PowerMac 8600/250 BEOS Woes

[Figgy2112]

Greeting Folks! recently I got my hands on a PowerMac 8600/250 with a Sonnet Crescendo G4 450mhz and was excited to play around with 7.6 and BEOS on this particular machine since I already have a 500mhz sawtooth that I use for OS 8.6+ and this is also my 1st foray into old world systems, and BEOS has given some weird issues to say the least, it installs fine (well with a little ****ery since it’s a Kansas board) but the audio in particular has been really weird, at first I was convinced it didn’t work and was doing research and found classichasclass’ (Cameron) article about his 6500 from a couple years ago and wondering if it was something like that because I had similar symptoms of no audio, but hearing popping noise noises if you muted and unmuted the output and also wav and mp3 files saying they can’t play in the built in media player, but after some reinstalls and such, I decided to play a midi file and low and behold I hear sound gloriously coming out of the speakers and this confuses the **** out of me, but then I tried some other stuff and I figured out these things


-MIDI’s and 3D Mixes Do work with the built-in player, but MP3 and waves do not and error that I need a addin

-however MP3 audio DOES work if I use the included clAMP

-CD audio doesn’t work through the player but interestingly, if you set your mic input to the CD and then restart the media services the period where the media service haven’t restarted you yet you can hear the CD audio coming out the internal Mac speaker

All of these versions of BEOS Pro I’ve tested so far exhibited this exact behavior:
-OG BE 4.5
-OG BE 5.0.3
-GOBE 5.0.3



If anyone’s curious about the other specs
It has 98 mb of ram, maxed out 4mb of vram and the og 4gb scsi drive

I also tried loading the sonnet extension before the os chooser and it just caused to be logo to not show and didn’t seem to change anything else

I don’t quite know what the cause of this could be, but it seems that it’s more of an issue of the OS processing audio internally rather than not being able to output to the hardware, if anyone has any ideas what this could be, please let it be known lol

Thanks
Figgy

 

[joevt]

I wonder if the original CPU would have the same problem?

 

[Figgy2112]

That thought crossed my mind, but I’ve never seen reports of people having audio issues because of a cpu upgrade, this computer also only came with the upgrade card and not the og so I have no way to test that, it not being able to handle audio because of system calls not being supported by the CPU sounds like it could be a valid thing, but I’ve never heard a case of audio not working properly of people who have used upgrade cards with BEOS including a sonnet g4 one

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Hi, nice to see you here. Unsure what else to add though - my BeBox and 6500 don't exhibit this behaviour. But I don't have any other BeOS systems running right now.

 

[Figgy2112]

Would probably just have to “be” atp does everyone have a Kansas system like this but they would be willing to test for this

 

[Figgy2112]

Welp I have a funny update, I decided to redo my Mac Drive to have some few other partitions, and with that had to reinstall beos and suddenly audio worked, only thing I can assume is that the third-party partition tool I used befoes somehow messed up something (i used that before bc i didn’t wanna redo my system 7 install but for this i backed it up
to my at server) that beos didnt like but uhh beos audio works now lmao

 

[Figgy2112]

Heres a pic, also found out another quick quirk, if you ever try to install any of the forbidden be betas like bone, it will just make the partition unrecognizable by the boot loader so don’t do that lol

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Pretty sure there wasn't a PowerPC version of BONE, though I'd love to be proven wrong. I think it was only ever x86 only.

I wrote up my own inetd-like system so that R5 on the PowerPC could do some of the same Internet server tasks.