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What have you done with a PowerPC today?

smirking said:
I have some thoughts about doing the same to an old 2nd gen Bondi Blue iMac that I have. What kind of adapter is needed to get one of those to take an SSD drive?
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I use IDE2SAT2 from https://www.startech.com/en-ca/hdd/adapters?filter_hddadaptype=adapter%20converter
which says it can do up to 133 MB/s (ATA-7) which is the max speed of a PCI slot.
I don't know if it can fit in an iMac.

Everymac says "This model supports a single internal 3.5" EIDE (ATA-3) hard drive. It does not support hard drives larger than 128 GB."
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac_ab.html

Wikipedia says ATA-3 supports at least 16.7 MB/s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

Some other source say ATA-3 supports up to 33 MB/s.
https://superuser.com/questions/408623/what-is-the-maximum-throughput-of-an-ide-bus-ata-3

So I don't know what speed you should expect from the iMac.
 
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Slix said:
It appears to have some flyback transformer issues, and so far it flickered a few times during testing.
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My iMac G3 appears to have this issue as well. I've found a company that stocks replacements but the price is insane...

Good work btw!

smirking said:
I have some thoughts about doing the same to an old 2nd gen Bondi Blue iMac that I have. What kind of adapter is needed to get one of those to take an SSD drive?
Click to expand...

In addition to the other recommendations, I use the Manhattan SATA 300 to IDE Converter in mine. Works flawlessly - as it does with my other PPC Macs that have the space to accommodate it.

M58PE3R.jpg


Certificate of Excellence said:
Hah! Nice matching shirt :D
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I was thinking exactly the same thing!

Slix said:
Haha thanks! I didn't even plan for that to happen. Just wore one of my many tie-dye shirts! :p
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A happy coincidence! :)
 
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TheShortTimer said:
My iMac G3 appears to have this issue as well. I've found a company that stocks replacements but the price is insane...

Good work btw!

<snip>
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My Bondi was flickering as well. I pulled the chassis and the flyback had bad solder joints. A quick reflow and it's now flicker-free going on three years now. Something to consider before springing for a new one...

(There is a shock hazard to pulling a chassis, so do your research. Don't let it scare you if you've never done it before, though. Fear of death by DC shock is a bit overblown.)
 
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swamprock said:
My Bondi was flickering as well. I pulled the chassis and the flyback had bad solder joints. A quick reflow and it's now flicker-free going on three years now. Something to consider before springing for a new one...
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Thanks a million for this tip! :D

I'll resolder the flyback - and very likely the PAV board for good measure if I spot any issues with its solder joints.

swamprock said:
(There is a shock hazard to pulling a chassis, so do your research. Don't let it scare you if you've never done it before, though. Fear of death by DC shock is a bit overblown.)
Click to expand...

It's sat disconnected for over 12 months so it should be safe for me to proceed. ;)
 
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TheShortTimer said:
Thanks a million for this tip! :D

I'll resolder the flyback - and very likely the PAV board for good measure if I spot any issues with its solder joints.



It's sat disconnected for over 12 months so it should be safe for me to proceed. ;)
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Funny story... Many years ago, I was repairing an old Arkanoid arcade machine, and someone came up to me while I was working and started telling me about how he pulled an anode cap off a monitor shortly after powering it down, and it threw him up against a wall, blew off the front of his shoe, and knocked him out cold. I listened to his BS for a few more moments, powered down the game, looked the guy directly in the eyes, and pulled the anode cap straight off the back of the tube. CRACK! The guy's eyes grew big, and he just walked away after that. I'd been bitten by CRTs so many times, it didn't bother me (much) anymore.

That one did hurt, though. I didn't think I was grounded, but I was wrong heh. Made me go cross-eyed for a few minutes...
 
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Spent all day snowed in, and wrote code for my next Dreamcast game, using an old scripting language called Fenix, on my Mac Mini G4-stuffed Cube running Tiger (post about this "machine" here.) All of the tools I need, with the exception of the compiler, interpreter, and IDE, run under Windows, so I use VPC 6 running Win98 to run those tools. I use plain old TextEdit to write and edit code. What's nice about Fenix is, I can write, debug, and see my changes by running the interpreter right in OS X, and it'll work exactly the same on the Dreamcast, as long as I stay within the DCs memory constraints. As with all of my games, it'll probably take me a few years to finish. My last one took 9 years, off and on. This one has been in progress for the past seven...

Picture 1.png
 
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TheShortTimer said:
I'll play it on my Dreamcast when it's ready. :D
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It shouldn't take me as long as it usually does. I recently set up an on-the-go Macbook 2008 with unsupported Mountain Lion (blazingly fast on the 2008! Just posted about it here) and Parallels and a Dreamcast emulator called nullDC that runs full speed on those old Intel GPUs, as well as copying over my development tools. I'll bang away on it during those dull times at work...
 
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I like having a powermac around (even if they aren't great on the internet) because they have built in disc drives still! Also, my first computer was a G4, so maybe I'm a little biased. But burning playlists to Cd's is where it't at for me
 
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Torben said:
I like having a powermac around (even if they aren't great on the internet) because they have built in disc drives still! Also, my first computer was a G4, so maybe I'm a little biased. But burning playlists to Cd's is where it't at for me
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My other half still buys CDs and Bluray discs, as she has a thing for physical media. Actually, I think it's the accumulation of "stuff" that she has a thing for 🤣
 
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Currently trying to install OSX 10.4 on my MDD G4, after painstakingly fighting the RAM slots and CPU card.

Now I can get it to boot consistanrly from my 10.4 DVD, this time without it hardlocking :)

I'm still going to recap the AcBel PSU, right now it's running off an old Delta ATX PSU attached to an ACX Electronics MDD-ATX harness.
 

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Meanwhile, I have fixed building folly with tests enabled on PowerPC (started from broken build, then all tests segfaulting etc.). While they take quite some time to complete on a PowerMac, I get 90% passing on 10.6 ppc vs 91% on Sonoma arm64.

Sonoma:
Code: 
91% tests passed, 272 tests failed out of 3045
Total Test time (real) = 178.46 sec

Snow Leopard PowerPC:
Code: 
90% tests passed, 308 tests failed out of 3051
Total Test time (real) = 13589.07 sec

299464495-e0b1c167-bcd3-4631-8ddc-34d44e44d303.jpeg


Anyone has nothing to do, it can be tried with sudo port -v test folly +tests. I did not try on Leopard, admittedly, but probably it will work.

P. S. Anyone has nothing to do and wants to code in C++? There are still three issues left to fix: https://github.com/facebook/folly/issues/2128
 
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Picture 2.png


After many fits- and starts- started getting serious about learning Objective-C. I typed in the example Calculator project from the book "Building Cocoa Applications" by Simson Garfinkel & Michael Mahoney. Rather than just typing in the example, I made several changes to learn Objective C.

1. I added a decimal key and implemented the back end code to make the decimal key work correctly. The main challenge was entering leading zeros, i.e. "0.0000...." because those don't change the value of the accumulator.

2. I created a custom NSView object to be the calculator display. My custom view allows the use of custom fonts, and shows the operator as well as the result. The view has several methods.
a. display value of accumulator
b. display current operation
c. append a character to the display
d. clear the display

3. Created UI behavior to make it more like a real calculator... such as ignoring multiple zero button presses if there is no decimal, disabling decimal and unary minus keys once selected, etc.

This project compiled on XCode 2.5 under 10.4.11 Tiger on a Powermac G5. I posted it on Github so others can play with it if they want to: github.com/bkmoore/Calculator

I think I'm starting to get the hang of Objective-C. I have been creating many mini-programs on my own to learn key concepts, such as how to pass a data structure betwen objects, how to draw with an NSView object, etc.
 
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swamprock said:
My Bondi was flickering as well. I pulled the chassis and the flyback had bad solder joints. A quick reflow and it's now flicker-free going on three years now. Something to consider before springing for a new one...

(There is a shock hazard to pulling a chassis, so do your research. Don't let it scare you if you've never done it before, though. Fear of death by DC shock is a bit overblown.)
Click to expand...

This was a common issue almost 20 years ago with the iMac, unfortunately it's poorly ventilated. Also, there are so many holes on the thing that eventually fills with dust. Dust itself is electrostatic. Heat plus dust, and a poor overall internal design means in some cases these units are also prone to catching fire, and I am not talking about The Hunger Games.
 
Using my Powerbook G4 and the Multi User Dungeon PPC MUD client "Atlantis", I logged onto three different Tolkien inspired MUDS and messed around. All three that I tried logged in without issue and I was able to create a new character and access everything from my PPC mac.

I'm really looking forward to trying these three online MUDS to see which I like the best.

:)
 
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Been playing with the Warpstream Youtube archive from Protoweb in OS9 on my G3 iBook.

As you can see, it works in IE 5.1 and gives you a glimpse of what Youtube used to look like around 2006 - fun to see what noughties videos have been preserved!

You have to enter proxy details in Preferences to access the network, details from Protoweb are here.

Be prepared for 240P heavily artifacted video action ;)

Picture 7.png
 
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