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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.
vddrnnr said:
Some updates on my endeavors.
After building DisableMonitor app I did some testing using other display
modes to see if it would affect display performance on non QE/CI machines.
What I found is that using 16bit color mode in my DLSD ( 1440x960 res )
makes very smooth almost all the user interface transitions like changing
between workspaces, going into exposé and the workspace grid.

I could not find a "detectable" loss of quality by changing this.
You must zoom in the image to notice it perfectly

But I did found two drawbacks:

1. Font smoothing seems to turn off on new windows
2. Banding/low quality window titlebars opened after changing color depth

Regarding the first issue I have not looked into it but maybe there is some way to reactivate it.
I say this because for example if you open Terminal before changing color depth and then
change it font smoothing is not removed on already opened windows.

Regarding the second issue if you change color depth after opening a window it
seems to keep the quality with some slight dithering effect so I think it's related to
the components inside the Sartfile.bin and Artfile.bin being 32bit color.

I want to try and edit them as it was done for Leopard Rebirth but I have not been
able to find the required tools that work in PPC Leopars/Snow Leopard.

Does anyone have some more info on this?

I also did some more tests on software built with Homebrew and was able to copy
the necessary binaries/libraries to have it working on SL_PPC :D

I'll post a zipfile later with all the binaries/libraries I have right now copied from a Leopard
install if you want to try them.

Best regards,
voidRunner
Click to expand...

Hi @vddrnnr,

Have you tried compiling the SArtFile and artFile tools in Xcode 3.2 on PPCSL?

SArtFileTool

ArtFileTool
 
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Anyone willing to upload a copy of XCode 3.2 for PowerPC SL? Managed to find the final one and it indeed installs but is unusable
 
Hi @ChrisCharman,

I've got two different ArtFileTool versions building in SL.
One is the latest available from github and another which is an older branch
for Snow Leopard and Lion.
Unfortunately both are not working properly because they try to get offsets for
image header information and location/size inside the bin file and all values return
very large numbers even larger than the size of the bin file.
I'm at a loss right now because I don't understand why this happens.
Do you have any ideas?

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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vddrnnr said:
Hi @ChrisCharman,

I've got two different ArtFileTool versions building in SL.
One is the latest available from github and another which is an older branch
for Snow Leopard and Lion.
Unfortunately both are not working properly because they try to get offsets for
image header information and location/size inside the bin file and all values return
very large numbers even larger than the size of the bin file.
I'm at a loss right now because I don't understand why this happens.
Do you have any ideas?

Best regards,
voidRunner
Click to expand...

Hi @vddrnnr

Hmmm i’m not sure i’m afraid mate. I’ll have a go at compiling it on my day off later in the week and see if i get the same error.
 
Hi @ChrisCharman,

I've found the issue it's an Endianness problem in the code made for Intel so Little Endian.
I'm trying to find all the places that need CFSwapInt32 or 16LittleToHost but
right now it's almost all extracted :D

Edit: Everything is extracted and is looking good ;)

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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Sorry if this has been covered yet, stopped following this for a bit. Has anyone made progress with the AGP Nvidia 6800ddl? Was the only thing keeping from really toying with this. That and my G5 now seemingly only wanting to post 60% of the time..
 
Hi @WalnutSpice97,

Besides the optimizations already mentioned in other posts about getting
QuartzGL activated and changing some frameworks to get smoother UI and proper
looking pictures without distortion we have not been able until now to get any
of the AGP based cards with full QE/CI.

I also don't know if anyone is specifically looking into that right now.
We are nonetheless still working on this ;) but has it was previously stated
it will be a marathon not a sprint.

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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Heyo everyone :)

after being away from this topic several months I now want to take a closer look again on this. While scrolling through all the pages I saw how many problems were fixed and how many features were added. What about building something like a patcher? I know you maybe know this procedure but just to show the steps necessary to accomplish that.... Firstly make a "pre tool" which will create a bootable firewire or USB drive with SL PPC beta and patches it to run properly. After the whole installation progress you reboot into the installer, run a (maybe graphical) "after patch" where you choose your device and then will apply the needed patches. For that we would need to create something like a table for every device with files which are needed to be patched. So what do you think? I could help out a bit on that. Also thanks to everyone here who helps making this possible! My 1.5GHz Aluminum PowerBook G4 and my 2.7GHz PowerMac G5 are already waiting for something like that (and I think also the people in this community who wren't that advanced).

See ya soon, theANY
 
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That's the idea about it. I know that you can boot f.e. from USB in Open Firmware by using several commands (already did that) but I still try to find some way to make it user-friendly.
 
Hi,

Saw this project on the Action Retro youtube channel and had to try. I'm now running 10.6 on powermac 7.3 (2*2ghz G5 ppc)

Thanks all!

Just used the installer of post 200 and only had 2 problems:
1 was the new disk being formatted as MBR and not Apple Partition Map. After fixing that it installed smoothly.
2 was the Sil3512 sata controller. Which kinda works in 10.5.8 (i ordered 2 and 1 didn't work so i'm not really sure on it being super stable) but i had problems using when restore to image. It gaves me i/o errors and some other things. So i used the onboard sata and worked perfect ( i think my 3512 has a problem because every time i take it out and swap slots i have to flash it again. I think it records the irq in the bios when flashing but i'll take that to the other topic.

Also tried migrating from another system on that mac after the first blank install and that worked.

I run audio on that machine so i tried logic 9.0.2 first but i doesn't want to run without QE etc.

But later i tried it with the migration from my 10.5.8 during install of SL and then it told me i needed prokit 5. After installing that even the au plugins loaded but crashed after i had to select a new project.

Also i run an old UAD card in it. And that installed but i think i used the wrong authorisation codes for that. I got multiple cards of that in different machines. Control of it runs but doesn't see card or see plugins in the uad control. But i need to check my authorisation files. Could be i use the ones for a card i removed some days ago.

Anyway i'm lurking through this topic hoping there are video cards that run QE. I got a Radeon 9600 with 128 mb.
 
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Update: i ordered a cheap Nvidia PCI card. I need to flash it for MAC. Although i haven't researched it completely. It looks like it is possible but first let's see if the card arrives. Also some caps look like they are bulging but i have to order new caps anyway and i see no leaks so first see if it runs.

Also i'm still half way the replies of this topic so it could be this isn't going to work perfectly. And it may need it to work perfectly to get Logic 9.0.2 up and running.

Haven't tested the UAD authorisation file yet but it's on my list.

And does anybody know how much sata ports are on the g5 powermac 7.3? So far it looks like 2 but i haven't removed the motherboard yet. I use an extra Sil3512 PCI Sata card as mentioned above but i can't run it because the flashing method doesn't work in SL.

Thing is i want to move 2 raid 0 4tb disks into the G5. My Sierra hack has 2 sets of raid 0 but if i update to High Sierra the raid breaks and only thing i could do is move back to Sierra. The thing is these disks are old and not 100% anymore and i read somewhere High Sierra has problems with that. And i think i didn't let them be formatted to APFS. I think the fact they are old is why HS doesn't want to work with them but i could be wrong.

Anyway i'm going off topic now. But i want to use the 2 onboard sata ports for the raid because they are the most trustworthy and booting of the sil3512 only works in 10.5.8

Thanks!
 
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Hi @Madr,

Welcome to the "party" ;-)
Yes those PCI cards should work with full acceleration and should be enough for
almost everything.
Keep us posted.

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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Hi all,

I think I have some interesting news for the No QE/CI crowd.
I've been working on a "replacement" for Exposé and all the
effects when moving between workspaces to try and make our
"crippled" machines feel smoother.
While doing this I started looking deeper into QuartzGL and how it works.

- QuartzGL was supposed to be Apple's UI acceleration framework and it looked very
promissing at first but although it was very good lowering CPU usage for a lot of things
it was not perfect and in some cases it resulted in no benefit.
- One other aspect to have QuartzGL working is that it only works if
your app is not using CoraAnimation which happens for example if you are using layers.

If you build and app and do something like
[view setWantsLayer:YES]
it will stop using QuartzGL.

- So Apple continued to develop QuartzExtreme/CoreImage and forgot about QuartzGL.
But for us without QE/CI this still works and seems to function properly in many apps.

- What I found is that for an application to use it it's not enough to enable QuartzGL
by using OSXtools as mentioned before.
If you want an application to use QuartzGL you also have to change it's Info.plist file
and add the following

<key>QuartzGLEnable</key>
<true/>

If the application does not have this directive it won't use it.

I've been trying this with some of the applications I use the most and the UI seems
to be much more "smoother" and also lowering CPU use in the animations
and even going into Exposé or Spaces looks better, not perfect dough.

I've changed the following apps with the key above

TextEdit
Terminal
Finder
Dock
System Preferences
iCal
TenFourFox
Xcode
Preview

Can you guys try this out and see if you have the same results?

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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vddrnnr said:
Hi guys,

So Lars has finished uploading the file to my DropBox account.
It's an ISO for the version which he got working with PPC.
If you want to download it send me a PM and I'll send you a public link for it.
I think for now and to test DropBoxe's capacity we should give it a few tries
downloading at the same time.
If everything goes well then I think I can share the link publicly.

@Lars Is this ok with you??

Best regards,
voidRunner
Click to expand...
Hi there, would it be possible t get the download link for the Snow leopard for PPC. Greatly appreciated.

ernesto
 
jmjluminesce said:
Hi Lars,
Will this work on a PowerMac G4 DA 533?
Click to expand...
That information is available on this wikipost:
forums.macrumors.com

Snow Leopard on unsupported PPC machines

[ ©© Ltshears, Wikimedia Commons] A CLOUDED LEOPARD: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on PowerPC WikiPost last updated: 11 April 2022 OVERVIEW We’re exploring how to run early builds of Snow Leopard on (later) G4 and G5 PowerPC Macs. This WikiPost outlines testing methods to get a Developer...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

According to the other people who have tested SL-PPC on various PPC Macs, there has been success booting into the DA G4s, but you will need to take others’ testing notes into account.
 
vddrnnr said:
Hi @Madr,

Welcome to the "party" ;-)
Yes those PCI cards should work with full acceleration and should be enough for
almost everything.
Keep us posted.

Best regards,
voidRunner
Click to expand...
Thanks! It finally arrived due the post having christmas delays. Have to find a floppy drive for nvflash to work on my windows 10 machine.

I think i need to re install SL on the HD and can't use the old install right? Which used the AGP graphics card.

Or do you think i can just swap cards after i flashed it?
 
Bad news and good news. I finally got the video card flashed. Took me hours but when i wanted to try the card in my G5 it turned out some PCI cards won't fit into an PCI-X slot. So i'm not 100% sure it flashed correctly because i couldn't try.

Anyway i am on the hunt for some old macs so maybe i find some and i can test it. Will let you know if i know more.
 
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