Welp, couldn’t wait. (Things I should have been working on today: I’m so sorry.)
Instead of pulling the A1138 mule from storage to try the OpenGL/QuartzCore mod, I cloned the mule’s backup over to a partition on my A1139. (This build, of course, is 10A96, not 10A190.)
The usual crankypants of a waking OS finding itself in slightly altered hardware notwithstanding (specifically, wifi not working, since I’ve never tried to get AirPort working, much less an AirPort-native 802.11n Broadcom card in the PCMCIA slot), I duplicated educovas’s findings successfully. In my case, only two items — OpenGL.framework and QuartzCore.framework — required swapping, as the others they called out were in place already from earlier testing.
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Not only was I able to verify it worked, via System Profiler (note how it’s still named glaciologia, the name of the 15-inch A1138), but I also decided to open VLC 2.0.10 to try a 480p video I’d used previously on the mule. As with the A1138 mule (sorry, I can’t help but keep calling its unusual hardware quirks as anything but, save for monster of Frankenstein, but nah), the video pulled up and performed the same as it would, relying on the CPU (as Apple intended).
But whereas getting video to play nicely on VLC versions built for PowerPC Macs has always been, well, a challenge, I opened the clip in a VLC playlist. At first, it was the (expected) choppy, unwatchable video. Then I opened preferences in simple view to check the video output module and noticed it was set to “Default” (whatever that is, probably CPU playback with no acceleration).
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I set a manual override to OpenGL, then restarted the clip. Not only did it not stutter or drop frames, but it also zoomed out to full screen fluidly. There were no dropped frames. After the clip ended, I noticed the CPU load never exceeded 70–75 per cent. (Software video playback on QuickLook/QT7.7 works, but it typically spikes the CPU to the 95–99 per cent range.) Whether this is an indirect indicator that VLC is taking advantage of the GPU, or that VLC is lighter than QuickTime 7.7/CoreGraphics when relying on GPU playback, this was still pleasantly surprising to see.
I’ll need to figure out AirPort/Brcm43xx and the PCMCIA slot issue at another time (as even the internal AirPort card is not registering), but it looks like I have more table updating to do over on the wikipost — again, as time permits.