Wrote an obituary to PowerPC on my G4 Titanium as I see no future for this platform in the coming months. THe obituary was written using NeoOffice.
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What have you done with a PowerPC today?
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I spent some time on iMac G4 using Photoshop CS4. I'm surprised by how smooth it is even though I might have about a hundred layers with layer effects on. An absolute joy to work with.
The thing is, I have found Audion and become a power user; I adore skinnable software. I don't want to have huge libraries of mp3s on my G4, and playing CDs on an actual CD player is far less noisy, but I do enjoy listening to internet radios on it. Audion is great for that and I like how I can have it visible in the bottom corner of the display, next to the dock so I can always see the name of the song that the channel is playing. However, I've noticed that even though the collection of faces (skins) available for it is vast, there's not a lot of them that are visually very well made, would still display the fonts correctly (certain OS9 made themes probably just won't), and also fit to a bottom corner to be dock height. So I started doing some interface mockups to test what I might like; Once I have a few, I'll probably try to create a new Audion face or several, depending on how difficult the phases after the visual design is.
Also, when I listen to radio channels, I often write down the names of great songs so I can look into them and purchase them later. Today after some experimenting, I managed to write an Applescript for Audion that logs the currently playing track to a plain text file, so I don't have to open a text file, manually type it in, and wait for the text to scroll so I could see the whole thing! I have a script like that for iTunes and I was actually quite surprised that by modifying it, I was able to translate it for Audion in 10.5.8. Audion's documentation had no mention of scripting, but I tried adding Audion to Script Editor's library, and that gave me the hints!
Here's my first little mockup, no modern computers were used. Imagine it next to the dock. (Oh! Maybe I should make a Candybar dock with the same wooden texture to match!)
The thing is, I have found Audion and become a power user; I adore skinnable software. I don't want to have huge libraries of mp3s on my G4, and playing CDs on an actual CD player is far less noisy, but I do enjoy listening to internet radios on it. Audion is great for that and I like how I can have it visible in the bottom corner of the display, next to the dock so I can always see the name of the song that the channel is playing. However, I've noticed that even though the collection of faces (skins) available for it is vast, there's not a lot of them that are visually very well made, would still display the fonts correctly (certain OS9 made themes probably just won't), and also fit to a bottom corner to be dock height. So I started doing some interface mockups to test what I might like; Once I have a few, I'll probably try to create a new Audion face or several, depending on how difficult the phases after the visual design is.
Also, when I listen to radio channels, I often write down the names of great songs so I can look into them and purchase them later. Today after some experimenting, I managed to write an Applescript for Audion that logs the currently playing track to a plain text file, so I don't have to open a text file, manually type it in, and wait for the text to scroll so I could see the whole thing! I have a script like that for iTunes and I was actually quite surprised that by modifying it, I was able to translate it for Audion in 10.5.8. Audion's documentation had no mention of scripting, but I tried adding Audion to Script Editor's library, and that gave me the hints!
Here's my first little mockup, no modern computers were used. Imagine it next to the dock. (Oh! Maybe I should make a Candybar dock with the same wooden texture to match!)
This is very minor by comparison to almost everything above, but today, I wrote my first forum post on macrumors from a G4 in about 15 years.
This one.
Not exactly what I got my iLamp for, and I must say that IceWeaselPPC requires considerable patience, because congealed porridge is a fair bit quicker, but still pretty cool. For me, that is!
This one.
Not exactly what I got my iLamp for, and I must say that IceWeaselPPC requires considerable patience, because congealed porridge is a fair bit quicker, but still pretty cool. For me, that is!
So, I did the above, and got the same result. I may download another copy of the distro just to make sure. I don’t have any DVDs so USB it is going to have to be USB until I can get some more.
So, I did the above, and got the same result. I may download another copy of the distro just to make sure. I don’t have any DVDs so USB it is going to have to be USB until I can get some more.
I've got my 1.67Ghz 17" PBG4 (not high res) set up with about 6 different partitions on the hard drive. I use it regularly as a Target Disk Mode machine, almost like a Swiss Army Knife installer. Everything from 10.4 to 10.8
Yep, I had it lying around and couldn't stomach the price of a FireWire hard drive enclosure. It works great in that capacity, even with a slow hard drive
They aren't too bad on eBay.. If you look around long enough. I have 4 of them now.
For the record, the OWC one that they still sell today FW800/USB 3 combo enclosure is not bootable. I almost returned it because of this. I don't know what they did to it but it refuses to boot on PPC. I emailed them about it and their only reply was "not supported". They have to have put in some sort of firmware block intentionally. I might have made a post about it a couple years ago but just in case I didn't; anyone looking for this sort of enclosure for old Macs should look elsewhere.
I got another enclosure on eBay that's FW800\400\USB2 that happened to have a 750GB drive in it already. I think I paid $20 for it. It works perfectly, and is used for pretty much the same purpose yours is, except I don't have anything Intel related on it. Since x86 Macs boot USB pretty much effortlessly I just use USB flash drives for Intel Mac OS X installers.
Guess I'd better look closer next time! Although, the PowerBook is exceeding all my needs thus far
I've done that before too, but only for IDE drives...TiBook's are extremely easy to get to the drive bay. Whenever I need to diagnose a 2.5" IDE it goes into a TiBook. Lol.
I definitely like using my external FW drive though...If I had to plug in a 17" or really any size PB for this it would get real old, especially in the limited space I have in my apartment.
Don't get me wrong, fixing a 17" MacBook Pro with a 17" PowerBook kills all the desk space. I think that's half the beauty of it; it's stupid and horribly inefficient
That’s odd. I have the same enclosure from OWC and I have been able to boot my dual USB iBook from it.
Is it the same one or is it an older one? OWC sold these back in the PPC days I think, but without USB 3.x
There’s different revisions. Mine’s the latest one that is still sold on their site.
I haven’t been able to get anything to boot from it on PPC. It doesn’t show up in the picker, and if I select it in start up disk it boots back to the internal drive.
I’m pretty sure it booted an Intel Mac though. I can’t remember if I tried that or not; it was around 2 years ago and as soon as I figured out it wasn’t going to work I bought a different enclosure on eBay. The only reason I didn’t return the OWC one was that the USB 3 on it make a good data sharing drive between my PCs and Macs.
I bought a used PS1 the other day, a $10 game, and 20 Maxell CD-R discs. The plan was to compile an older version of the open source program cdrdao and then burn some PS1 games to the Maxell CD-Rs using the Mac mini G4. Unfortunately I bought a relatively new PS1 (SCPH-5010), what I really wanted was the US launch model SCPH-1001 which can be exploited with a single or double disk swap to play burned games. After an insane amount of attempts, I did a triple? or quadruble? disk swap (required for newer PS1s?) and got my burned CD-R to boot, but it would ALWAYS stop reading the disk when starting a new game and loading the second FMV. I ended up doing the trick twice more with the Maxell CD-Rs to only get the same results. Went to a different store, found VERBATIM (A.K.A the holly grail of CD-R brands) 100 pack CD-Rs, bought a roll, burned them in the mini, failed for 2 more hours to do the triple/quadruble? Hard to remember when your in the zone, swap trick, and then BAM its all working?!
Feels amazing that I've done exactly what I've pictured working in my head...
Never turning this PS1 off until i finish this 2 Disc game! (yea i have to swap all over again about 75% of the way through mid game as there is no save before disc 2 option)!
My PS1 is from 1997, I was able to buy new CD-Rs I could play in it from a local store, and burn the images from a 2005 PowerPC Mac and use a cheapo real $10 PS1 game to boot them, what more could I ask for...
Feels amazing that I've done exactly what I've pictured working in my head...
Never turning this PS1 off until i finish this 2 Disc game! (yea i have to swap all over again about 75% of the way through mid game as there is no save before disc 2 option)!
My PS1 is from 1997, I was able to buy new CD-Rs I could play in it from a local store, and burn the images from a 2005 PowerPC Mac and use a cheapo real $10 PS1 game to boot them, what more could I ask for...
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Weird. Maybe something is wrong with mine. It works fine as a storage device though.
Played around with Puma today. I tried installing it awhile back on my PDQ, but the installer would just get stuck at a black screen while booting up. I decided to try installing Puma onto my 1.5ghz Sawtooth using the same install CD I was trying to use on the PDQ and erasing the partition I used for Jaguar. 10.1.3 is the oldest version of OS X my Radeon 9000 will support and I think Puma is the lowest version of OS X my 1.5ghz CPU accelerator will support. Installation went fine and I booted up to the desktop. I love the UI in Puma. What I did not love was my icons disappearing in Finder just by left-clicking them. I wanted to use the Netboot OS 9 folder for Puma's classic since my Sawtooth's OS 9 installation's Classic support has been updated for Jaguar's classic, so I hooked up my external SSD via FireWire and when I left-clicked on the Netboot image file, the icon disappeared. The image didn't mount either. This happened with the other file icons on this drive too. I rebooted Puma, same thing happened. So, I booted into Tiger and copied over the Netboot image to the volume I had Puma on and booted back into Puma. I was finally able to to mount the image file and copy over the Netboot OS 9 system and applications folder. Unfortunately, Puma's classic couldn't see the Netboot OS 9 System folder, so I restarted Puma, but still Puma's classic couldn't see the Netboot OS 9 System folder. After one of the reboots, Puma stopped recognizing my USB mouse, so I had to unplug and plug back in my monitor's USB cable. I downloaded and installed the 10.1.5 combo update, but still Classic couldn't see the Netboot OS 9 System folder. I also noticed that Puma couldn't read my FAT-formatted USB flash drive for some reason. I gave up on Puma and booted into Leopard, erased the volume that had Puma and replaced it with Jaguar again.
I've yet to experience this but I think it's only cosmetic, with the files actually still being there (as evidenced in e.g. Terminal).
I had a similar problem with Jaguar if the PDQ had been powered off: the screen backlight turned off as the GUI loaded. The fix was to cold-boot into OS 9 first, then soft-reboot into Jaguar.
So I did the math and this is actually 7 disc swaps?! I think this is what I did, Sony literally just moved the goal posts farther down field as far as I can tell. Wrote up a tutorial here...
Sounds like OWC is anti-PPC now with a new management. I remember a few years ago they had a nice selection of PPC stuff.. now, they are anti-PPC. Why it wouldn't boot is probably due to the chipset.
I tried to get OS 8.6 installed on my PB G4 1ghz - still working on it, though I doubt it will work as 9.2.2 is the min.
I think it was actually 5 swaps now. But this was so rewarding. UNMODIFIED 1997 Playstation. Only have one game I bought for $10. Have 100 Verbatim CD-Rs to burn using the Mac mini G4. Since I first did this trick successfully I have been playing my favorite Playstation 1 game Parasite Eve, have not turned off the Playstation since doing the trick. Unfortunately I will have to perform the same trick mid game! About 75% of the way through Parasite Eve, you have to change to Disc 2 without any save option. I have faith tho, and seeing that Verbatim CD-R burned by the mini speed up is like nothing else. I did this for the challenge I read about on the internet lol.Sounds like you had a load of fun
You have an OS 9 mini as well?! Aren’t they just amazing.. I have the external surround sound system attached to mine so no volume issues for me. Also have a very bad Ethernet to WiFi adapter that usually does what it needs to...
I’m usually one to blare music to the max, and the mini honestly almost gets me there, no volume issues really even with headphones! So overblown IMO, but I still have the mouse cursor freeze issue happen sometimes even on the latest that fixed it.
These Mac mini’s are the G5’s of OS 9 IMO. I played that Alice game by EA maxed settings. And every other game for that matter.