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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.
B S Magnet said:
Nice. You should be good so long as the capacitors remain good.

Also, were you aware that your series iMac G5 can be upgraded to 4.5GB RAM? :)
Click to expand...
Capacitors have been replaced years ago when I first got the Mac, it's been working fine ever since!

I'd be happy if I could get it to recognise the 2GB stick I have here, let alone a 4GB one :p But thank you, I'll definitely try if I ever get a 4GB stick.

In the meantime, I'm restoring the Snow Leopard client installer to an USB drive. We'll see how it goes
 
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@B S Magnet I'm getting the "Unable to find drivers for this platform" kernel panic at early boot stages with 10A96 after using the script from the first page. That happens on all the Macs I've tried.

EDIT: I bypassed the issue by installing the OS from Leopard. I'm at the desktop, currently with no QE/CI. I'll try enabling those
 
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mikiotty said:
@B S Magnet I'm getting the "Unable to find drivers for this platform" kernel panic at early boot stages with 10A96 after using the script from the first page. That happens on all the Macs I've tried.

EDIT: I bypassed the issue by installing the OS from Leopard. I'm at the desktop, currently with no QE/CI. I'll try enabling those
Click to expand...

Yah.

The only way to install is from the modified OSInstaller.mpkg from Leopard. Even with the .pkg I’m trying to create (PackageMaker is a lot more complicated than I anticipated), the instructions I’m writing make it clear running the Installer from Leopard is an unavoidable step, as this isn’t like a retail package of an OS (in which one opens the installer, the system reboots, and then the install begins).

As for CI/QE, let us know what you do and how things work out.
 
California said:
I'm very impressed with this effort but confused at the net gain in Snow Leopard for PPC machines? What do we get in Snow Leopard that we couldn't get in Leopard?
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This probably won’t be convincing for majority of users, but there are few ports that fail to build on Leopard but do build on Snow Leo PPC. Also it is not a priori impossible to bring 10A190 pretty close to 10.6.8 eventually, which will have more or less significant benefits.
 
mikiotty said:
@B S Magnet I'm getting the "Unable to find drivers for this platform" kernel panic at early boot stages with 10A96 after using the script from the first page. That happens on all the Macs I've tried.

EDIT: I bypassed the issue by installing the OS from Leopard. I'm at the desktop, currently with no QE/CI. I'll try enabling those
Click to expand...

If it is acceptable for you, installing from pre-made dmgs is far easier. You just restore an image with Disk Utility. Takes but few minutes all-in.
Macintosh Garden has both 10A190 and 10A96 in this way.

P. S. As a side note: I am not sure this was made obvious in this thread, but for anyone considering development, it is better to stay away from 10A96. Macports is at the moment broken on it.
 
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mikiotty said:
Ok so I managed to get the ATI kext loaded by installing the ones from 10.5.8 (didn't work on 10A96, only on 10A190), but still no acceleration. I will try some of the solutions listed in the first page.
Click to expand...

You may already know this, but take care to verify the kexts you move into place have the correct ownership/group and permissions, and that the Extensions.mkext gets deleted just before reboot.
 
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B S Magnet said:
You may already know this, but take care to verify the kexts you move into place have the correct ownership/group and permissions, and that the Extensions.mkext gets deleted just before reboot.
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Yep they have! I've been in the hackintosh world for about 10 years now, I'm (unfortunately :p) quite familiar with manual kext installation, especially in the Snow Leopard era.
Still no progress unfortunately. Is there any ATI GPU that works in 10.6 on PowerPC?
 
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mikiotty said:
Still no progress unfortunately. Is there any ATI GPU that works in 10.6 on PowerPC?
Click to expand...

Not that we know of just yet. The ones we are sure of, thus far, have been the PCIe cards in the A1117 Power Macs, and all of those were NVIDIA:

1649009738724.png


If you’re able, can you boot into Leopard with this iMac, then open the “Extensions” tab in System Profiler to see/verify which ATI kexts it loads for supporting the X600 series? As I look over the kexts from 10.5.8, I’m inclined to guess it’s the “ATIRadeon.kext” (as there aren’t any which have an “X-series in their file name.
 
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B S Magnet said:
Not that we know of just yet. The ones we are sure of, thus far, have been the PCIe cards in the A1117 Power Macs, and all of those were NVIDIA:

View attachment 1985922

If you’re able, can you boot into Leopard with this iMac, then open the “Extensions” tab in System Profiler to see/verify which ATI kexts it loads for supporting the X600 series? As I look over the kexts from 10.5.8, I’m inclined to guess it’s the “ATIRadeon.kext” (as there aren’t any which have an “X-series in their file name.
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It loads ATIRadeon9700.kext (successfully on 10.6 too), and the PCI id is listed in that kext, but still no HW QE/CI. I will try bringing over IOGraphicsFamily as well.
 
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Hello again,
As stated earlier, I am new to this so please bear with me; I might have some pretty basic questions. This is one of them. (sorry) If I want to, for example, load the AirPort kexts, here is what I would possibly do:
  • Find the specified files from Leopard (would Sorbet Leopard work? I have it already installed so I was just curious)
  • Rename the kexts I'm replacing in SL
  • Copy kexts into the specific location in SL
  • Check file permissions on each kext (I am afraid I am not familiar with how to do this)
  • Delete Extensions.mkext (which I cannot find anywhere)
  • Reboot
Is this the right idea? I feel like I’m missing something big. Also, how can I tell whether or not I’m getting graphics acceleration/full GPU support?
Thanks.
 
tensixturtle said:
Hello again,
As stated earlier, I am new to this so please bear with me; I might have some pretty basic questions. This is one of them. (sorry) If I want to, for example, load the AirPort kexts, here is what I would possibly do:
  • Find the specified files from Leopard (would Sorbet Leopard work? I have it already installed so I was just curious)
Click to expand...

What I would try to do is follow the steps in post #513 (also referenced in Appendix B of the WikiPost): retrieve the group of files in that post from one of the two disk images for Build 10A96, and copy those into their respective locations on your installation — accounting for file ownership/groupship and permissions being correct once you do so.


tensixturtle said:
  • Rename the kexts I'm replacing in SL
  • Copy kexts into the specific location in SL
  • Check file permissions on each kext (I am afraid I am not familiar with how to do this)
  • Delete Extensions.mkext (which I cannot find anywhere)
  • Reboot
Is this the right idea? I feel like I’m missing something big. Also, how can I tell whether or not I’m getting graphics acceleration/full GPU support?
Click to expand...

Because your iMac uses an AGP bus graphics card, you will not be able to tap into hardware support for Core Image and Quartz Extreme. What moving the video drivers over from 10.5.8 do is bring some support for your video card in 10.6, including software support for CI/QE. In addition, I would spend some time looking at the posts mentioned in Appendix B on how to further improve graphics performance, as there are a number of tweaks along the way which can improve performance even in the absence of hardware support.


tensixturtle said:
Thanks.
Click to expand...

In general: with this project, any files we’ve been pulling from Leopard 10.5.8 have been from just that: the final build produced by Apple. It would probably not be a good idea to pull anything from Sorbet Leopard.
 
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mikiotty said:
Yep they have! I've been in the hackintosh world for about 10 years now, I'm (unfortunately :p) quite familiar with manual kext installation, especially in the Snow Leopard era.
Still no progress unfortunately. Is there any ATI GPU that works in 10.6 on PowerPC?
Click to expand...

I got XT1900 and it apparently works :)
 
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barracuda156 said:
I got XT1900 and it apparently works :)
Click to expand...

Apropos of nothing:

Sometime along the way in Table 4, the ATI Radeon X1000- and X2000-series kexts/bundles/plugins got removed (or else I completely forgot to add them). Although there are version 1.6.0 iterations of these two GPU classes in Build 10A96 (and possibly 10A190), there are version 1.5.48 iterations from 10.5.8. Generally speaking, people have had relatively OK experience with the 1.5.48 iterations from 10.5.8.

So those have been added back in to the table.
 
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B S Magnet said:
Apropos of nothing:

Sometime along the way in Table 4, the ATI Radeon X1000- and X2000-series kexts/bundles/plugins got removed (or else I completely forgot to add them). Although there are version 1.6.0 iterations of these two GPU classes in Build 10A96 (and possibly 10A190), there are version 1.5.48 iterations from 10.5.8. Generally speaking, people have had relatively OK experience with the 1.5.48 iterations from 10.5.8.

So those have been added back in to the table.
Click to expand...
The X2000 extensions are marked in blue so ppc in that table, so are there really ppc kexts for X2000 cards?!? On 10.5.8 and 10A190, lipo -info returns i386 on the stock X2000 extensions. AFAIK no ATI cards >X1950XT have OF ROMS (even though they can be used under Linux but not OSX)
 
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pc297 said:
The X2000 extensions are marked in blue so ppc in that table, so are there really ppc kexts for X2000 cards?!? On 10.5.8 and 10A190, lipo -info returns i386 on the stock X2000 extensions. AFAIK no ATI cards >X1950XT have OF ROMS (even though they can be used under Linux but not OSX)
Click to expand...

There are kexts for the X1000 and X2000 series in both Build 10A96 and also 10.5.8. Both show as containing “Universal” binaries. Beyond that, I couldn’t assess their suitability or why Apple included an X2000 series when nothing from that series ended up in an OEM product.
 
B S Magnet said:
Apropos of nothing:

Sometime along the way in Table 4, the ATI Radeon X1000- and X2000-series kexts/bundles/plugins got removed (or else I completely forgot to add them). Although there are version 1.6.0 iterations of these two GPU classes in Build 10A96 (and possibly 10A190), there are version 1.5.48 iterations from 10.5.8. Generally speaking, people have had relatively OK experience with the 1.5.48 iterations from 10.5.8.

So those have been added back in to the table.
Click to expand...

There is also this: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ati-x1900-driver-powermac-g5-late-2005-pcie

The first installs into 10A190 and works.
 
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Minor update:

I dovetailed some changes into the monster that is better known as Table 4 and tried to clean up the portion relating to NVIDIA drivers (namely, removing indicators of “Intel-only” by relying entirely on what is contained in 10.5.8, which isn’t Intel only).

In addition, I grouped a couple of other components together, which should help to resolve how those elements are related to the same function. (Don’t sweat it if you don’t notice much of a difference: I had to go through everything, slowly, once more, as I was using the table for preparing a patch installer for 10A96, and it was then when I found a couple of minor typos and other info needing an update.)

I will probably, in a coming update to said long table, add in the components specific to QT 7.7.0 and iTunes 10.4.1, as these both help improve general stability for — at least — Build 10A96.
 
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B S Magnet said:
I dovetailed some changes into the monster that is better known as Table 4 and tried to clean up the portion relating to NVIDIA drivers (namely, removing indicators of “Intel-only” by relying entirely on what is contained in 10.5.8, which isn’t Intel only).
Click to expand...
The drivers for GeForce 8000 and Radeon HD 2000 series and newer GPUs present in 10.5.8 are Intel-only.
 
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Sorry, I have another question. I see on Macintosh Garden that I can get a 10A096 DMG file to download, but where can I find a DMG of 10.5.8? I don't have it installed and the only 10.5.8 I see are updates. Thanks.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
The drivers for GeForce 8000 and Radeon HD 2000 series and newer GPUs present in 10.5.8 are Intel-only.
Click to expand...

Well hot dog, look at that!

I’ll fix that in the table shortly. Thanks for clearing that up!

(I think I made that erroneous assumption because there were other parts in the GeForce section of the table which I had listed as Intel-only, which were, upon a re-look, actually Universal. I took that to mean I’d made the mistake across all of them and, thus, updated them from orange to blue. Also… it was late. But I also know that’s no excuse!)
 
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