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What have you done with a PowerPC today?

eyoungren

eyoungren

macrumors Penryn
Aug 31, 2011
29,604
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chaosbunny

chaosbunny

macrumors 68020
Mar 11, 2005
2,114
510
down to earth, far away from any clouds
eyoungren said:
LOL. Trying to help someone out which proved to be an interesting challenge. So, there's a need to get Pagemaker 7 files open and saved out as either Postscript files or PDFs. I have InDesign CS4 and CS6 which will open PM files, but neither app sees these as actual PM documents.

That meant an OS9 Mac or a Mac capable of running Classic. There are several ways I could do this (I have an iMac G3), but the easiest was to get Classic on the second drive of my G3 server. I don't need to install it, I just want to copy over a System folder. Finding THAT was hard enough, but found one and Classic is now working on the G3.

Yes, yes. I hate OS9/Classic - but this was to try and help someone and involved graphic programs. Well, purported to be graphic programs anyway.

Got PM 7 installed, didn't recognize the files. Got PM 6.5 installed, didn't recognized the files. I suspect that the resource forks are blown. I was going to try PM5, but that's a bunch of floppy disk images.

Anyway, it was fun getting all this stuff installed and working.
Click to expand...
I just read this and thought "sounds like a fun afternoon". :)
 
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eyoungren

eyoungren

macrumors Penryn
Aug 31, 2011
29,604
28,366
chaosbunny said:
I just read this and thought "sounds like a fun afternoon". :)
Click to expand...
Well, I got started around 6 or so. :D

Most of the time taken up was Google searching. Once I had what I needed it was just a matter of watching the computer do the work. I was able to enjoy all of it because I had no stake in the outcome. I don't normally run Classic and any Pagewrecker files I still have were converted to InDesign at some point. So this was solely to try and help somebody else. As I had it on a second partition it didn't affect the server either.

But now, should this come up again, I've got things set up to help.
 
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mectojic

mectojic

macrumors 65816
Dec 27, 2020
1,327
2,518
Sydney, Australia
Today I replaced the rotted speakers in my iMac G3 Ruby with brand new ones from eBay. Now they are producing a glorious sound! These speakers are amazing, possibly the best built-in ones until last year’s M1 iMac.

Speaking of that, here’s a photo of the two iMacs together- don’t they look great?
 

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galgot

galgot

macrumors 6502
May 28, 2015
487
899
I've be working from a Wallstreet, on setting up my self hosted Gopher server .
Was doing this while having no idea what to put on it, finally decided to document the way to set up a BasiliskII VM to use as server on a Raspberry-Pi... turns out it's a lot of words (and corrections to do..) :/

Jane-henderson-190622.jpg
 
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wicknix

wicknix

macrumors 68030
Jun 4, 2017
2,621
5,307
Wisconsin, USA
So i've been messing around with VPC the last few days. WinXP installed easily, and after installing the additions package it works flawlessly. Now Linux on the other hand is hit or miss. I originally tried with various current distros with little success. AntiX did boot to the desktop however, but half the software failed to run. Maybe i'll try a console only install of AntiX next, but in the meantime, going retro worked out of the box with Damn Small Linux. Works great. Even the repository is still online to install extra packages. The only real downfall to VPC is the lack of SSE support, so finding web browsers compiled without SSE is pretty limited and means you wont find anything newer than FF45/52 on XP (and probably linux/bsd as well). At any rate this really opens up lots of options for software and games not found on 10.4/10.5. Really enjoying this 11,2. It's a beast.

VPC-WXP-G5.png


VPC-DSL-G5.png


Cheers
 
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Amethyst1

Amethyst1

macrumors G3
Oct 28, 2015
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wicknix said:
The only real downfall to VPC is the lack of SSE support, so finding web browsers compiled without SSE is pretty limited and means you wont find anything newer than FF45/52 on XP (and probably linux/bsd as well).
Click to expand...
You may be able to compile newer stuff without dependencies on SSE — but I wouldn’t even dream of doing that within VPC. ;)

(I have a few physical non-SSE boxes myself which are in a similar situation.)

wicknix said:
At any rate this really opens up lots of options for software and games not found on 10.4/10.5.
Click to expand...
You can totally forget about any 3D gaming though. ;)
 
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galgot

galgot

macrumors 6502
May 28, 2015
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wicknix said:
So i've been messing around with VPC the last few days. WinXP installed easily, and after installing the additions package it works flawlessly. Now Linux on the other hand is hit or miss. I originally tried with various current distros with little success. AntiX did boot to the desktop however, but half the software failed to run. Maybe i'll try a console only install of AntiX next, but in the meantime, going retro worked out of the box with Damn Small Linux. Works great. Even the repository is still online to install extra packages. The only real downfall to VPC is the lack of SSE support, so finding web browsers compiled without SSE is pretty limited and means you wont find anything newer than FF45/52 on XP (and probably linux/bsd as well). At any rate this really opens up lots of options for software and games not found on 10.4/10.5. Really enjoying this 11,2. It's a beast.

View attachment 2021337

View attachment 2021338

Cheers
Click to expand...

How about OpenBSD ? Remember I had it working in VPC 6 on a MacOS 9 host, that was V.6.6...
Maybe newer versions could do, with maybe more modern browsers... ?
 
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Amethyst1

Amethyst1

macrumors G3
Oct 28, 2015
9,795
12,201
wicknix said:
Openbsd and netbsd are next on the list to try. Will report back after giving them a whirl in the upcoming weeks.
Click to expand...
I forgot to ask:
Does VPC emulate an i686-class CPU with the CMOV instruction? This is another requirement for many recent Linux distros.
You can check this in Linux by running
cat /proc/cpuinfo
Does the flags line contain cmov?

If it doesn't you need to look for distros/OSes that say they work on i586 or lower-class CPUs.
 
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