Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs

[B S Magnet]

HI @B S Magnet

One way we can find out which kexts are used it to match the low level openfirmware drivers...

Any chance you could boot into OpenFirmware (Apple-Alt-O-F) on boot and then type dev / ls and see what comes up.

We can do some digging for the all the devices.

I'm guessing that despite some computers having USB some driver stuff is handled using adb or proto-adb calls (on some platforms).

For example on Powerbook5,6 (yours is 5,4) there are these methods on the PowerManagement device

A couple of things:

I may have time later to examine devices at the OF level.

The A1138 is PowerBook5,8 (and the A1139 is PowerBook5,9). Both models have no ADB buses, unique to the final (late 2005) line of PowerBook G4s. Similarly, both have integrated AirPort and Bluetooth on one card (though in the case of my A1138 unit I’m using as a Snow Leopard sandbox, there’s a logic board fault which prevents the use of said integrated card).
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Hi B S M,

In my QUAD with a Geforce 6600 it's out of the box no additional
work required.
Also Lars has an ATI card and if I understood correctly everything is
out of the box also.

Best regards,
voidRunner

My guess (hypothesis) is there was GeForce 6600 support intended for a Mac Pro model (what ended up going in with the early Mac Pros was a 7300), which is maybe why you aren’t running into any trouble here. As far as I can make out, no Intel MacBook/MacBook Pro/Mac mini was shipped with any of the 9xxx line of Radeon Mobility cards.

 

[Larsvonhier]

My guess (hypothesis) is there was GeForce 6600 support intended for a Mac Pro model (what ended up going in with the early Mac Pros was a 7300), which is maybe why you aren’t running into any trouble here. As far as I can make out, no Intel MacBook/MacBook Pro/Mac mini was shipped with any of the 9xxx line of Radeon Mobility cards.

My bet would be that we can finally use all GPUs that Apple had kexts for in 10.5. or even 10.4. even if they were not supported in later 10.6. intel builds - perhaps we have to find the right spots in some property list files (.plist) further up the dependency ladder.
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I wrote to Cameron Kaiser and made him aware of the new findings here. He was so kind to respond very quickly and here´s what he wrote:
- as there are some users running TFF on 10.6 via Rosetta PPC emulation, there is no intended blocking of TFF on 10.6 PPC already and he tries to at least keep it up as long as no other obstacles show up
- he suggested trying the G3 build of TFF to see if the system´s AltiVec routines are flawed -> then the G3 build would
run with good rendering (as Arcticfox does). If so, we could easily compile our own version of actual TFFs supporting G4/G5 optimizations just without using AltiVec functions (that would keep us up-to-date, but he´ll not build or support that)
- the idea of 10.6 PPC running on (his) Talos Power9 machine(s) would be feasible, but only the G4 could be "faked" on it, as some G5 support shortcomings are present (He showed Leopard on it some time ago)
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I couldn’t seem to boot the installer on my 800Mhz iMac G4 but I can make a basic script for patching the installer disk and system.

Something with user queries like your "alternative" to dosdude1´s installer would be great!

 

[Project Alice]

The "stuck at blue screen with mouse" might be temporarily worked around by removing the GPU related kext(s) and run in completely un-accelerated mode. I had such behaviour on my Pismo and boot-time logging (verbose mode) gave errors like "NRDV too old" and nonetheless loading the Nvidia kexts.

CCC btw. has the annoying habit (in later and recent versions that is) to "update boot support" with its own ingredients for various OS X and macOS releases it runs on. This leads to i.e. the situation that I always have to re-copy prelinkedkernel and boot.efi on our office MP1,1 running as a server with El Capitan (very unsupported ;-). Might be related to what you see on your machine after cloning with CCC.
Another workaround: CCC-clone twice and stop right before progress bar reaches 100% and thus skipping the under-the-hood CCC actions at that point. Original contents of source volume stay unmodified then.

This morning I booted it up on my Dual 1.8Ghz G5, and it logged in. Then I made a new user, and trying to log into it did it again. I turned it off and on, and it's working. Nobody ever said early builds were perfect lol.


My G5 happens to have a Geforce 6800 Ultra. Acceleration is not working at all like it is on the 6600. I was under the impression they used the same kext so I thought it would work.

 

[Larsvonhier]

Hi B S M,

In my QUAD with a Geforce 6600 it's out of the box no additional
work required.
Also Lars has an ATI card and if I understood correctly everything is
out of the box also.

Best regards,
voidRunner

Perhaps I confused things earlier or got deciphered between the lines ;-) , but my Quad G5 was upgraded with a NVidia Quadro FX4500, but that worked oob with full QE and OpenGL.

 

[weckart]

I haven't tinkered around with mine in any way yet but closing the lid does not put my PBG4 to sleep (servers, eh?) but does produce a lovely black screen of death. Time to tweak services methinks.

 

[0403979]

I couldn’t seem to boot the installer on my 800Mhz iMac G4 but I can make a basic script for patching the installer disk and system.

It seems like Lars already uploaded my very basic script (thank you!). I'll make it a bit more in-line with my current tools and maybe upload it to GitHub if that makes sense? I'll also post the steps I used to install it on my 800Mhz iMac G4. Stay tuned!

 

[Larsvonhier]

Confirm Nvidia 6600 out-of-the-box full accel on my G5 (test-swapped out the Quadro FX4500 that‘s also supported).

 

[JoyBed]

Hi Lars,

On my DLSD IOI2CADT46x is loaded in Leopard and in SL
too after copying it to /S/L/E so maybe different PDs need different kexts.
Regarding G4FanControl the problem is that is built with java and Java
is not working is x86.
I'm trying to get the JavaVM.framework from Leopard but until now it's not working
@JoyBed has extensive knowledge regarding Java on PPC maybe he can help us get it done.

Best regards,
voidRunner

Its good that someone is taging me on their posts and mentioning my name as it sends an email to me so I will notice while I work on my house. Keep doing it and I will chime in every time. So... Regarding to the Java. Try to use my newer versions. The 7 has no OS dependencies but have limited libraries bundled with it. Version 6 has all the libs but I cant recall if it has some OS dependencies or not. Keep me updated on how it works.

 

[weckart]

Ok. Downloading 10A222 client and I should be able to get 10A190 too. Do I need a different BootX to test it?

 

[jimjamyaha]

Hello - Just downloaded DP_10a261 and 10A380. (Currently downloading DP_10A96_Server).

Have compared the kexts listed between the first 2 - apart from code build-out changes these kexts have been removed between the builds:

Also - as the above builds are known to be Intel only I extracted the Finder.app from the BaseSystem install package and confirmed that they are built as Intel only:

DP_10a261

10A380

Once the DP_10A96 has downloaded I'll do the same - just incase the reporting mechanism only sees Intel code above PPC code.

We'll have to see as basically as with G3 support in 10.5 once the betas of that stopped having compiled components the only way of getting around this was to use G4-upgrades. Obviously, this situation is different in that Intel upgrades are are not a solution.

Long-shot would be to shoe-horn in the PPC-built Finder and other components into later builds - or even the GM release - but this might be totally buggy.

Just a heads-up for what might be the limits. Saying that even ending up with an early 10.6 beta mishmash would be awesome!

 

[weckart]

Checked Disk Utility app on 10a222 and it only has 32 and 64 bit Intel executives. Finder and Finder Exec are Intel only but Installer still Universal. Will download 10a190 but not really hopeful now.

[edit] 10a190 looks hopeful

 

[jimjamyaha]

Checked Disk Utility app on 10a222 and it only has 32 and 64 bit Intel executives. Finder and Finder Exec are Intel only but Installer still Universal. Will download 10a190 but not really hopeful now.

[edit] 10a190 looks hopeful

View attachment 910374

Out of interest where have you found the 10a190 and 10a222 - have been looking various places but no luck - any chance sharable? Thanks!

 

[weckart]

Out of interest where have you found the 10a190 and 10a222 - have been looking various places but no luck - any chance sharable? Thanks!

Will do. Just giving it a spin on my G5 to see if it isn't a mess of PPC/Intel first before raising too many hopes.

 

[Larsvonhier]

Just my 2cts.
It would be favourable if all found builds could be shared asap so we all can deduct things and learn from it. We might have different approaches at experimenting with the builds. I think we all are realistic enough to not be deluded by "rising hopes" ;-)
I try to make it all available (see link on page#1 for 10A96) and still think a place like macintoshgarden would be one of the right spots to place such stuff for all... Mail to maintainer of that site is out, seeking support for the faulty upload attempts there.

 

[jimjamyaha]

Just my 2cts.
It would be favourable if all found builds could be shared asap so we all can deduct things and learn from it. We might have different approaches at experimenting with the builds.
I try to make it all available (see link on page#1 for 10A96) and still think a place like macintoshgarden would be one of the right spots to place such stuff for all... Mail to maintainer of that site is out, seeking support for the faulty upload attempts there.

I've almost got the 10a96 downloaded - just stuck due to MEGA limit for a few hours.

Have just found 10a190 and 10a222 via waybackmachine - scraped yesterday - BUT this is going to take about 12-17 hours with the rate it's putting out data. Anything faster appreciated.

Totally agree @Larsvonhier - the more eyes, the more we might spot in total together- and the less focus on x person discovering x thing.

 

[Larsvonhier]

Ok. Downloading 10A222 client and I should be able to get 10A190 too. Do I need a different BootX to test it?

If it does not have a BootX already, you could take the one from 10A96 (or in attachement of p#1).
Chances are, that even then the boot mechanism changed in a way that kext preloading at first stage bootloader does not care. But it´s worth a try anyway then!

 

[Amethyst1]

Out of interest where have you found the 10a190 and 10a222 - have been looking various places but no luck - any chance sharable? Thanks!

All the builds listed in the first post, including 10A96 Client, are on BetaArchive's ftp. Getting access to that isn't easy though.

 

[vddrnnr]

Hi guys,

Found the problem with the Printers preference pane.
It's the cups binaries with are all intel but they an be replaced by the 10.5.8 ones and
everything works.
Also replacing syslogd with the one from 10.5.8 also fixes the high CPU I was having
in my DLSD.

PS. I'll post a list of the paths/files I replaced for reference

Best regards,
voidRunner

 

[jimjamyaha]

All the builds listed in the first post, including 10A96 Client, are on BetaArchive's ftp. Getting access to that isn't easy though.

Ah - just read up on BetaArchive - access will be a problem unless we can find someone who is friendly or already has access and is directly interested. In understand the rationale for their stance - but it's a shame it such a closed 'special' community.

 

[Larsvonhier]

Just found that @ASentientBot put two builds (10A190, 10A222) onto archive.org yesterday. Thank you - and perhaps welcome to where the fun is now on the PPC side of computing.
I´ve changed the wiki page so that the links to the currently 3 available builds are in the table now. To be continued..

 

[jimjamyaha]

Just found that @ASentientBot put two builds (10A190, 10A222) onto archive.org yesterday. Thank you - and perhaps welcome to where the fun is now on the PPC side of computing.
I´ve changed the wiki page so that the links to the currently 3 available builds are in the table.

Thanks - glad you're on it - that's where I got the builds (currently downloading at 161kb/sec). Was just about to link up. Thanks for doing it too

 

[LordeOurMother]

Of all the things I thought I would see one day, Snow Leopard on PPC wasn’t one of them... this is genuinely incredible lol.

Would it run intel apps? Or is just to make the OS itself more “modern?"

 

[weckart]

All the builds listed in the first post, including 10A96 Client, are on BetaArchive's ftp. Getting access to that isn't easy though.

That's where I hauled mine from. Was going to give a quick test then ask the mods there for permission to share here. Not sure they would have acquiesced as they are pretty nervy and don't want to be taken down but since the builds are out in the open that's now a moot point.

First issue, how to mod the OSInstall.mpkg? Have not done this for a while.

 

[Larsvonhier]

Of all the things I thought I would see one day, Snow Leopard on PPC wasn’t one of them... this is genuinely incredible lol.

Would it run intel apps? Or is just to make the OS itself more “modern?"

Intel (apps) outside ;-)
(No they would not run).

But what can be done instead:
- run slightly more recent PPC apps (in comparison to 10.5.8)
- re-compile apps for 10.6 PPC with XCode 3.2.x (i.e. TenFourFox, atm without Altivec, but for G4/G5)
- and, as you said, use a more modern OS X

 

[LordeOurMother]

Intel (apps) outside ;-)
(No they would not run).

But what can be done instead:
- run slightly more recent PPC apps (in comparison to 10.5.8)
- re-compile apps for 10.6 PPC with XCode 3.2.x (i.e. TenFourFox, atm without Altivec, but for G4/G5)
- and, as you said, use a more modern OS X

Aw, that’s a shame . I guess Rosetta doesn’t run in reverse. Nonetheless, still super cool. Will be keeping an eye on the project.