. Here's the website in question, provided by a snapshot from 2009 by the Way Back Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20090208221443/http://anvsoft.com/. The front page doesn't do itself any favors to present an image of credibility. This program, “Any Video Converter” (version 2.1), was used to convert and compress an .mp4 file in the same manner I tried before with iSquint. The website called it "Any Video Converter", and on one occasion misspells it as "Any Vdieo Converter" on the software's Mac version download page, but the application calls itself "Any Video Converter Pro". Let's ignore the naming discrepancies for now. After my first try, the video converted/compressed perfectly, but the audio was unplayable in VLC Media Player, so I had received a silent video. Come on, now. It appears I had chosen an inappropriate audio toggle for the program's .3gp profile, so that's on me. Let’s try a second time with different settings. Bingo. This questionable program did it! Third time’s the charm with trying different programs to reach a solution, I guess. That settles that. It also happens to be faster than iSquint and less CPU-intensive to boot! Shady program with a generic name and a dubious origin actually works splendidly, so I guess not to judge a book by its cover.

ibook 2.PNG


With that out of the way, I also did some simple comparison of a few video players. Upon my video playback test between three programs (VLC 0.9.10, QuickTime 7.4.5, MPlayer OS X Extended revision 11), I found that MPlayer is the most efficient of the three tested, according to Activity Monitor. I used the same 352x264 resolution .mp4 file (fullscreen disabled, i.e. playing in windowed mode at native resolution) for all three players. QuickTime 7 used 50% of my CPU and 22MB of RAM, VLC used 30% CPU and 40MB of RAM, and MPlayer (Activity Monitor reported two instances of MPlayer running - that's normal - and both are required for playbac, one instance handles the GUI frontend presumably) used 35% CPU and 25MB of RAM. Impressive! QuickTime is the most CPU-intensive and VLC is the most RAM hungry. It seems that MPlayer is the best option, despite seemingly not giving a CPU advantage over VLC. What I don’t like about MPlayer is that the GUI skin doesn’t scale nicely like VLC does. When I played certain 4:3 videos, MPlayer’s skin will stay at what appears to be widescreen, so when you’re playing in windowed mode, you’ll get horizontal pillarboxing.


I’ve been installing a dozen or so applications for Tiger, most of which are open source. One being VirtueDesktops, a wonderful program that brings a similar feature akin to Leopard’s Spaces or Linux’s virtual desktops to Tiger, which out-of-the-box doesn’t have support for virtual desktops. With VirtueDesktops, more functionality with Tiger can be had. I adore this software, but it’s too bad it never left Beta development. Imagine what the final product could have been. Nevertheless, it does its purpose wonderfully. It hides in the menu bar and must be in the background at all times to complete its operation, of course. It hogs 40 or so megabytes of RAM, so that stock 512MB that I have in the iBook is starting to look more cramped now. It’s just enough to get comfortably by. My CPU almost never reaches past 50% usage, so the G4 is soaring like a champ at the moment. If I had the spare RAM that this laptop could handle, upgrading to its maximum might be the best decision to give this iBook more room to spread its legs, so to speak. I’ll have VirtueDesktops act as a start-up application so I can have it active the moment the desktop finishes loading upon turning the iBook on. Things are cooking (and I don’t mean the G4, lol, its temps rarely exceeded 50 Celsius, and I installed G4FanControl to mitigate any potential heat issues anyways)!