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What have you done with a PowerPC today?

Tried to once again add FW 800 to my Sawtooth. Guess I got too confident after my optical drive upgrade...

Same problem as usual, slow copying speeds and issues with the Mac powering on. It took removing the card and multiple PMU resets to get the Sawtooth booting again (and some NVRAM and PRAM resets too). I said this before, but I really have to give up adding FW 800 on here. Only conclusion I've come to is that the PSU isn't powerful enough. Aside from the logic board though, the only other things that are hooked up to the PSU are the optical drive, the SSD, and the USB hub (which replaced the Zip drive). The GPU just uses bus power and so does my USB 2.0 card. When I had the FW card plugged in I tried both with and without having a molex cable plugged into the card's molex port. Maybe the accelerator draws so much power that there is not enough for a FW card? I don't know...
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
Tried to once again add FW 800 to my Sawtooth. Guess I got too confident after my optical drive upgrade...

Same problem as usual, slow copying speeds and issues with the Mac powering on. It took removing the card and multiple PMU resets to get the Sawtooth booting again (and some NVRAM and PRAM resets too). I said this before, but I really have to give up adding FW 800 on here. Only conclusion I've come to is that the PSU isn't powerful enough. Aside from the logic board though, the only other things that are hooked up to the PSU are the optical drive, the SSD, and the USB hub (which replaced the Zip drive). The GPU just uses bus power and so does my USB 2.0 card. When I had the FW card plugged in I tried both with and without having a molex cable plugged into the card's molex port. Maybe the accelerator draws so much power that there is not enough for a FW card? I don't know...
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If you have a spare atx psu, you could take the load off the powermac psu with that atx psu/molex and see if that fixes the slow speeds. If not, maybe there is a driver that you need. IIRC my fw800 card came with a os9 driver. What Os does the sawtooth run?
 
Certificate of Excellence said:
If you have a spare atx psu, you could take the load off the powermac psu with that atx psu/molex and see if that fixes the slow speeds. If not, maybe there is a driver that you need. IIRC my fw800 card came with a os9 driver. What Os does the sawtooth run?
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Nope, I don't have any spare PSUs. I'm running Leopard and Tiger on the Sawtooth. This is the fourth FW 800 card I have tried (2 from Belkin, 1 from SiiG, and an unknown brand, all experience the same problems).
 
MacFoxG4 said:
Nope, I don't have any spare PSUs. I'm running Leopard and Tiger on the Sawtooth. This is the fourth FW 800 card I have tried (2 from Belkin, 1 from SiiG, and an unknown brand, all experience the same problems).
Click to expand...

Something isn't right here - I've added FW 800 cards to my PM G4's without any of these issues.
 
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Yet to test on real hardware, but my hacked up dingusppc tree is accurate enough such that (checked) NT4 actually installs and boots correctly (with my gossamer HAL and mac i/o IDE and ADB drivers).

1719699496858.png
 
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TheShortTimer said:
Something isn't right here - I've added FW 800 cards to my PM G4's without any of these issues.
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I agree, this should work and something's definitely wrong - and my guess is it's the USB 2.0 PCI card. I've run into this problem before with PMG4's, not working right, kernel panics and such; and following standard troubleshooting procedures I'd remove PCI cards and add them back one by one. It's been a while since I've tinkered with my G4's, but I seem to recall identifying a PCI USB card as the culprit on more than one occasion. IIRC it's something you wouldn't notice by just testing one card at a time, it's the combination of cards that caused the problem. I'd remove the USB card and voila! - things just worked. My guess is some things just don't play nice with each other on that single PCI bus.

@MacFoxG4 , if you haven't already done so, remove that USB 2.0 card, remove all peripherals except a keyboard and mouse, and see if you can get your Sawtooth to work with a FW800 card. If that fixes it, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to choose between USB 2.0 and FW800, it probably means you need to try a different USB 2.0 card.

My only other suggestion would be to boot your Sawtooth into target mode, connect it via FW400 to a newer PPC Mac that has built-in FW400 and FW800 (any G5 or the latest PBG4s if you have one), then boot the newer Mac from your Sawtooth's drive via FW400. Once booted, try connecting something to the built-in FW800 on the newer Mac. If it doesn't cause any problems, then you've at least determined there's nothing amiss with your Sawtooth's OS install, FW800 should work with it. That doesn't tell you much but it's a start: at least you'll know the problem is somewhere in your Sawtooth's hardware or the PCI cards' hardware and/or their associated drivers.
 
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I finally found some good screen capture/vlog software for OS X PowerPC that actually delivers. ScreenFlow 2 is really cool if you've never used it. Even on a 1920x1200 screen capture with simultaneous iSight capture it uses less than half the CPU when recording. The interface is great too, it's essentially a clone of iMovie HD. I've got two samples below, one from my iSight and one from a D800 via the KONA3. It's pretty incredible the quality that comes out of this. These clips are captured at 1920x1200, the videos have been compressed through Turbo.264 to 640x400 for the web.

The way the software seems to work is that it creates a 'camera' for the screen at whatever resolution you have it set at when the software is launched. There is no live monitoring either, so no overhead for that. There's a lot of tests to be done to see where optimizations can be made, but I feel pretty confident that live game capture is possible with this.

On a similar note, if you have a G4 or G5 tower, do yourself a favor and get a capture card. I can't recommend it enough, having the ability Airplay over a streaming stick to your Mac or watch any other modern content at full resolution and frame rate is really quite nice.

 
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davisdelo said:
I finally found some good screen capture/vlog software for OS X PowerPC that actually delivers. ScreenFlow 2 is really cool if you've never used it. Even on a 1920x1200 screen capture with simultaneous iSight capture it uses less than half the CPU when recording. The interface is great too, it's essentially a clone of iMovie HD. I've got two samples below, one from my iSight and one from a D800 via the KONA3. It's pretty incredible the quality that comes out of this. These clips are captured at 1920x1200, the videos have been compressed through Turbo.264 to 640x400 for the web.

The way the software seems to work is that it creates a 'camera' for the screen at whatever resolution you have it set at when the software is launched. There is no live monitoring either, so no overhead for that. There's a lot of tests to be done to see where optimizations can be made, but I feel pretty confident that live game capture is possible with this.

On a similar note, if you have a G4 or G5 tower, do yourself a favor and get a capture card. I can't recommend it enough, having the ability Airplay over a streaming stick to your Mac or watch any other modern content at full resolution and frame rate is really quite nice.

View attachment 2393456View attachment 2393457
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Does that version of screenflow produce a watermark? What screen capture card do you recommend?
 
Raging Dufus said:
I agree, this should work and something's definitely wrong - and my guess is it's the USB 2.0 PCI card. I've run into this problem before with PMG4's, not working right, kernel panics and such; and following standard troubleshooting procedures I'd remove PCI cards and add them back one by one. It's been a while since I've tinkered with my G4's, but I seem to recall identifying a PCI USB card as the culprit on more than one occasion. IIRC it's something you wouldn't notice by just testing one card at a time, it's the combination of cards that caused the problem. I'd remove the USB card and voila! - things just worked. My guess is some things just don't play nice with each other on that single PCI bus.

@MacFoxG4 , if you haven't already done so, remove that USB 2.0 card, remove all peripherals except a keyboard and mouse, and see if you can get your Sawtooth to work with a FW800 card. If that fixes it, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to choose between USB 2.0 and FW800, it probably means you need to try a different USB 2.0 card.

My only other suggestion would be to boot your Sawtooth into target mode, connect it via FW400 to a newer PPC Mac that has built-in FW400 and FW800 (any G5 or the latest PBG4s if you have one), then boot the newer Mac from your Sawtooth's drive via FW400. Once booted, try connecting something to the built-in FW800 on the newer Mac. If it doesn't cause any problems, then you've at least determined there's nothing amiss with your Sawtooth's OS install, FW800 should work with it. That doesn't tell you much but it's a start: at least you'll know the problem is somewhere in your Sawtooth's hardware or the PCI cards' hardware and/or their associated drivers.
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Removed the USB 2.0 PCI card and still get the slow copying issue. I tried all 4 cards one at a time and tried each PCI slot one at a time. I just noticed today all 4 of my FW 800 cards have a Texas Instruments chipset. My USB 2.0 card, in contrast, has an NEC chipset. Tried the Target Disk Mode method you described, putting my 2006 MBP into TDM via it's FW 400 port and I was able to copy files from my FW 800 drive, which I plugged into the MBP's FW800 port, to the Sawtooth without issue.
 
Certificate of Excellence said:
Does that version of screenflow produce a watermark? What screen capture card do you recommend?
Click to expand...
There's no watermark if you use the serial # and 2nd download on the garden. Unfortunately the activation servers no longer exist so any other old serial number you may have previously purchased won't work. If you have a Mac with PCI-X or PCIe then get an AJA KONA 3, they're about 30-50 bucks all day long on ebay.
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
Removed the USB 2.0 PCI card and still get the slow copying issue. I tried all 4 cards one at a time and tried each PCI slot one at a time. I just noticed today all 4 of my FW 800 cards have a Texas Instruments chipset. My USB 2.0 card, in contrast, has an NEC chipset. Tried the Target Disk Mode method you described, putting my 2006 MBP into TDM via it's FW 400 port and I was able to copy files from my FW 800 drive, which I plugged into the MBP's FW800 port, to the Sawtooth without issue.
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I just looked at one of my known-good FW800 PCI cards that I've used in a Sawtooth, it's an IOGEAR brand and has a Texas Instruments chipset. So I don't think the TI chips are the problem. My best guess is there's something askew with your PCI bus, which would require replacing the Sawtooth's logic board unless you're skilled at board-level repair. However, I can't explain why that would affect the FW cards and not the USB.

Unless - are these bus-powered FW devices you're trying to use with the FW800 cards? If so, do they have the option of using external power? If external power brings them up to speed, you're probably right that your PSU isn't supplying enough power to the FW800 card.
 
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Raging Dufus said:
I just looked at one of my known-good FW800 PCI cards that I've used in a Sawtooth, it's an IOGEAR brand and has a Texas Instruments chipset. So I don't think the TI chips are the problem.
Click to expand...

Neither do I - because my FW PCI cards all feature the TI chipset and on the USB 2.0 side, all of my cards use the NEC chipset. The only time that I ever had an issue with a USB 2.0 PCI card and a Power Mac was due to the one that came with my QuickSilver having a VIA chipset.

@MacFoxG4 If you have another Power Mac on hand, I would've suggested testing the cards on a different machine to see whether you still encounter the same problems.
 
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Raging Dufus said:
I just looked at one of my known-good FW800 PCI cards that I've used in a Sawtooth, it's an IOGEAR brand and has a Texas Instruments chipset. So I don't think the TI chips are the problem. My best guess is there's something askew with your PCI bus, which would require replacing the Sawtooth's logic board unless you're skilled at board-level repair. However, I can't explain why that would affect the FW cards and not the USB.

Unless - are these bus-powered FW devices you're trying to use with the FW800 cards? If so, do they have the option of using external power? If external power brings them up to speed, you're probably right that your PSU isn't supplying enough power to the FW800 card.
Click to expand...
Already tried using external power for the external HDD I’ve been testing these cards with (OWC Mercury, the model that has FW 800 & USB) and the results are the same. Drive works just fine via USB and the built-in FW ports on various Macs.

Looking like logic board replacement might be my only option left at this point.
TheShortTimer said:
Neither do I - because my FW PCI cards all feature the TI chipset and on the USB 2.0 side, all of my cards use the NEC chipset. The only time that I ever had an issue with a USB 2.0 PCI card and a Power Mac was due to the one that came with my QuickSilver having a VIA chipset.

@MacFoxG4 If you have another Power Mac on hand, I would've suggested testing the cards on a different machine to see whether you still encounter the same problems.
Click to expand...
Nope, I don’t have any other working Power Macs, unfortunately.
 
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still haven't tested on real hardware (awaiting time to replace the HD in my lombard with msata ssd connected to an adapter that people have said works with lombard), but tested some powerpc NT software under emulation.

ntvdm working (on non-x86 NT it uses a port of insignia softpc 3.0, emulating a 386 i think):
1720126248718.png


wx86 + insignia softwindows emulator (i think this emulates a 486? anyway it allows for x86 PEs to run under emulation):
1720126058527.png


excel 5.0 for powerpc NT:
1720126083058.png


I had some issues installing excel, I think it's an issue with the checked build of NT (some incorrect API calls that throw asserts/etc), I had to copy in the x86 installer and use that, then move the files it installed into system32\wx86 to system32... at least it basically showed that the x86 emulator worked fine!
 
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Rairii said:
Yet to test on real hardware, but my hacked up dingusppc tree is accurate enough such that (checked) NT4 actually installs and boots correctly (with my gossamer HAL and mac i/o IDE and ADB drivers).

View attachment 2393130
Click to expand...

oh thats super awesome! literally the stuff of legends, the PPC port of NT running on a PPC Mac, especially given that the Grackle/Gossemer platform was supposed to be universal and all that before Steve Jobs came and nuked that idea

I look forward to seeing your progress on this and it running on real hardware, especially as once its on a G3 beige, it should not be too hard to make it work with a trayloading iMac G3 (which is also an MPC106 system) and the idea of Windows NT running on Steve Job's/Jonny Ives baby so to speak really tickles me :)
 
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LightBulbFun said:
oh thats super awesome! literally the stuff of legends, the PPC port of NT running on a PPC Mac, especially given that the Grackle/Gossemer platform was supposed to be universal and all that before Steve Jobs came and nuked that idea

I look forward to seeing your progress on this and it running on real hardware, especially as once its on a G3 beige, it should not be too hard to make it work with a trayloading iMac G3 (which is also an MPC106 system) and the idea of Windows NT running on Steve Job's/Jonny Ives baby so to speak really tickles me :)
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my dingus tree is emulating a bondi blue, i was even considering getting one before I got my lombard :)

currently the port is new world only, mainly the issue with old world is getting the arc firmware running, although everything's at a low enough level that it won't care about OW/NW other than ARC firmware repartitioning code that will have to be changed for OW. that said, i don't have an old world gossamer system and my changes to get MSR_LE working properly somehow broke old world systems booting, no idea why.

might be possible to port to bandit too, although my priority would probably be scrapping most of my old uni-n code and writing weird MSR_LE compatible drivers for that... (I tried poking at various uni-n PCI config registers on my ibook G3 to see if the endianness switch bit from bandit survived, and as far as I can tell, it did not)

"the idea of Windows NT running on Steve Job's/Jonny Ives baby so to speak really tickles me"
NT was the last resort if the other OS plans went wrong, even at this time.
 
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so I basically have two issues I need to fix for now:
- the messed up colours, obviously I'm still missing something when changing the colour depth to 32bpp;
- can't login, lombard's keyboard has no delete key, and "delete" text printed on the backspace key!

1720377244911.jpeg
 
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