Installing Mac OS X Leopard on the Apple TV (1st generation)

[dronecatcher]

My ATV arrived this week and by a stroke of luck, instead of being a 40GB model as advertised it had been upgraded to a 750GB Scorpio Blue SATA HDD connected via a SATA/IDE adaptor.

As I have a USB/SATA enclosure, restoring the Leopard image was easy - though I did have to replace the boot.efi to get it working.

It's not half as bad as I expected and after running my normal Leopard speed-ups I gained an extra 23 points in Geekbench! Screenshots also show MPlayer doing 720P with ease!

 

[caver01]

What may I ask are your “normal Leopard speedups”???!!!

 

[dronecatcher]

What may I ask are your “normal Leopard speedups”???!!!

Disable Spotlight, install Onyx to turn off all GUI animations, make Dock 2D and disable Dashboard, use ShadowKiller to remove drop shadows, disable IPv6 and on PowerPC delete the AudioIPC kext.

 

[scj312]

Snow Leopard on the Apple TV

I've uploaded two Snow Leopard images to the link in the first post, one for 10.6.3 and one for 10.6.8. The reason for two images will be explained below.

Running Snow Leopard introduces some problems, notably:

1. The time is blank. As in, there is no time. When trying to set the date and time, it goes negative (??!!)
2. No audio.
3. Graphical issues galore! A lot of interface elements are calculating sizing and positioning ever so slightly off, which adds up to most things not looking right, and some things being unusable.
4. Finder and Quick Look eat all of the CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to the above issues.
5. There is some issue with setting video modes which causes Snow Leopard to reboot immediately when the window server starts. I have found a specific procedure which seems to resolve this for me.

To solve item 5 above, I performed some testing to find the following:

• 10.6.3 will boot with component, but not HDMI.
• 10.6.8 will not boot with either component or HDMI.
• If you boot 10.6.3, finish setup and change the resolution, then both 10.6.3 and 10.6.8 will begin booting fine with either component or HDMI.

As a result, we will need to first boot 10.6.3 using component, then we can switch to the 10.6.8 image.

Let's get this running! Here are the steps to get to a Snow Leopard desktop:

1. First, download the Apple TV HD 10_6_3 image and use the same steps as the original post to image it to the USB drive.
2. Then, connect the Apple TV to a display using the component outputs on the Apple TV.
3. Boot from the USB drive, and complete the setup assistant. You'll notice the colors are very wrong, ignore this for now.
4. Once at the 10.6.3 desktop, open System Preferences > Displays. Set the resolution to something else (like 720p60), then back to the original or desired resolution (I chose 1080p60).
5. Shut down the Apple TV, remove the USB drive, and plug it back into your Mac.
6. Download the Apple TV HD 10_6_8 image, and use the same steps as the original post to image it to the USB drive.
7. Connect the Apple TV to either component or HDMI, and boot it up. It should boot to a Snow Leopard desktop without the color issues from 10.6.3.

The 10.6.8 image is pre-configured due to the setup assistant not working on 10.6.8 on the Apple TV. I created a user "appletv" with password "appletv".

Of course, this is far from ideal, so any ideas for solving the issues are welcome!

 

[scj312]

It's not half as bad as I expected and after running my normal Leopard speed-ups I gained an extra 23 points in Geekbench! Screenshots also show MPlayer doing 720P with ease!

View attachment 2904

There's a nice boost with 10.6.8 https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2728474

 

[dronecatcher]

There's a nice boost with 10.6.8 https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2728474

I think I'll stick with Leopard as I can't live with no audio

My Geekbench reaches 830 after fixing permissions and when airport is off.

Did a video here:

 

[scj312]

I've uploaded the Tiger and Leopard images to Macintosh Garden, for faster downloading: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os-x-apple-tv-1st-generation

 

[timlaunice]

I've uploaded the Tiger and Leopard images to Macintosh Garden, for faster downloading: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os-x-apple-tv-1st-generation

I tried all 4 files. As what scj312 said, they all work. Scj312, thank you so much for allowing me to use my old apple tv as a wifi extender. I prefer osx 10.5.8.; cause, I need music server as well. One more question: how can I get into bios to set up wake on lan? On System Preference >Energy Saver, there is no Wake on lan for network access. Could you tell me how I can wake it up remotely? Now, I tried to unplug the appletv and re-plug it again in order to wake appletv from sleep . BTW, I didn't connect it with a external monitor. I only vnc it on my laptop pc.

 

[caver01]

I can confirm restoring the 10.5.8 image to the internal HDD. I was finally able to try image #1, 10.5.8 using an external USB HDD. After booting successfully with the USB, I connected to my LAN, transferred the image DMG file over to the desktop of the USB-booted ATV and launched Disk Utility. Using the internal drive (disk0) I was able to simply repeat the procedure only this time from the ATV itself, then shutdown, disconnect the USB drive and boot the internal drive right up!

It is currently finishing the first time setup and just landed me at the desktop! Thanks for the great instructions back on the original post. Easy step by step.

 

[caver01]

Curious if anyone else is seeing their ATV gen 1 locking up with Leopard like this:



I am running the leopard image, I have the memory indicator enabled in the menu bar. It’s not out of memory, but something is causing lockups. Initially, I had the screen saver kicking in, dimming the display, allowing the HDD to spin down—which all seemed like a good idea, but it started hard-locking when I was away and I could never see what was going on. So I set all of the power save features to NEVER, and on Saturday, I was using it successfully to SSH into a retropie arcade system I am working on. It’s a handy system! After around 11:30 PM or so, I went to bed, and as you can see, at 5:20 am this morning I got a nice kernel panic situation. I am curious if it is just over heating, but I can hear and barely feel the internal fan moving air. I also have the rubber base removed and adhesive stripped off, so the bottom plate is no longer the insulating heat box that it once was. There are rubber feet now and it acts as a big heat sink. Thoughts?

 

[scj312]

I've uploaded a new "v2" 10.5.8 image to the download locations linked in the original post. It contains the following improvements over the original images:

• Disabled Spotlight, Software Update, and iOS syncing to save RAM and improve performance
• Fixed display of model identifier and memory speed in System Profiler/About This Mac
• Removed unnecessary Hackintosh components

 

[dosdude1]

Leopard runs remarkably well on these after upgrading the RAM to 512MB. You can see details about that upgrade here:

One thing I noticed, though, is that the image linked on the OP (10.5.8 v2) was using a Darwin 9.4.0 kernel, which is not correct for 10.5.8. Switching to a 9.8.0 SSE3 emulator kernel, attached, improved the performance of the system by a LOT, but unfortunately broke AppleHDA. I worked around this by using VoodooHDA.kext, also attached, which works, but the audio output is oddly quiet. HDMI audio still does not work. @scj312, I'd recommend updating your image with this kernel, as it really makes the system run a whole lot more smoothly (at least on my system with 512MB of RAM).

 

[algarcia]

This all sounds great, I think I'm ready to give it a try. However there are two things I don't fully get:
1. Is the composite out working? Like to connect the Apple TV to my old trinitron with the yellow RCA cable.
2. Is there a Tiger option? I read it here mentioned a couple of times, but all the images I see are for Leopard.

 

[Nixontheknight]

This all sounds great, I think I'm ready to give it a try. However there are two things I don't fully get:
1. Is the composite out working? Like to connect the Apple TV to my old trinitron with the yellow RCA cable.
2. Is there a Tiger option? I read it here mentioned a couple of times, but all the images I see are for Leopard.

the composite out is supposed to be Component aka YPbPr, which supports higher resolutions than composite

 

[scj312]

Leopard runs remarkably well on these after upgrading the RAM to 512MB. You can see details about that upgrade here:

One thing I noticed, though, is that the image linked on the OP (10.5.8 v2) was using a Darwin 9.4.0 kernel, which is not correct for 10.5.8. Switching to a 9.8.0 SSE3 emulator kernel, attached, improved the performance of the system by a LOT, but unfortunately broke AppleHDA. I worked around this by using VoodooHDA.kext, also attached, which works, but the audio output is oddly quiet. HDMI audio still does not work. @scj312, I'd recommend updating your image with this kernel, as it really makes the system run a whole lot more smoothly (at least on my system with 512MB of RAM).

View attachment 5059View attachment 5060

Very cool seeing this on 512 MB! I'm sure it is a heck of a lot more usable. While I didn't notice an improvement with the 10.5.8 kernel on 256 MB, I'll try some ideas I have to fix audio and upload the result! Thanks for bringing this up.

This all sounds great, I think I'm ready to give it a try. However there are two things I don't fully get:
1. Is the composite out working? Like to connect the Apple TV to my old trinitron with the yellow RCA cable.
2. Is there a Tiger option? I read it here mentioned a couple of times, but all the images I see are for Leopard.

There isn't a proper composite output, but if you set the resolution to 640x480 and connect the yellow cable to the green component port, you do get a usable black and white image. I haven't uploaded a Tiger image as Tiger has significantly more problems, thanks to a lack of graphics acceleration.

 

[dvdmena]

Thanks @scj312 for this post! Many years wanting to use ATV with OSx! Last version ("v2" 10.5.8) works good (just take time to start). The only problem for the test I have done is that the old version safari doesn't have ciphers for https that required for the most of the sites and it's impossible to surf. Any idea how to upgrade it or use another browser?

My idea is to use openemu, any restriction (soft the RAM) for this?

 

[yangbo]

What do you think I can't start it by following the steps? What's wrong

 

[scj312]

Thanks @scj312 for this post! Many years wanting to use ATV with OSx! Last version ("v2" 10.5.8) works good (just take time to start). The only problem for the test I have done is that the old version safari doesn't have ciphers for https that required for the most of the sites and it's impossible to surf. Any idea how to upgrade it or use another browser?

My idea is to use openemu, any restriction (soft the RAM) for this?

You can use TenFourFox Intel, but the RAM limitations make it nearly unusable--it loves to crash.

I haven't tried openemu on mine, would love to hear how it works for you!

 

[scj312]

View attachment 10308What do you think I can't start it by following the steps? What's wrong

Is the photo of the commands you ran? If so: you'll want to run the commands again and on line 4, instead of literally putting START, use 409640 and instead of SIZE, use 77468336

 

[yangbo]

照片是你运行的命令吗？如果是这样：你需要在第4行再运行命令，而不是字面

照片是你运行的命令吗？如果是这样：您需要在第 4 行再次运行命令，而不是字面意义上的 START，使用 409640 而不是 SIZE，使用 77468336

是的，我不认为我在这里得到它。我可以不输入命令行就恢复到内置硬盘吗？