LOL two things I never thought I'd see in one sentence - "pee" and "iMac'. Gets a chuckle every time I read about your adventure with the whizzer iMacG4.
2026 PowerPC Challenge: the user's Unofficial thread
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Hey Guest, MARCHintosh 2026 is upon us. Check out community projects, join GlobalTalk, and have fun!
The WHIZZER, it was right in my face the whole time! That's the name of this iMac now. Absolutely. More fun, and less vulgar than the alternative.LOL two things I never thought I'd see in one sentence - "pee" and "iMac'. Gets a chuckle every time I read about your adventure with the whizzer iMacG4.
great i'm also planning for this with a little bit changes and upgrade.With the start of PowerPC Challenge 2026, I decided to install an OWC Excelsior pcie card with a fresh Orico 128gb msata I picked up months back into my dual core 2ghz A1117 Powermac G5/Sorbet. I am already quite happy with how it performs now but was curious what the increase would look like.
The xbenchmark scores certainly illustrate the speed increase of 4lane pcie (32gb theoretical max) vs Sata3 (6gb theorietical max).
The percentage lift from 6gbps to 32gbps is 433% lol however the lift in xbench score is only 40.52%. of course I wont even pretend to understand how that theoretical maximum translates to realworld performance and how xbench interprets that barf and asigns a value to it. So yeah, it's faster. Good enough for who its for anyways. Fun times
Interestingly, on the app front. Everything is working pretty much as it did in 2025. Aside from gmail being slow AF (buttheads killed html webmail in 2025) in its box and invidious not working (no big deal really) everything has been pretty easy.
Youtoobie is handled by Wicknix's Ten five tube - still works great.
Browsing is handled by TheWireless's Aquafox (although Safari 11 works remarkably well for being 8 years old now too & you can always compile fresh TFF/AF with the Unofficial TFF Dev toolkit.
Gmail works with Wicknix's In the box.
AI ChatGPT interaction works with GreyStash/Manticore's Legacy AI.
and that's most of what I DD on this machine. There's other stuff I touch from time to time but not too much on this box.
OK, what is it? Taking a quick scan of the posts, it is basically a marchintosh for PowerPC's over the course of the year? Projects people are doing basically? If so, I have some.
It was historically only for the month of January, happening annually. It was started before I joined, but I think Mac-Yak started it.
From what I've observed, the challenge is a January event focusing on PPC Macs. Marchintosh is also a monthlong focus on anything Mac related. Projects are cool all year long, but those two months seem to be community sharing events as opposed to individual topics.
@phunguss @Trash80toG4 thanks. That makes sense. I just was going through posts and ran across this and was curious. Well, anyway, since I was starting from zero this last January and definitely have power PCs in the mix, you could say I have projects going. Maybe I will just post a quick little update in this thread along with anything I might post in my own thread(s).
Yeah that's my understanding as well. I really miss Mac-Yak and TinkerDifferent was like an extension of that community in so many ways as so many of those guys are here and played formative roles in its creation. To the chagrin of my wife, I would sit down in my super comfy lazy-boy with a soda in my hand and stream those every Thursday lol. It was something I looked forward to each week to disconnect from the weeks stresses and just reset/relax for a bit - very sad when they went away. I get with old Macs that there's only so much you can talk about I guess and to their credit they did like almost 200 shows but that at least for me wasn't really the point. I liked the community and camaraderie of the retro Mac community and how it made me feel connected in a weird way I guess. It was fun to see everyone each week or every other week and talk about nerdy Mac stuff and the occasional guest appearances etc.
Anyways, they were really fun while they lasted. Im still curious about what Mike and his ornery cats are up to lol (they would almost always make an appearance) and that hilarious video when Steve was over at Mikes working on computers and a iirc classic Mac of some type blew up startling Steve (Mac84) lol or how everyone always ribbed Greg (Rhutkay Mods) on his non existent mic & not so great cameras or Bruces funny video clips lol. That type of personable and light hearted interaction just isn't the same on other platforms or even here; not in the same way anyways.
Mac-Yak is still streamable on YouTube if you want to watch some of them @sunvalleylaw .
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I think I may have accidentally already started one, if I remember correctly. Will check it out and be sure. I used to have a similar experience with some folks on my guitar forum on Saturday mornings for a while as well. Nerding out on gear, music theory as it applied to guitar, etc. And I enjoyed that for the same reasons.
I must confess that I completely forgot about the PowerPC challenge this year. A few of the Mac Yakkers are still in daily contact and I think we all forgot. I was just tinkering with a 17" PowerBook G4, thinking how this would make a great candidate for the PowerPC challenge, when it suddenly dawned on me. It's great to see that this post got started and people still took on the challenge without us. I promise we'll do better next year! With the new PowerFox browser, the possibilities are endless.
I remember it every year.... sometimes not until August
Finding the time is doable, but finding the space to set up my PPC of choice, not so much.
Finding the time is doable, but finding the space to set up my PPC of choice, not so much.