Mac OS 9 booting on: Mac mini G4 (Detailed Posts)

[Jubadub]

Man, I love the internet for the wealth of information and resources!

Relatable. Gratz on making it work! If I play Barrack, I'll remember your discovery.

Incidentally, I have been rocking the mini under OS 9 left and right lately, and I think I became addicted to this machine. Now I bought another 2 Mac mini G4 1.5GHz for a total of 3, with overclocking plans for at least 1. And if yet another cheap mini pops up in front of me, I fear I will not be able to contain myself!!

Best. Machine. Ever. For OS 9 or otherwise, it's definitely my all-time favorite in life. Still so thankful to ELN and all the others!

[IIO]

barrack and apeiron were the tools of the time. i once downloaded by first beta from ambrosias hotlineserver i think.

[whoisthisguy]

Hey guys! Try out my video driver for Mini’s  9200. Running 1920x1080@60 on modern Dell 27 just fine: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,5009.0.html Don’t forget to delete “ATI Via Driver” from Extensions before installing the new one.

[Pabloz]

JUST TO BE CLEAR SO EVERYBODY READS

1) the link provided to download the ISO, sometimes does not work right and downloads about 400 megs instead of 600. So get the iso from google drive.

2) the Mac mini G4 will not have sound:
   a) some users reported it fixed with external sound usb sabrent from amazon, others bought the same and it never worked nor detected in macos9.

   b) some users said to connect old speakers with volume control, i tried my old speakers with volume control externally powered and it did not work, i did not get any sound.

[Pabloz]

i was wrong

there is sound coming out of the minijack, even at full speaker volume its kind of low tho.
i was so wrong, i thought it had no sound because on common tasks like "empty the trashcan" and things like that i never got any sound at all, and on the sound system setup i see preloaded sound files for common tasks and when i hit play nothing happened

then i installed quicktime, downloaded some mp3s and some mov files and i was able to hear the sound!
these adapters cheap  china also work

https://showmecables-static.scdn3.secure.raxcdn.com/media/catalog/product/cache/ecd051e9670bd57df35c8f0b122d8aea/u/s/usb-to-3.5mm-audio-converter-adl-usb-audio-1.jpg

https://dqzrr9k4bjpzk.cloudfront.net/images/13467108/872424576.jpg

the second one has a small crackle from time to time.

[IIO]

they´ve kind of set the sound to a fixed level as an interim "solution".

[whoisthisguy]

they´ve kind of set the sound to a fixed level as an interim "solution".

It's because the Mini's Toonie Sound Chip doesn't have a hardware mixer. All the mixing routine is done by drivers in Panther+ OSes. The Linux Developers facing the same issues and fixed that as well. Maybe someone know where to download Linux sound drivers source code? Also maybe somebody know something about sound drivers development under OS9? What is Sound Managers, SoundLib etc? Cannot find the info.

[Daniel]

Info on this stuff is found in Inside Macintosh:Sound. This is the best online source of it I could find:
http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/Sound/pdf.html.

The Sound Manager makes heavy use of Components, which are documented in Inside Macintosh:More Macintosh Toolbox. That is available here: http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/MoreMacintoshToolbox.pdf

[whoisthisguy]

Info on this stuff is found in Inside Macintosh:Sound. This is the best online source of it I could find:
http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/Sound/pdf.html.

The Sound Manager makes heavy use of Components, which are documented in Inside Macintosh:More Macintosh Toolbox. That is available here: http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/MoreMacintoshToolbox.pdf

Hey Daniel! Thanks for this useful links! That will be great start! I want to develop some sort of alternative to Apple Audio Extension with software mixing capabilities. You was right when you said we need to write our own Extension. There is no way of patching like with the video drivers because all audio ecosystem was totally rewritten in OSX.

[IIO]

Also maybe somebody know something about sound drivers development under OS9? What is Sound Managers, SoundLib etc? Cannot find the info.

the issue with sound lies far deeper. only daniel and a few marsians know where exactly.

[Daniel]

Also maybe somebody know something about sound drivers development under OS9? What is Sound Managers, SoundLib etc? Cannot find the info.

the issue with sound lies far deeper. only daniel and a few marsians know where exactly.

Actually, I have no clue either

I know where to find the sound drivers in the System File, but nothing about the sound chips.

This is one of the reasons I would like to decompile Open Firmware roms: OF knows how to talk to the hardware it has.

[IIO]

then it was somebody else here (and the marsians.) what was it about? "audio object"? cant refind the thred.

[Nymunariya]

I've successfully booted my MacMini (1.42) from the v8 cd (just had to remove and replug in my mouse), and installed, and can boot from the internal 500GB mSATA SSD without problem.  OS9 shows up from the alt-boot screen without trouble, despite the 500GB drive being formatted as 64GB for OS9+rest for OSX.  Is it really important that no partition be bigger than 190GB?

However, I currently have the problem that my USB mouse and keyboard are not responding.  It's not just that they're frozen, my (usb single click) Apple Mouse has no light on the bottom, and my iMac keyboard doesn't light up when pressing caps lock.  Both were plugged into a hub, and then the mouse directly into (both) usb ports in the back, but all I got was a single light flash on the mouse (and keyboard) and then nothing more.  If I juggled around the usb connector, I got multiple flashes, but still no response from OS 9, kinda like trying to power a USB drive enclosure with a USB1.1 port--it tries to power up and fails, tries again and fails.  I don't think I've tried only having the mouse plugged in (as it was on the cd), so I'll give that a try too.

This is also reminicent of using my Kingston trackball mouse on OS 9 (on MDD), if I didn't keep moving it at boot, it would die and no amount of unplugging would fix it. So I'll give that a try when I get home from work.  But I don't think that would help the keyboard.

Edit: only having the mouse plugged in allows me to use the mouse.  So that's a plus. Plugging in my keyboard later into my hub allows me to use both.

Of course, sound didn't work for me (from the CD at least--wasn't able to try anything on normal boot), but I have a generic USB to 3.5mm jacks that I will try.

Edit: usb sound thing is apparently not plug and play ...


Also: interesting side affect, while backing up my original 80GB drive to my PowerBook G3 in Firewire Disk Mode, I rebooted the macmini holding option, so I could boot into the Tiger install cd (beacuse Carbon Copy Cloner was giving me trouble), and the Jaguar partition of the PowerBook showed up.  Now, I happen to love Jaguar.  But everytime I booted an unsupported (too old) version of OS X, it kernel paniced while booting, or gave me a fancy grey NO symbol.  But not yesterday.  The MacMini happily booted from OS X 10.2.8.  The only thing I did to the PowerBook was change the boot logo to Kero-Chan from Card Captor Sakura.  Kero-Chan showed up, Jaguar booted, and I was met with gnarly colours because apparently there were no AMD drivers.  It recognised the monitor size (SXGA?), but only showed like 512 colours.  I'll talk a screenshot, because that was awesome.  And if I can get Jaguar running, I'm totally buying a bigger drive so I can make a Jaguar partition.   Jaguar Server maybe?

[IIO]

Is it really important that no partition be bigger than 190GB?

< 190 to boot
< 500 for operation of norton utilities
< 2000 as maximum possible partition (and disk!) size

and forget jaguar, go 10.4.11 unless you have a good reason for lower.

[teroyk]

< 2000 as maximum possible partition (and disk!) size

Is that disk size limit real with external firewire drives?

[IIO]

yes, no matter which connection type. some of my 1,5 TB disks have 1.0 and 1.3 partitions.

normlly i find smaller partitions better, but OS9 has a limit of only 27(?) or so partitions which can be automounted after boot, so i´ve chosen to make bigger partitions the more disks i have.


ah, you are talking disk size. yes that´s also everywhere. not sure about network

[fuego]

Now I regret getting rid of my 1.5Ghz G4 mini :/ You guys are awesome!

so... the mac mini is very similar to the iBook G4, up for another project?

[macStuff]

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MINIMOUNT/

heres a nice accessory for the mini owners

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/NUCUBE/
this ones pretty neat too

[ELN]

I have distilled the entire ROM-patching-for-mini process down so that it runs anywhere that Python is available. You can run the linked macmini.py script to add Mac mini support to any ROM from Mac OS 9.2 (and even earlier, if you're brave).

The underlying "tbxi" script is designed to help tinkerers to change the deepest internal parts of the ROM, a la ResEdit. I look forward to seeing what people come up with!

https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi-patches

[Falcury]

Here are some of my experiences setting up OS 9 on the G4 Mac mini. I bought a G4 mini a while ago, for this exact purpose

My machine is a Late 2005 model, 1.5 GHz, with SuperDrive, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It came with 512MB of RAM (I recently upgraded this to 1GB), and a 120GB hard drive with OS X 10.5.8 installed (no original install discs though).
I went for a dual boot set-up, with separate drive partitions for OS 9 and OS X 10.4.

Booting from the OS 9 ISO unfortunately did not work. The boot sequence stalled at the Happy Mac stage, at which point the disc drive would make noises and spin up and down in an endless loop. I tried redownloading the ISO a few times (figuring that I might be suffering from this issue), but I kept running into the same problem and I eventually gave up.

I ended up installing Mac OS X 10.4 first. Lacking the original OS install discs (10.4.2), I used a retail 10.4 disc. While trying to install OS X I ran into an issue with the DVI connection to my monitor, which I guess is related to this. I got around this by switching to another monitor which had a VGA input, and connecting to that using a DVI to VGA adapter. (After installing Mac OS X, updating the software to 10.4.11 resolved the DVI issue, at least on the OS X side of things.)

I partitioned the hard drive for a dual boot set-up (from the Terminal, within the Mac OS X installer environment). The commands I used were (approximately):

Code: [Select]

diskutil list
diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk1 2 OS9Drivers HFS+ MacHD 60G JHFS+ OSXHD 60G
After some trial and error, I managed to install OS 9 from within Mac OS X, using the drag and drop approach. (Basically, mount the Mac mini OS 9 CD, mount the "Configurations/Macintosh HD" image, copy everything inside onto the OS 9 partition, and copy the "CD Extras" folder as well.)
This was the command I needed to run to "bless" the OS 9 system folder, from within OS X:

Code: [Select]

sudo bless -folder9 "/Volumes/MacHD/System Folder" -use9 -bootBlockFile "/usr/share/misc/bootblockdata"
At this point, I could boot successfully into OS 9.

Regarding some of the "known issues":

• Mouse cursor freezing: I only experienced this once, so far.
• Audio volume: The volume is stuck at an impractically low level. I did end up buying an M-Audio Transit USB interface and using that as the audio output, this has resolved the issue for me, for now.
• OS X does not recognize OS 9 as a startup disk option. However, this is only a minor issue, because holding down the option key at startup works fine, and I can still set OS 9 as the default boot option from within OS 9 itself.
• The DVI connection issue is still unresolved for me on OS 9, so I am still using a VGA monitor as a workaround. (So far, these alternative drivers haven't worked for me; they cause the screen to turn black, after which nothing seems to happen.)
• Bluetooth: If I pair with a wireless keyboard from within Mac OS X, then the keyboard still works correctly within OS 9.

Aside from the above inconveniences, OS 9 runs quite flawlessly.

More recently, I replaced the hard drive with a 240GB mSATA SSD (using an mSATA to IDE converter). As a result, the Mac mini now runs more quietly and feels faster and more responsive.