A small victory for my PowerMac G4 MDD and Linux - Acceleration!

[kahunalx]

Hello everyone,

I've been working on getting decent hardware 2D/3D acceleration and video decoding on my PowerMac G4 MDD. My goal is to keep the stock Radeon 9000 PRO AGP card for OS 9, macOS X, and MorphOS, while using a newer PCI card for Linux.

After testing several NVIDIA cards with little success, a Radeon HD 5450 PCI arrived in the mail today. Wow, what a difference! I've already managed to accomplish some of those goals.

There's still a lot of testing to do, I'd like to try with Debian as well, but I wanted to share this small victory with the community. Details are below with more to come!

 

[kahunalx]

I have compiled the game "Neverball" on my PowerMac G4 MDD, it doesn't take long if you choose to do so.

Download | Neverball

neverball.org

I had to install the package physfs and I'm sure it will require other dependencies that, for whatever reason, I already had installed.

Please note, there is a small bug in the code, in share/text.h
you'll need to add add "extern" to the beginning of line 18, so it will look like this:
extern char text_input[MAXSTR];

At any rate, see the FPS I've got with the Radeon HD 5450 PCI at 1280x1024 with 8x antialiasing enabled and disabled. Also, see the CPU usage at the bottom, not bad!

Yes, I understand this is a very basic game, but it's still great performance, and the low CPU usage indicates acceleration is working nicely

The following screenshots were taken disabling antialiasing

 

[Bug-Creator]

keep the stock Radeon 9000 PRO AGP card for ...... and MorphOS,

a Radeon HD 5450 PCI

MorphOS should work with that card, but it won't work with 2 Radeons at the same time.
Not sure if it would take the AGP or PCI.

Well "should" work as AtomBIOS card support is barely tested on AGP let alone PCI and my tests with an AGP 3450 in a QuickSilver didn't bear fruit (I did tape over the 2 contacts).
There is also no 3D support for those cards for at least till the next bigfoot sighting.

 

[kahunalx]

I was under the impression that MorphOS was limited to "Mac Edition" graphics cards with Apple firmware. In any case, I'm very satisfied with how my Radeon 9000 performs in MorphOS so far.

Editing to add that the HD 5450 PCI is indeed getting ignored in MorphOS, but the 9000 Pro works as expected.

 

[Bug-Creator]

It’s a bit more complicated there are basically 3 types of GFX drivers for MorphOS.

The really old ones that don’t require any firmware initialization that were originally created for 68k AmigaOS, so Voodoo3/4/5 and even older.

The ones that need a proper ROM matching the system so Mac cards for PowerMac and PC cards for Pegasos and EFIKA. Thats R100–300 Radeons

Newer Radeons come with AtomBIOS which can be interpreted by the driver and is neither x86 nor PPC code.



But, since you have PCI HD card and I‘m of the curious kind, could you try booting MorphOS without the AGP Radeon, or even better with Mac NVidia card in AGP.
It should pick up the HD card and if that works I got some fancy ideas…