What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[ToniCH]

I watched this comparison and decided to try if there is a difference between Delock (red) IDE-mSata -adapter + cheap 128GB mSata drive + 44->40 pin adapter vs Startech (red) Sata to 40 pin IDE -adapter + Intel Pro 5400s Series 512GB SSD.

I ran Xbench and there is none. There was like 0.4 point difference in total drive score and around +- 1MB difference in each test part. So, either adapter and drive performs the same the bus being the obvious limiter. The Sata SSD -option has one adapter less but performance wise the end result is the same.

 

[eyoungren]

I watched this comparison and decided to try if there is a difference between Delock (red) IDE-mSata -adapter + cheap 128GB mSata drive + 44->40 pin adapter vs Startech (red) Sata to 40 pin IDE -adapter + Intel Pro 5400s Series 512GB SSD.

I ran Xbench and there is none. There was like 0.4 point difference in total drive score and around +- 1MB difference in each test part. So, either adapter and drive performs the same the bus being the obvious limiter. The Sata SSD -option has one adapter less but performance wise the end result is the same.

The 'red' adapters were originally sold by one company (in Germany I believe) that licensed other manufacturers. So essentially, any of these you find are going to be the same - just sold by different manufacturers.

The comparison to make is 'red' vs 'green'. The 'green' adapters are made by a variety of manufacturers, tend to be much cheaper and by my experience have a 50 percent fail rate. Meaning that there is either a 50 percent chance they will work fine and you'll never have a problem, or they will function correctly 50 percent of the time.

 

[ToniCH]

Yes, I've seen people say: "buy the red adapter" and I have. That is why I mentioned the color. These were two totally different adapters from 2 companies so I was interested seeing if there was a difference but none observed.

Ps. I originally bought a green adapter to install a SSD to my Cube and that didn't work at all. So, after that I've bought red ones for various vintage Macs and have no problems. But as anybody can make red PCBs I try to buy good known brands like Delock to be sure.

 

[ojfd]

Delock and Startech are products by the same Taiwanese company, just different trade names in different regions.
Red adapters work better in master/slave configurations with other drives, but otherwise the green ones work fine too.
Btw, I bought well over 20 of various green ATA adapters (mSATA, M.2, SATA) and none of them were defective, so, I don't know where the 50% failure rate number comes from.
If you wanna see real world red vs. green adapter speed tests, head over to MacOS9Lives, there are several threads about them.

"Green" vs. "Red" mSATA adapter speeds

"Green" vs. "Red" mSATA adapter speeds

macos9lives.com

 

[ToniCH]

Delock and Startech are products by the same Taiwanese company, just different trade names in different regions.

Good to know. 👍

Not interested in the green ones, I am happy with the red ones which I've had 100% success rate this far.

 

[headlessmike]

Delock and Startech are products by the same Taiwanese company, just different trade names in different regions.
Red adapters work better in master/slave configurations with other drives, but otherwise the green ones work fine too.
Btw, I bought well over 20 of various green ATA adapters (mSATA, M.2, SATA) and none of them were defective, so, I don't know where the 50% failure rate number comes from.
If you wanna see real world red vs. green adapter speed tests, head over to MacOS9Lives, there are several threads about them.

"Green" vs. "Red" mSATA adapter speeds

"Green" vs. "Red" mSATA adapter speeds

macos9lives.com

I bought a "green" JMicron M.2 SATA to IDE adapter and the adapter itself worked fine, just not in my 2003 Powerbook. I could install an OS but the longer I used it (we're talking less than an hour) the slower it got. Finally, the system would only boot after a few hours of waiting. If I reformatted the drive, then it was fast again for another hour or so. I still have that adapter and the SSD I put in it and they both work great in other machines, just not in the Macs I've tested them in for some reason. My "red" Marvell works perfectly in my Powerbook. It's just getting difficult to find good mSATA drives. In both cases the SSD was the only hard drive in the computer.

 

[ojfd]

I bought a "green" JMicron M.2 SATA to IDE adapter and the adapter itself worked fine, just not in my 2003 Powerbook. I could install an OS but the longer I used it (we're talking less than an hour) the slower it got. Finally, the system would only boot after a few hours of waiting. If I reformatted the drive, then it was fast again for another hour or so. I still have that adapter and the SSD I put in it and they both work great in other machines, just not in the Macs I've tested them in for some reason. My "red" Marvell works perfectly in my Powerbook. It's just getting difficult to find good mSATA drives. In both cases the SSD was the only hard drive in the computer.

That's strange. I never had any problems with M.2 drives and JMicron adapters. But, I have to admit, I only used brand name OEM drives (used), not any recent offerings from Far East.
Ok, I also encountered one bad batch by Samsung, but that was the only case.

Warning! Samsung PM881 M.2 SATA 128GB bad batch floating around

I thought I'll post this info, especially for our German users and those, who are looking for M.2 drives to upgrade their older G3/G4 Power Macs. There was a large number (>50) of these drives sold on German fleebay recently at a very attractive price. I bought four :oops: It turns out, that...

forums.macrumors.com

What drive were you using?

 

[headlessmike]

That's strange. I never had any problems with M.2 drives and JMicron adapters. But, I have to admit, I only used brand name OEM drives (used), not any recent offerings from Far East.
Ok, I also encountered one bad batch by Samsung, but that was the only case.

Warning! Samsung PM881 M.2 SATA 128GB bad batch floating around

I thought I'll post this info, especially for our German users and those, who are looking for M.2 drives to upgrade their older G3/G4 Power Macs. There was a large number (>50) of these drives sold on German fleebay recently at a very attractive price. I bought four :oops: It turns out, that...

forums.macrumors.com

What drive were you using?

The one I used is from a German brand named Intenso. I'm not sure if the problem was because of a conflict between the adapter and computer, the adapter and SSD, or computer and SSD, because everything works alright with other hardware. I put the SSD in another enclosure for an Intel Mac using SATA and it works great.

 

[Rairii]

So I decided to install on real hardware to determine if some odd issues were qemu emulation inaccuracies or not. Turned out to reproduce on real hardware, but I got this photo

 

[davisdelo]

So I decided to install on real hardware to determine if some odd issues were qemu emulation inaccuracies or not. Turned out to reproduce on real hardware, but I got this photo

Am I looking at NT PowerPC running on an iBook here?

 

[Rairii]

Am I looking at NT PowerPC running on an iBook here?

Yes.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Is it NT4 or some older version?

 

[eyoungren]

Transferred pics from my 17" PowerBook G4 to my 2TB RAID enclosure.

Just bought a new (used) Synology NAS off eBay. Actually comes with the drives! Either will be a 6TB RAID or two 3TB drives. Either way, right now I have three 3TB spares doing nothing. At least I can put them in this NAS if those drives become bad. We'll see.

I mention the above because when it gets here, the PowerMac G4 is going to be retired. That'll be the last PowerMac I have actually on doing duty. I don't count the PowerBook G4 because it's mainly just my attachment to it that keep it up and running.

 

[ToniCH]

After a long search I finally bought a Sonnet single CPU upgrade to my Cube from a forum member. My plan is to make a cool interior decor music player/streamer out of my Cube. It has the GF 6200 GPU, mSata boot drive, cooling fan and max memory already. I hope the factory VRM will survive another decade or two of occasional use.

 

[Rairii]

Is it NT4 or some older version?

It's NT4. Older versions would have a different UI style.

 

[pipetogrep]

Stepmania!

 

[Doq]

View attachment 2369913

So I decided to install on real hardware to determine if some odd issues were qemu emulation inaccuracies or not. Turned out to reproduce on real hardware, but I got this photo

Please split this off into its own thread!

I have always thought this to be fundamentally impossible because of endianness and also CHRP vs Apple architecture or whatever. I would love to know all the gorey details.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

I would love to know all the gorey details.

Me too .

 

[barracuda156]

 

[Rairii]

Please split this off into its own thread!

I have always thought this to be fundamentally impossible because of endianness and also CHRP vs Apple architecture or whatever. I would love to know all the gorey details.

I keep meaning to write a guest blog post on virtuallyfun to explain various parts, then get sidetracked debugging one issue or another (as you can expect it doesn't run 100% correctly yet). I'll probably end up doing it when I finally get everything to a releasable state, haha. What that releasable state will be in terms of drivers, I don't know (currently only the bare minimum is implemented, which means PIC/PMU in the HAL, porting atapi.sys using the DDK sources to support the Mac I/O ATA controllers, and only ADB keyboard driver for now, no ADB mouse or USB anything yet).

There's plenty of interesting and cursed things I've ended up doing, and getting NT to boot is only part of it, there's partition tables and partitioning (to work around a stupid NT thing, and probably not the one you're thinking of, I ended up spending a day writing my own NTFS partition formatting code)...

This started as an attempt to port NT to the Wii, then I ran into some hardware issue there with the GPU clobbering memory, without a usb gecko/hardware debugger to look into it (as of course it works fine in dolphin), it turned out it was cheaper to get an iBook G3 (from Japan, with the shipping costs that implies) than a USB Gecko. (At least I got a good deal on the iBook G3, the seller sold it cheap because of an "issue" that looked from the pictures like just not having the correct graphics drivers installed in OS9 - which is exactly what the issue turned out to be! It turned out to be one of Those iBook G3s with notorious overheating GPU, but I don't have it powered on for long periods anyway.)

 

[mlayer]

Bought an old used iMac G4 (700 MHz/256 MB/40 GB) from an auction over the weekend for $25. It had a slightly dinged up screen. The neck was still in good shape and so was the rest of it, nothing that a couple of sanitary wipes couldn't take care of. I brought it home, plugged it in, and was completely amazed to that it booted straight to the desktop. It ran Panther (10.3.9) and was mostly cleaned out except for some MP3s and a rather large student iMovie project which I purged. I never had personally owned the "sunflower" iMac, so I would've been fine if it didn't work at all. A successful boot is a bonus.

Not sure if I want to reformat and install Panther or move up to Tiger since it's supported. TBH, I like booting up the handful of old Macs I have with whatever OS is current on them. It's like a snapshot in time. Not too worried about running old software these days. Maybe I'll put it on the network (Ethernet, no Airport) and laugh at Internet Explorer.

 

[eyoungren]

Not sure if I want to reformat and install Panther or move up to Tiger since it's supported. TBH, I like booting up the handful of old Macs I have with whatever OS is current on them. It's like a snapshot in time. Not too worried about running old software these days. Maybe I'll put it on the network (Ethernet, no Airport) and laugh at Internet Explorer.

Panther was never flashy like Tiger was, but aside from a few later versions it is one of my favorites simply because it was stable and consistent. When I worked for a newspaper, I got a lot of jobs out on that OS. It even functioned when damaged. In the first year of having a G5 (which came with Panther) a ram stick died. Because there was disk access at the time I guess, the ram stick going out damaged the filesystem 'B' tree. The 'B' tree is the backup to the 'A' tree and both trees tell the OS what files are where. It wasn't until a few weeks later that I could wipe the drive. reinstall apps and move on. But in the meantime, Panther handled everything just fine. I guess it amazed me so much that I am still mentioning it to this day.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Bought an old used iMac G4 (700 MHz/256 MB/40 GB) from an auction over the weekend for $25. It had a slightly dinged up screen. The neck was still in good shape and so was the rest of it, nothing that a couple of sanitary wipes couldn't take care of. I brought it home, plugged it in, and was completely amazed to that it booted straight to the desktop. It ran Panther (10.3.9) and was mostly cleaned out except for some MP3s and a rather large student iMovie project which I purged. I never had personally owned the "sunflower" iMac, so I would've been fine if it didn't work at all. A successful boot is a bonus.

Not sure if I want to reformat and install Panther or move up to Tiger since it's supported. TBH, I like booting up the handful of old Macs I have with whatever OS is current on them. It's like a snapshot in time. Not too worried about running old software these days. Maybe I'll put it on the network (Ethernet, no Airport) and laugh at Internet Explorer.

I have a few imacg4s and they all kind of sit around staring back at me like cats on a shelf - as an homage to that gen of Mac just like my g3s do for their generation. My home office is salt and peppered with old macs LOL but remind me of trips to Compusa and other tech retailers of the era where I’d see their displays & wishing I could afford one. The allure was palpable - specifically the Titanium PB … oh boy the first time I saw one of those and I was in love.

FWIW, my iMac g3s run classic macOS 8, Panther and Tiger while my iMac g4s run Tiger and leopard.

I really love the neck. I wish Apple had included a redesign of it in their newest M series release. Maybe in the future

 

[eyoungren]

Well, that's it then. The last PowerMac that was officially dedicated to a purpose is now retired. Pulled the drives and put it out in the garage to await a return to service for some other day.

The PowerPC era for me, in with a 'meh' in 2001 and out with a unceremonious shutdown/removal in 2024. In between I had a lot of great years and great Macs. I still have them, they are just not being put to a purpose requiring them being on all the time now.

Good run…

500mhz AGP PowerMac G4

Given to me by a reddit user. Don't know anything yet other than the label below and that it has two video cards. More to come after lunch.

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Well, that's it then. The last PowerMac that was officially dedicated to a purpose is now retired. Pulled the drives and put it out in the garage to await a return to service for some other day.

The PowerPC era for me, in with a 'meh' in 2001 and out with a unceremonious shutdown/removal in 2024. In between I had a lot of great years and great Macs. I still have them, they are just not being put to a purpose requiring them being on all the time now.

Good run…

500mhz AGP PowerMac G4

Given to me by a reddit user. Don't know anything yet other than the label below and that it has two video cards. More to come after lunch.

forums.macrumors.com

Mine dont really play a role nowadays either. 95% is either my Intel macs or my m series. I always have one running but I probably sit down at it once or twice a week if that - mostly to mess with linux. I still really enjoy building up/ kitting out my PMG4s but trying to use them nowadays with the intel and M series stuff I have, is just time I need to reclaim for other things.