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Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
Hi @vddrnnr @Larsvonhier and all,

Attached are all of the Apple Developer Connection Seed Notes for 10AXX that i have been able to locate, thus far.

Some notes are incomplete and Apple switched from releasing full preview builds from 10A394, to instead releasing them in an “update” form through Software Update, so notes for these builds are simple summaries.

I have yet to find the documentation for builds: 10A096, 10A354, 10A380 and the Golden Master 10432. It's also possible that there are differences between Server and Retail builds that are not included in the notes. Further information may also be included on the disc images themselves.

It's worth noting on a separate but related point that searching YouTube for several of these build numbers will result in footage detailing some of the added features at different stages of the development process, via eager young tech YouTubers of the time.
 

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Rikintosh said:
The disk drive in the SL works perfectly. The problem seems to be with the file system, not with the utility. It works perfectly in Leopard. Even the Leopard Disk Utility cannot verify the SL partition.
Click to expand...

I think @MacPro2006VBox is asking for a pre-prepared dmg of 10A096 as has been kindly provided for 10A190.

@Rikintosh With regard to the Disk Utility issues, i think you're probably correct and my thoughts currently are along the same lines - possibly the result of the introduction of HFS+ Compression being added into the mix. I haven't tried repairing permissions from the command line yet, does this work?
 
As a side note, I thought about porting the Cocoa Finder from 10A190 to Leopard. Seeing that SL here is performing better in benchmarks but doesn’t have GPU support for most AGP Macs, would it be possible to port the Finder from this build?

I have made a handy Discord for everything PowerPC OS X if you guys are interested, so we can talk about this more there:Link to the Discord server
 
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ChrisCharman said:
I think @MacPro2006VBox is asking for a pre-prepared dmg of 10A096 as has been kindly provided for 10A190.

@Rikintosh With regard to the Disk Utility issues, i think you're probably correct and my thoughts currently are along the same lines - possibly the result of the introduction of HFS+ Compression being added into the mix. I haven't tried repairing permissions from the command line yet, does this work?
Click to expand...
I tried it via the command line on my G4 powerbook, and got no luck. The scan ends in less than a second. This bug in the file system, maybe fixable with machine language, someone who worked a while with asm programming may be lucky with that

As for the dmg image, I intended to do it, but after fixing some (many) silly and easy to fix bugs.
 
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Rikintosh said:
I tried it via the command line on my G4 powerbook, and got no luck. The scan ends in less than a second. This bug in the file system, maybe fixable with machine language, someone who worked a while with asm programming may be lucky with that

As for the dmg image, I intended to do it, but after fixing some (many) silly and easy to fix bugs.
Click to expand...

I’ve been booting into Leopard from a different partition/volume in order to use that version of Disk Utility to repair permissions. The SL 10A96 version is functionally incomplete and something I’ve mentioned in the wiki section.
 
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Rikintosh said:
I tried it via the command line on my G4 powerbook, and got no luck. The scan ends in less than a second. This bug in the file system, maybe fixable with machine language, someone who worked a while with asm programming may be lucky with that

As for the dmg image, I intended to do it, but after fixing some (many) silly and easy to fix bugs.
Click to expand...
What bugs need fixing perhaps? I’d be willing to help sort those out when I have the time to do so.
 
In regards to GPU support... maybe AGP GPU support was dropped or broken and that’s why PowerPC support was dropped as a factor.
 
MacPro2006VBox said:
In regards to GPU support... maybe AGP GPU support was dropped or broken and that’s why PowerPC support was dropped as a factor.
Click to expand...

Fair hypothesis, but where is that broken/missing link occurring? Where is that point of failure (if one looks at is as a failure for AGP video card support)?

This is what no one here has been able to determine yet.

What might be helpful is to see a diagram flowchart of how/where the AGP video cards interact with the AGP bus, the G4/G5 CPU(s), the Darwin/SL kernel and so on — such as this old flowchart diagram for the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro in a Wintel-based environment:

1599797789766.png


Needless to say, this task is way beyond my skill-set to assemble in my own.
 
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B S Magnet said:
Fair hypothesis, but where is that broken/missing link occurring? Where is that point of failure (if one looks at is as a failure for AGP video card support)?

This is what no one here has been able to determine yet.

What might be helpful is to see a diagram flowchart of how/where the AGP video cards interact with the AGP bus, the G4/G5 CPU(s), the Darwin/SL kernel and so on — such as this old flowchart diagram for the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro in a Wintel-based environment:

View attachment 951906

Needless to say, this task is way beyond my skill-set to assemble in my own.
Click to expand...

I wonder if anybody following the thread owns a copy of any of the Mac OS X internals books? They look like they’d be invaluable from the excerpts that i’ve read online. I’m considering purchasing some although someone with a good understanding of powerpc assembly, C and Objective C would undoubtedly glean more from them. Searching the Apple Developer Reference Library via WayBackMachine is also very informative.


https://flylib.com/books/en/3.126.1.123/1/


https://flylib.com/books/en/3.126.1.24/1/
 

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I have eventually upgraded the HDD to SSD and from 1gb to 2gb ram. Able to make it to 10.6. But it kept frozen. So gave up and back to 10.5.8.
 
tru6794 said:
I have eventually upgraded the HDD to SSD and from 1gb to 2gb ram. Able to make it to 10.6. But it kept frozen. So gave up and back to 10.5.8.
Click to expand...

Did you try the 10A190 or the 10A96?
[automerge]1599850029[/automerge]
ChrisCharman said:
I wonder if anybody following the thread owns a copy of any of the Mac OS X internals books? They look like they’d be invaluable from the excerpts that i’ve read online. I’m considering purchasing some although someone with a good understanding of powerpc assembly, C and Objective C would undoubtedly glean more from them. Searching the Apple Developer Reference Library via WayBackMachine is also very informative.


https://flylib.com/books/en/3.126.1.123/1/


https://flylib.com/books/en/3.126.1.24/1/
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I was talking about, thank you!

Now to find what changed between 10.5 and 10.6…
 
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B S Magnet said:
Did you try the 10A190 or the 10A96?
[automerge]1599850029[/automerge]


This is exactly what I was talking about, thank you!

Now to find what changed between 10.5 and 10.6…
Click to expand...
I have tried both. But still did not work.
[automerge]1599852039[/automerge]
I have tried it both. But still didn’t work
 
Archive.org contains a lot of cool stuff, you can even find the osx source code there lol I once found a dump of a hd from a developer's machine, which contained an unfinished game for og xbox. I have no knowledge of development for og xbox, so I sent it to a friend of mine, and he can finish the game. It may seem unimportant, but to me it was exceptional.

BTW I am now working (with my little knowledge) on an Ion Fury port for osx ppc. I learn as I face problems and try to solve them.
 
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Can anyone tell me if this is fully working now ? QE/CI and wifi ? I'd like to get rid of Leopard on my PB G4 Titanium 1ghz and move already to Snow Leopard PPC, since Linux does not run at all on this machine.
 
Macbookprodude said:
Can anyone tell me if this is fully working now ? QE/CI and wifi ? I'd like to get rid of Leopard on my PB G4 Titanium 1ghz and move already to Snow Leopard PPC, since Linux does not run at all on this machine.
Click to expand...

No.

We’re still working on it.

And right now, with respect to PowerBook/iBook and full compatibility, my own focus in the project is complete video capability on the later aluminium PBs with the Mobility Radeon 9700s with 128MB VRAM.

This is, as the idiom goes, a marathon, not a sprint.
 
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Is there a link to the .iso version somewhere in this thread? There's talk about it on the first page, but I'm not going through the whole thread.

I think the version in the o.p. needs to have Mac OS already installed, which I do not have.

I did try an .iso version from somewhere else, but it seems to have a problem and it wouldn't even start the burn, the DVD just pops out.
 
B S Magnet said:
No.

We’re still working on it.

And right now, with respect to PowerBook/iBook and full compatibility, my own focus in the project is complete video capability on the later aluminium PBs with the Mobility Radeon 9700s with 128MB VRAM.

This is, as the idiom goes, a marathon, not a sprint.
Click to expand...

So, a 1ghz Titanium G4 won't work at all ?
 
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