In the spirit of PowerPC Challenge 2025, I pulled out my FW400 MDD dual 867mhz Powermac G4 from my closet. Went to boot it up and the drive was corrupted. Drive is a msata in one of those white 2.5" pata enclosures. Anyhow, attached it to my 2008 a1181 white polycarbonite macbook running SL and verified and repaired the disk image. Stuck it back in and booted into leopard via another 2.5 to 3.5 40 pin adapter adapter at the ATA100 40 pin port. I havent really built this machine up in any way, so lots of room for that. Currently it has a Tango 2.0 and that is about it; otherwise typical stuff Radeon 9000, 2gb DDR1 and of course the daughter card. Since I had the machine open, I played around with various low-dollar Chinese pata/sata adapters I had and found that
THESE worked great in the MDD at at $5.00 a pop, what a deal IMO. These adapters attach to the female 40 pin port, so one caveat with this is that the way the pata ports are laid out, once inserted they wont allow the door to close so you will need a lead cable first like this
THIS, so all in still under a tenner USD.
Anyhow, I wanted to see if I could get PPCMC 7.2.7 to play Youtube videos. For years Ive used a Fluid instance of
Invidious for streaming YT but youtube has really cracked down lately, blocking streaming through lighter front end sites like iteroni, yewtu.be etc, hence I was looking for a new solution there. Anyhow, I started with PPCMC base version 6 and updated to 7.2.7 but could not get it to play. It kept grumbling on about having the newest youtube-dl version which I believe I did have. Anyhow, after futzing with that for an hour or so, I pivoted to good ol' Tenfivetube. Fired right up as it always does.
I pivoted to downloading TFFx dev tool kit & xcode to compile TFF on this machine and grabbed Aquafox as well. On this box I had some older browsers already installed like darkweb, IWPPC rolling release and Artcic Fox 38 - all of which worked fine for my needs, connected to and functioned just fine. Scary how fast DW is for a Mozilla browser as it approaches webkit in speed. Regardless, I wanted a current browser so have TFFx compiling alongside AquaFox.
As far as email, I no longer have a decent solution. In the past. I would use an SSB like Fluid or InTheBox for HTML gmail or outlook however google axed their html email and Outlooks 2FA gets in the way preventing that from working as well on PPC (same for EI). This was a big loss of function for my PowerPC machines over the past year. I technically can still leverage gmail on my DC G5 but the fat bloated gui sucks frankly. I dont like it at all so have pivoted all email to EI machines & SeaMonkey.
And that's where Im at with this box so far. A few things I think this box could use - an upgrade to FW800, BT4 and possibly a CPU upgrade however IIRC this unit runs at 133mhz bus, so any designed for the faster 167Mhz would be clocked down by roughly 20%. I'd consider a flashed PCI sata card but I was also thinking about running two 40gb spinners in Raid0. Thought that might be a neat throwback and I personally love the sound of two spinners cruising along. If I end up doing that I should record that hard drive sound
github.com
