What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[VirtuallyInsane]

Updated the RAM on my new iBook, and installed the Shuriken optimizations and customizations. Next I'm going to try to set it up as a little Python coding box

View attachment 2244627 View attachment 2244628

iBooks are hot and anyone who says otherwise needs slapped ;D

Recently, I moved my Dell monitor and Powerbook G4 12" to my main desk, and my iBook G4 12" to the 'PowerPC table' so that I can open my damn window lol. And yep, that weird looking device is a fan:

I will probably change the background soon but I love the fishies. Sad, I know I have WritersCafe (a great free app for planning novels I found by accident once) open, Garageband, and Word 2004 or 2008, (I think it's 04) open. Reason 12 is open on my iMac 2019. The Pbg4 12" is a pleasure to type on, which is why I use it as my writing machine.

 

[ojfd]

Just for kicks, calibrated (sort of) my newly fitted to A1095 PowerBook G4 1440x960 display, while in OS9
Boy, are these early CCFL LCD displays rubbish, compared to what I'm used to work with these days. Delta E is all over the place and so is the brightness across the screen. They won't pass UGRA tests either and are useless for serious Photoshop or color correction work.

EDIT. For the average user they will look 'just marvelous'

This is the best I could do with non-functioning Brightness control in OS9 Monitors CP.

 No. | Lab              | dE94
-----+------------------+------
  0  | 57.4 -27.3 -39.6 | 14.6
  1  | 63.8 -26.5 -32.9 | 10.8
  2  | 74.0 -16.9 -20.1 | 6.4
  3  | 84.0  -8.7  -9.4 | 4.3
  4  | 48.6  66.8  -2.3 | 7.3
  5  | 56.4  53.0  -3.6 | 8.9
  6  | 69.0  32.2  -2.5 | 8.1
  7  | 82.7  14.0  -1.0 | 4.8
  8  | 88.0  -4.5  76.1 | 5.4
  9  | 89.4  -3.9  60.3 | 3.8
 10  | 90.4  -3.7  38.1 | 3.4
 11  | 91.9  -2.1  19.9 | 2.8
 12  | 20.8   0.7   2.4 | 4.5
 13  | 38.2  -0.1  -0.4 | 7.5
 14  | 56.9  -0.4  -0.7 | 6.5
 15  | 71.8  -0.7  -0.4 | 5.1
 16  | 48.3  62.6  37.3 | 6.5
 17  | 55.5  50.3  32.4 | 7.8
 18  | 67.5  30.7  24.4 | 6.4
 19  | 81.3  11.4  15.0 | 4.6
 20  | 52.3 -56.5  24.2 | 10.7
 21  | 59.8 -42.6  18.3 | 6.2
 22  | 72.1 -24.3  13.2 | 3.7
 23  | 83.3 -11.8   8.1 | 2.9
 24  | 27.4  12.9 -42.9 | 7.5
 25  | 36.9  16.0 -35.4 | 10.7
 26  | 54.5  12.9 -22.3 | 9.7
 27  | 74.3   5.2 -11.7 | 6.2
 28  | 92.8   0.3   2.0 | 1.7

Average deviation     6.5 dE94
Maximum deviation     14.6 dE94

The systems does not comply to the SWOP(r) standards.

 

[sambow23]

Well I have gotten Spotify working on PowerPC again, technically. I used a combination of Browservice to load the web spotify app to control my PC client, then used VLC to stream the audio back to my PowerBook G4 12". It works surprisingly well and there isnt a horrible delay clicking the media controls. The audio itself is pretty stable, even when using the slow Wi-Fi card.

 

[sambow23]

Little update, since I wanted a slimmer way to control spotify at home I came up with this small client/server script (thank you ChatGPT) that handles controlling media via playback button emulation and grabbing song info from the Spotify window title. Its all very hacky and I have no idea if I'm going to turn it into a more robust application
Here is a live demo:

(no idea why its a YT Short)

 

[Ryan Bremer]

Well I have gotten Spotify working on PowerPC again, technically. I used a combination of Browservice to load the web spotify app to control my PC client, then used VLC to stream the audio back to my PowerBook G4 12". It works surprisingly well and there isnt a horrible delay clicking the media controls. The audio itself is pretty stable, even when using the slow Wi-Fi card.

yeah of course, browservice doesn't count, it's like using a vnc viewer to use your modern mac from your old one 🤣

 

[doctor_dog]

Little update, since I wanted a slimmer way to control spotify at home I came up with this small client/server script (thank you ChatGPT) that handles controlling media via playback button emulation and grabbing song info from the Spotify window title. Its all very hacky and I have no idea if I'm going to turn it into a more robust application
Here is a live demo:

(no idea why its a YT Short)

Nice work here. I've been working on a native Spotify experience for PowerPC these past several weeks, but running into lots of obstacles as you might expect. I like your novel approach here, haven't thought about using Browservice on a PPC Mac (thanks for the idea).

Some unsolicited information: I know you've started on a control script, I will point out that if you want to skip the browser bit altogether (and having to issue text commands to your script), you can use the Python-based Spotify Terminal app. Spotify Terminal is a full-on text-based Spotify frontend that allows you to use Spotify Connect to control your "host" Spotify app from elsewhere. Since this is what you are doing and piping the audio back via VLC, it might be worth checking out:

spotify-terminal

Terminal Spotify application

pypi.org

Note you need to authorize Spotify Terminal for use in Spotify, this presents a bit of a conundrum for PowerPC browsers which can't handle the internal redirect. You'll need to proxy this bit to another machine or connect from another machine to make this happen. But one you do, you will have a full Spotify client running semi-locally on your PPC machine. With any luck, I'll have a way to do this all natively soon (and if I can't, I will probably just end up using your method!)

Hope this helps, cheers and keep up the good work.

 

[sambow23]

Nice work here. I've been working on a native Spotify experience for PowerPC these past several weeks, but running into lots of obstacles as you might expect. I like your novel approach here, haven't thought about using Browservice on a PPC Mac (thanks for the idea).

Some unsolicited information: I know you've started on a control script, I will point out that if you want to skip the browser bit altogether (and having to issue text commands to your script), you can use the Python-based Spotify Terminal app. Spotify Terminal is a full-on text-based Spotify frontend that allows you to use Spotify Connect to control your "host" Spotify app from elsewhere. Since this is what you are doing and piping the audio back via VLC, it might be worth checking out:

spotify-terminal

Terminal Spotify application

pypi.org

Note you need to authorize Spotify Terminal for use in Spotify, this presents a bit of a conundrum for PowerPC browsers which can't handle the internal redirect. You'll need to proxy this bit to another machine or connect from another machine to make this happen. But one you do, you will have a full Spotify client running semi-locally on your PPC machine. With any luck, I'll have a way to do this all natively soon (and if I can't, I will probably just end up using your method!)

Hope this helps, cheers and keep up the good work.

InterWebPPC worked for me authorizing spotify-terminal, and spotify-terminal does indeed work but the rendering is really buggy

 

[doctor_dog]

That's awesome, glad you got it to work. Bonus points for the SOAD 🤘

I also have that bug, but sometimes it can be avoided by restarting the client and crossing your fingers.

There's an open ticket that looks related on GitHub, but seems like the project might not be active anymore (no updates in 2 years).

First run after installation fails with error "'Thread' object has no attribute 'isAlive'" · Issue #89 · marcdjulien/spotify-terminal

I installed with pip install spotify-terminal on my Raspberry Pi Linux raspberrypi 5.10.92+ #1514 Mon Jan 17 17:35:21 GMT 2022 armv6l GNU/Linux Python 3.9.2, pip 20.3.4 I then closed and reopened m...

github.com

There are some other python-based Spotify clients out there I haven't yet tried, it might be worth a look to see if we can't find a less buggy one. For example, there's this one, though it doesn't appear as full featured.

spotify-cli

Control Spotify playback on any device through the command line.

pypi.org

Either way, thanks for testing this out and proving that it works!

 

[VivienM]

I put an mSATA SSD in a Titanium G4... now I need to reinstall everything... (okay, I could probably have transferred stuff but really, I hadn't done much on the hard drive)

Interestingly there was a handwritten taped label on the 40GB drive. Makes me think this laptop may have had a more colourful history than I originally thought...

 

[VivienM]

I put an mSATA SSD in a Titanium G4... now I need to reinstall everything... (okay, I could probably have transferred stuff but really, I hadn't done much on the hard drive)

And I thought I could directly install Tiger, but now the software restore app on the DVD with OS 9 on it isn't happy. Time to go hunting for hidden DMG files...

 

[hopfenholz]

Real men use Word 5 on a Mac with OS9

Surely Corel WordPerfect 3.5e?

 

[ojfd]

Surely Corel WordPerfect 3.5e?

Yuck..

 

[VivienM]

Surely Corel WordPerfect 3.5e?

I don't think WordPerfect 3.5e has the ... absolutely legendary... reputation of Word 5.1a for 68K Mac. Wasn't there an article in Ars Technica or somewhere in the last <5 years about the staying power of Word 5.1a?

 

[hopfenholz]

Fair enough! Back in the days I was daily driving 68k macs I preferred to have nothing from Redmond on my system but I guess that was just youthful prejudice. Word 5.1a is a good piece of software

 

[EnriqueG]

Bought a Cardbus USB Card. My PowerBook has now USB, I got it to the 21st century!

It will be easier to use now with a mouse (Apple Pro Mouse) than with that trackpad.

 

[VirtuallyInsane]

Pulled out the beast (17-inch Powerbook) and installed a pile of programs onto it.

I am actually typing from it right now, but will probably use it more as an offline machine, unless I NEED to go online. So far, it's running fine but a little hot.

 

[ojfd]

Your 17" 1.33MHz PB is much better at running OS9

 

[VirtuallyInsane]

Your 17" 1.33MHz PB is much better at running OS9

Lol 1.33 MHz? You mean GHz? xD I have a 1.07 GHz iBook G4 and it runs alright but a bit slow on Tiger. But it only has one job, literally. To type documents. So that's fine.

I put in a 256GB SSD into the 17 inch and it's running a lot better than it did before on Leopard lol. And oh yeah, classic mode. Forgot about that. My iBook G4 has that, and my iBook G3 is running 9.2.2. at the moment.

You can load OS9 natively but it doesn't seem to be all there, according to a thread at Mac OS 9 Lives. If I get another one, I am gonna try it out though.

 

[3922434]

Spent the morning watching YouTube through iteroni and did some writing and email for school using office and tenfourbird…Ohhhh and can’t forget played some super mario bros advance using retro arch.

 

[Ryan Bremer]

fun fact: since iteroni.com is an public invidious instance, yewtu.be works too

 

[3922434]

Good too know! Thanks for sharing that pal!!!!

 

[hopfenholz]

Your 17" 1.33MHz PB is much better at running OS9

Not possible is it? I have a 867 12” booting into 9 (that was difficult enough) but missing sleep (surprisingly annoying) but I understood 17” to be not possible

 

[ojfd]

Ta da!

 

[Doq]

I got shown wrong too-- I thought it was only the first gen 17 (the 1GHz A1013) that could do it.

What voodoo wizardry needed to be done to make this work? Old Companion is similar enough to the second gen 17 (it being a second gen 15) and I couldn't ever get OS 9 to even boot on it.

 

[philgxxd]

Just fired up my bedroom iMac for some chill tunes.
Totall ghetto setup. Just opened a drawer and put the keyboard there I brought just in for a little appreciation session.