2024 PowerPC Challenge

[phunguss]

Day 6

Losing the silicon lottery

Attempted some G4 overclocking with jumpers

Since the G4-450 is now just laying around, I moved the jumper from R7 to R9, hoping to get it to 500MHz.

While that worked and it registered as 500MHz, it had slower benchmark performance compared to when at 450, so I am moving the jumper back to see if I am back where I started is still good. [Edit 1: Moved back to 450, everything is still fine there]

Using my iPhone 7, so zoom is limited, did not want to dig out my DLSR with reverse macro ring.

The Dual 500MHz should go to 550, by adding a jumper at R11. Didn't have any SMC 102 resistors (1k Ohms), closest I could find was a 122 (1.2k Ohms). Donor came from an XYZ 3D printer motherboard.

Tiger and Leopard would not boot, I got 9.22 to boot, but froze during benchmarks. Removing that resistor and retesting to see if I am back where I started.

Other retro stuff: I read in another thread about the non-use of floppy disks. My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica back in 1999. I was at a university recycle center and found one for $5, so I took a chance. It had the charger and battery and it powered on. The battery was dead but easily replaced with a new one from eBay. And I already have plenty of USB Floppy drives laying around. So, the floppy disk is not dead, just retro.

Taken with this camera with flash on:

 

[cjsebes]

I bought a used Mavica sometime in 2003 or 2004. My wife and I took a trip into Manhattan for our anniversary and I used that to take a few photos. They weren't bad, but carrying around a pocket full of floppy disks was a pain in the arse. The quality was good enough that I could get 4x6 prints from them. I believe it was an FD85 or something.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Took my dual 450Mhz Graphite GigE for a spin on Tinker Different's Quake 3 Arena server. Hardware I added included a SCSI card, Siig USB2 and I swapped out the rage 128 pro for an ATI Radeon 7500. I will upgrade the slow spinner in it now with a SSD at some point. The spinner really chugs. Q3A was buttery smooth and latency from a Euro server was only around 190-200, very even/smooth and playable. Had a blast on this old box.

Let’s blow up some bots!

 

[phunguss]

Day 7

This week has been a true PPC joy! Made another trip to FreeGeek Minneapolis. Secured a few more treasures.

iSight FireWire, listed as untested, works fine at home, $5 (iChat would not open the camera on PPC, but my FW800->FW400 cable worked on my iMac12,2).

Found a Radeon 7000 that I hope to eventually flash for the Sawtooth, something look off to you?

Yeah, they bent the bracket... but for $5, I will give it a shot.

Grabbed a couple legacy PhoneTalk adapters ($0.50@), a couple USB->Ethernet adapters ($4@), another original AirPort card ($1), and this beauty Mac Mini PPC 1.42GHz for $15.

I have one more 120GB mSATA SSD and an IDE-mSATA adapter, so I will upgrade this to solid state and run some more benchmarks. This is now my fastest PPC until I can revive the Dual G5 2.5GHz.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Day 7

This week has been a true PPC joy! Made another trip to FreeGeek Minneapolis. Secured a few more treasures.

iSight FireWire, listed as untested, works fine at home, $5 (iChat would not open the camera on PPC, but my FW800->FW400 cable worked on my iMac12,2).
View attachment 14521

Found a Radeon 7000 that I hope to eventually flash for the Sawtooth, something look off to you?
View attachment 14522
Yeah, they bent the bracket... but for $5, I will give it a shot.

Grabbed a couple legacy PhoneTalk adapters ($0.50@), a couple USB->Ethernet adapters ($4@), another original AirPort card ($1), and this beauty Mac Mini PPC 1.42GHz for $15.
View attachment 14523
View attachment 14524

I have one more 120GB mSATA SSD and an IDE-mSATA adapter, so I will upgrade this to solid state and run some more benchmarks. This is now my fastest PPC until I can revive the Dual G5 2.5GHz.

Nice pickups. I scooped a boxed iSight off goodwill a few years ago but it was missing its cable which I did not notice in the auction. I had a thinner fw400 cable I was able to squeeze in so it does work but glad to see yours came with the exact cable.

 

[iBookSpeedster88]

Day 7

This week has been a true PPC joy! Made another trip to FreeGeek Minneapolis. Secured a few more treasures.

iSight FireWire, listed as untested, works fine at home, $5 (iChat would not open the camera on PPC, but my FW800->FW400 cable worked on my iMac12,2).
View attachment 14521

Found a Radeon 7000 that I hope to eventually flash for the Sawtooth, something look off to you?
View attachment 14522
Yeah, they bent the bracket... but for $5, I will give it a shot.

Grabbed a couple legacy PhoneTalk adapters ($0.50@), a couple USB->Ethernet adapters ($4@), another original AirPort card ($1), and this beauty Mac Mini PPC 1.42GHz for $15.
View attachment 14523
View attachment 14524

I have one more 120GB mSATA SSD and an IDE-mSATA adapter, so I will upgrade this to solid state and run some more benchmarks. This is now my fastest PPC until I can revive the Dual G5 2.5GHz.

For $15, I'm not complaining! I would jump on a PPC Mac Mini for that price. It's a bummer that the optical drive is malfunctioning according to the attached notes.

 

[phunguss]

For $15, I'm not complaining! I would jump on a PPC Mac Mini for that price. It's a bummer that the optical drive is malfunctioning according to the attached notes.

Yes, the optical drive was faulty. Luckily I had another laying around. I swapped out the spinner drive for solid state, replaced the optical drive, and upgraded it to 1GB of RAM. I could overclock it with the resistors on the bottom of the motherboard, but its not worth it right now.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

For $15, I'm not complaining! I would jump on a PPC Mac Mini for that price. It's a bummer that the optical drive is malfunctioning according to the attached notes.

At a minimum they make great book ends

 

[3lectr1c]

Hadn't heard of "Dark Web" before, yet another great wicknix project it seems! Will have to try it out tonight.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Hadn't heard of "Dark Web" before, yet another great wicknix project it seems! Will have to try it out tonight.

By far the fastest browser IMO for PowerPC macs using OSX/Sorbet. Wicknix is a wizard.

 

[3lectr1c]

Got it running now on my PowerBook G4. The pages that it does load the mobile versions of do seem to run faster (google). m.youtube.com doesn't work though, and I'm noticing some glitchy-ness and rendering issues here on TinkerDifferent that I don't think InterWeb had. Mainly, it seems whenever I click somewhere on this page it will just jump up to the middle of the page for whatever reason. I wonder what version of Firefox it's based off of? Looks like it hasn't been updated since 2022.
I'll have to experiment around with it more.
I'll post a screenshot in a few - it won't let me upload it from here, seems it doesn't like the format, the file's just grayed out.

 

[3lectr1c]

Posting via InterWebPPC now. Glitching is gone, couldn't insert the image properly in Dark Web. It looks like it DID insert it, but it wasn't rendering. The browser seems neat but I can't see myself switching to it since it's a lot less usable compared to InterWeb, which is still rendering this page just fine. Shouldn't there be a way to force mobile sites on InterWebPPC as well?

 

[Pedro Passamani]

Puma on an MDD
Today I decided to try to install Puma on my 1.25 GHz MDD 2003. I didn't recall if Puma was ever officially supported, so I went with the OG Xserve G4's build of 10.1.5 Server that I got off the Macintosh Garden.

Installation was easy with no errors whatsoever, and everything seems to work fine. The only things I noticed were the lack of model name under System Profiler, and that the fans seem to ramp up more often than under Jaguar and later.

System Profiler (everything detected fine, including the CPU's L3 cache)

Ready to publish my first website!

The machine is pretty much bone stock, with a single 1.25 GHz G4 CPU, 768 MB of RAM (1x 512 MB + 1x 256 MB) and Radeon 9000 Pro graphics. Aside from the upgraded RAM, I added a PCI Realtek RTL 8139 10/100 ethernet card, as the built-in interface is dead.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Got it running now on my PowerBook G4. The pages that it does load the mobile versions of do seem to run faster (google). m.youtube.com doesn't work

I use TenFiveTube. or I point a webkit browser instance to invidious to surf youtube. Mobile youtube hasn't worked for me either but TFT is snappy so I havent bothered attempting a mobile instance of YT in either DW or IWPPC. The speed becomes more nebulous the older of a machine you use. For example to write this I've shifted from my Gige G4 to a dualcore 2ghz G5 which is plenty snappy. Performance is much more muted on more modest machines lol.

I'm noticing some glitchy-ness and rendering issues here on TinkerDifferent that I don't think InterWeb had. Mainly, it seems whenever I click somewhere on this page it will just jump up to the middle of the page for whatever reason.

Both DW & IWPPC sometimes do this to me as well - It'll just zip up to just below page-middle. I dont know why that happens lol. BB Forum Buttons have never worked for me in either DW or IWPPC but I remedy that with manual BB Codes which work fine. Pics, I've always just drag and dropped em into the text window and they upload fine for me on these old boxes.

I wonder what version of Firefox it's based off of?

I pulled this from Terminal - pulled it from the Application.ini file which the info.plist file mirrors, so maybe FF 38ESR like TFF?

[App]
Vendor=Mozilla
Name=DarkWeb
RemotingName=darkweb-bin
CodeName=Dark Web
Version=38.9.0
BuildID=20230129005007
ID={ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}

 

[phunguss]

Day 8

Mac Mini Cleanup and exploration.

Oh, she's a very dirty girl!

Some compressed air cleaned her right up! As mentioned last night, I swapped the mechanical drive for SSD, replaced the optical drive, and upgraded to 1GB of RAM. I then partitioned the SSD for 80GB of Leopard and 40GB of Tiger.

I was digging around for an HP power supply, and found a box of misc stuff I had tucked away. Inside was an ADB iMate adapter and an ALPS GlidePoint, so that was hooked up to the G4 Mini to try out. Works great!

I could not find a PPC version of GParted or PMagic, so I tried partitioning my internal SSD by booting Leopard from the LaCie rugged FW drive... now I will see if I can get MorphOS installed tonight (and see if it triple boots 10.4 and 10.5 with MorphOS).

 

[V.Yakob]

I could not find a PPC version of GParted or PMagic, so I tried partitioning my internal SSD by booting Leopard from the LaCie rugged FW drive... now I will see if I can get MorphOS installed tonight (and see if it triple boots 10.4 and 10.5 with MorphOS).

Try using bootable iPartition #4.
MorphOS requires 3 partitions, I kept a cheat sheet in the form of several screenshots to manually partition the disk.










Try it, it should work out.

 

[Arbystpossum]

I have a G3 beige tower that I want to install a bunch of fans into, as well as fit it with several lbs. of heatsinks because a ton of chips want to steal my fingerprints when I touch them. I also want to replace all of the existing fans with some Noctua fans because why not. I also have one of those OrangePC cards with a 450Mhz K6-2 in it that also needs heatsinks and a better fan. The OrangePC card apparently can use the on-board Ethernet of the G3, so the goal is to have the PC and Mac side deathmatch against eachother in a game of Doom or Quake or something so I can fight myself in turn-based combat. I also wonder if Shrunken Tiger can be installed on this thing, because it has 10.2.8 and it's super not good. I heard you can install later OS X versions on old beige G3s, but you lose SCSI support and a bunch of other stuff. It also has a G4 upgrade board so I guess it's a G4 now, and it's hot so it needs a fan too. I got plans.

 

[V.Yakob]

I have a G3 beige tower that I want to install a bunch of fans into, as well as fit it with several lbs. of heatsinks because a ton of chips want to steal my fingerprints when I touch them. I also want to replace all of the existing fans with some Noctua fans because why not. I also have one of those OrangePC cards with a 450Mhz K6-2 in it that also needs heatsinks and a better fan. The OrangePC card apparently can use the on-board Ethernet of the G3, so the goal is to have the PC and Mac side deathmatch against eachother in a game of Doom or Quake or something so I can fight myself in turn-based combat. I also wonder if Shrunken Tiger can be installed on this thing, because it has 10.2.8 and it's super not good. I heard you can install later OS X versions on old beige G3s, but you lose SCSI support and a bunch of other stuff. It also has a G4 upgrade board so I guess it's a G4 now, and it's hot so it needs a fan too. I got plans.

You're probably talking about xPostFacto.
I haven't tried it on my MiniTower yet, but it'll probably work.

 

[phunguss]

Try using bootable iPartition #4.
MorphOS requires 3 partitions, I kept a cheat sheet in the form of several screenshots to manually partition the disk.

View attachment 14546

View attachment 14547

View attachment 14548

View attachment 14549


Try it, it should work out.

I can get the partitions created, but the iWizzard does not allow me to change anything on the partitions... I try to change the flags, and hit save, and everything reverts back. I guess I can wipe the whole drive and try MorphOS only, then shrink it and put Tiger and Leopard back on later.

 

[wicknix]

I've used these instructions in the past to dual boot morphos with tiger.

Dual-boot MorphOS and MacOS X on a Mac Mini G4 - MorphOS Library

library.morph.zone