What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[Macbookprodude]

Ah, PPC came out long before that xD

My mom got one of the first PPC Macs (7100) for school and has always had an affinity for them. My interest in PPC machines goes back quite a while but my first real world experience came about 3 years ago when I found a "Digital Audio" G4 at a garage sale in the neighborhood. After that I started to learn more and gain more real-world experience with them and now here I am today.

sorry, I meant when the G3/G4 came out.. How old were you ?

 

[RogerWilco6502]

sorry, I meant when the G3/G4 came out.. How old were you ?

Oh! Yea, I was born a few years after the first G3 machines came out, so My first experience that I can remember is with Intel machines.

 

[macgeek18]

Everytime I start thinking its time to give away my PPCs I need them. Also, forgot what a PITA iBook G4's are. Trying to save my friend's data right now....

 

[MacFoxG4]

Worked on my 700mhz IceBook recently. Since I got it both the trackpad and the optical drive didn't work. In the case of the optical drive I noticed that it wasn't even listed under System Profiler and it didn't even sound like it was powered on. I put off opening up the iBook, recalling my awful past experiences with opening up an IceBook. I knew the previous owner had opened up the iBook to remove the HDD, so I suspected that maybe the cable was loose.

Curiosity getting the better of me, I opened up the 700mhz iBook. I don't know if I've gotten used to working on these iBooks or what, but taking it apart wasn't as bad as the last time I worked on an iBook of this vintage. I only lost one screw this time! I ended up finding it after I had already given up and reassembled the iBook without it. Anyway, I discovered that the previous owner had left the IDE cable to the main board unplugged and that the trackpad cable was unplugged too. After plugging both cables back in and reassembling, both the trackpad and optical drive work now! It's nice not to have to daisy chain my external LaCie CD-RW drive to my OWC external SSD. I'm somewhat tempted to put an internal SSD in the iBook, but I'm afraid to press my luck when it comes to opening up these IceBooks.

I changed from a dual boot of Jaguar and OS 9 to a triple boot on my external SSD so that I now have Tiger, Jaguar, and OS 9 each on their own partition. It's nice having the internal optical drive working so I could use the DVD installer of Tiger instead of the CD version. I think Tiger runs better on here with 10.4.6 from the DVD as the base OS instead of 10.4.0 from the CD. I've been using Snow Leopard's Disk Utility on my MBP to make images of my OS 9 and OS X installs. I also used it to restore Jaguar and OS 9 from the DMGs I made after I was done installing and updating Tiger. I temporarily restored the Tiger Updates DMG from the Garden to the Jaguar partition since I experienced issues running the 10.4.11 combo update from my USB flash drive. Once I was finished updating Tiger i erased the Jaguar partition so I could put Jagaur on it. I can make images from and restore images to the SSD on Snow Leopard Disk Utility, but I can't erase partitions without getting errors, so all erasing and partitioning has to be done on the iBook itself.

I also discovered that Wolfenstein 3D will run in Classic on both Jaguar and Tiger, but the installer freezes halfway through. I had to install under OS 9 and then copy the Wolfenstein 3D folder over to my OS X installs to play the game under OS X.

 

[Amethyst1]

I also discovered that Wolfenstein 3D will run in Classic on both Jaguar and Tiger,

And the million dollar question is: does it run better in Jag's Classic than Tiger's?

 

[MacFoxG4]

And the million dollar question is: does it run better in Jag's Classic than Tiger's?

It runs about the same on both.

 

[repairedCheese]

It runs about the same on both.

That's legitimately good to know, not everything does and it's usually things like Wolfenstein 3D which fail the Tiger test.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Oh! Yea, I was born a few years after the first G3 machines came out, so My first experience that I can remember is with Intel machines.

So, you came into PPC later on in life.. unlike myself, which experienced it in 1999 with Apple's think different propaganda all over the place even in CompUSA.

 

[RogerWilco6502]

So, you came into PPC later on in life.. unlike myself, which experienced it in 1999 with Apple's think different propaganda all over the place even in CompUSA.

Yep!

 

[Hughmac]

Me too, in 2006 my stepson persuaded me to get an iBook for my wife, because she kept killing Windows laptops and I kept having to rebuild the system for her.
Once I saw how well it ran, and how it was impossible for her to destroy the system on it, I was converted and bought one for myself.

We've been Mac only since then

Cheers

Hugh

 

[RogerWilco6502]

Me too, in 2006 my stepson persuaded me to get an iBook for my wife, because she kept killing Windows laptops and I kept having to rebuild the system for her.
Once I saw how well it ran, and how it was impossible for her to destroy the system on it, I was converted and bought one for myself.

We've been Mac only since then

Cheers

Hugh

For me it was the fact I was impressed that I couldn't destroy the system with my endless tinkering that sold me on Macs. xD

 

[LordeOurMother]

Me too, in 2006 my stepson persuaded me to get an iBook for my wife, because she kept killing Windows laptops and I kept having to rebuild the system for her.
Once I saw how well it ran, and how it was impossible for her to destroy the system on it, I was converted and bought one for myself.

We've been Mac only since then

Cheers

Hugh

I was still in high school at the time. I wanted to give Macs a 'test drive' in 2013, and also became obsessed with the Power Mac G5. I ended up finding a flawless condition 1.6 Ghz with two of the plastic Cinema Displays for $100 locally, and went and picked it up. I still have it but whilst tinkering with it one day I dropped a screw in it and I'm fairly certain borked the logic board.

Nonetheless, I replaced it with a 2.0 DP which is a beast and also used a 1.67 G4 as a daily driver laptop, alternating with a 2 in 1 laptop through the rest of High School.

PowerPC is really cool because it forces you to have a certain amount of ingenuity to find workarounds etc. when using it. I'm pretty sure it improved my computing maturity by some degree messing around with both the hardware and the software.

I've since moved on to a pretty beastly 5,1 Mac Pro, but it's the spiritual successor of the G5 and that makes me happy.

 

[z970]

PowerPC is really cool because it forces you to have a certain amount of ingenuity to find workarounds etc. when using it. I'm pretty sure it improved my computing maturity by some degree messing around with both the hardware and the software.

This, all the way, a thousand times over.

There wouldn't be half the need for such a talented enthusiast community as ours (and one as dedicated as Macintosh Garden's) if this weren't the case.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then limitation must be the father. This notion has held true time and again throughout the course of history, and it rings soundly here once more.

 

[r6mile]

This, all the way, a thousand times over.

There wouldn't be half the need for such a talented enthusiast community as ours (and one as dedicated as Macintosh Garden's) if this weren't the case.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then limitation must be the father. This notion has held true time and again throughout the course of history, and it rings soundly here once more.

Definitely. I mean half the time when something weird happens or doesn't work it makes me want to throw the computer out the window and I ask myself 'why do I waste time on these useless machines', but the other half of the time it's a lot of fun

 

[Amethyst1]

I mean half the time when something weird happens or doesn't work it makes me want to throw the computer out the window and I ask myself 'why do I waste time on these useless machines', but the other half of the time it's a lot of fun

Couldn't have said it better myself

 

[swamprock]

I dug out my overclocked (1.25 to 1.42ghz) G4 Mini, installed v9 of the unsupported MacOS 9.2.2 build on a 64gb SD card, Virtual PC 6.01, and dug my Windows 2000 Dreamcast development drive image out of mothballs to do some game coding for a Pentium 4/Windows XP 80s-style cabaret arcade cabinet that I built (Asteroids clone, from scratch, wood and all, with an actual CRT in it). The bytecode that is generated from the language that I use will run on many different platforms, so I'm programming a game that'll run on both the PC and the Dreamcast (with some changes due to memory constraints). The last time I used the drive image was three years ago, for my last Dreamcast game, on my 667mhz TiBook.

(Cable management isn't my thing, especially in this mad scientist lair...)

 

[1042686]

Messing with leopard Webkit relinked to r226588. It's definitely snappy but is much more stable than say roccat which crashes on startup (which is a bummer because I like that browser). Does anyone have a recommendation on a UA app for webkit? I'm not terribly familiar with it truth be told.

 

[repairedCheese]

Messing with leopard Webkit relinked to r226588. It's definitely snappy but is much more stable than say roccat which crashes on startup (which is a bummer because I like that browser). Does anyone have a recommendation on a UA app for webkit? I'm not terribly familiar with it truth be told.

Wait, you have a more stable versions of Leopard Webkit? I've messed around with it a good deal, but I've yet to find extensions that work for it.

 

[swamprock]

Wait, you have a more stable versions of Leopard Webkit? I've messed around with it a good deal, but I've yet to find extensions that work for it.

Here's the Adblock extension that works with LWK. You can add your own custom lists to it, and it won't crash your browser unlike newer versions.

 

[wicknix]

And here's NinjaKit (greasemonkey-like)

Cheers

 

[eyoungren]

Repartitioned 2TB RAID on G3 Server using 17" PowerBook running Leopard. Firewire 800 cable.

Tiger Disk Utility sucks and can't handle dealing with the RAID for partitioning and formatting.

This time around I partitioned GUID and not APM.

 

[RogerWilco6502]

Oh! I just remembered. A few days ago I updated my website on my iBook.

 

[nickdalzell1]

My PowerBook G4 can pull in all modern sites thanks to some hackery with Netscape 9! I use it all the time just because it's the only Mac in my possession that has Aqua/skeuomorphic UI. It was given to me non working years ago, the battery still holds charge (20 years old!) and I had to pull the PRAM battery to make it turn on. Chime is dead (it worked a few months ago!) but sound works. I had to reinstall OS 10.2 Jaguar since it had 10.3 and it was corrupted. It only has 128MB RAM and every single module I've tried just makes it beep. I cannot find RAM to upgrade it with. Even so, it does podcasts just fine, the old iTunes app has no issue playing anything and Radio still works.

 

[Project Alice]

My PowerBook G4 can pull in all modern sites thanks to some hackery with Netscape 9! I use it all the time just because it's the only Mac in my possession that has Aqua/skeuomorphic UI. It was given to me non working years ago, the battery still holds charge (20 years old!) and I had to pull the PRAM battery to make it turn on. Chime is dead (it worked a few months ago!) but sound works. I had to reinstall OS 10.2 Jaguar since it had 10.3 and it was corrupted. It only has 128MB RAM and every single module I've tried just makes it beep. I cannot find RAM to upgrade it with. Even so, it does podcasts just fine, the old iTunes app has no issue playing anything and Radio still works.

View attachment 955577

What trickery are you using to make Netscape work? That would definitely be helpful for using Pre Tiger on our macs.

 

[MacFoxG4]

My PowerBook G4 can pull in all modern sites thanks to some hackery with Netscape 9! I use it all the time just because it's the only Mac in my possession that has Aqua/skeuomorphic UI. It was given to me non working years ago, the battery still holds charge (20 years old!) and I had to pull the PRAM battery to make it turn on. Chime is dead (it worked a few months ago!) but sound works. I had to reinstall OS 10.2 Jaguar since it had 10.3 and it was corrupted. It only has 128MB RAM and every single module I've tried just makes it beep. I cannot find RAM to upgrade it with. Even so, it does podcasts just fine, the old iTunes app has no issue playing anything and Radio still works.

View attachment 955577

Ah, Netscape...so much nostalgia. I started using Netscape during the 6.x era. I used to use version 9 a lot back in the late ‘00s on my IBM ThinkCentre running Windows 98SE. Netscape will always be my favorite browser, even if I can’t use it that much anymore. I’m also curious to know how you managed to get it to work with modern websites.