Snow Leopard Developer Preview on G4 and G5

[Protools5LEGuy]

Just like MDD FW800 and mini didnt boot vanilla Mac OS 9 a few years ago now you can boot most G4 and G5 in Snow Leopard Developer preview

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/

How is this possible at all?

Back in the late transition days from PPC to Intel Apple had to eventually cut the rope for PPC. When early reports of developer beta builds of Snow Leopard surfaced, Apple neither clarified nor commented on the further PPC support of OS X beyond Leopard. But when the golden master was handed out it was clear — and communicated by then — that support for PPC was finally dropped. Things rested for years at that point (at least to my knowledge; Apple engineers knew better for sure). Then, mid-March 2020 I was hinted to a tweet by tesco@system2048 who posted a screenshot of a working SL-PPC.

What ingredients are needed to start experimenting?

Obviously, a PowerPC machine is pre-requisite. A copy of a developer build of 10.6 (server or client) will be needed, in addition to a handful of original kernel extensions from 10.5.8, a USB drive (or even better, a firewire hard disk), and a helper system in form of a Mac capable of running 10.6 out-of-the box (e.g., MacBook 1,1 to 4,1, etc.).

In addition, if the installer of a server build is used, then at some point a license key will be needed to finalize the installation. The client versions, of course, never needed such keys.

Suitable Mac OS X Snow Leopard build(s)

The search currently goes on for intermediate PPC/Intel builds of Snow Leopard, but at present, the version proven to work are the builds 10A96 (server dev preview) and 10A190. There was probably a working build of 10A96 for clients, but this for now remains elusive (these would be labelled something like "User DVD" or "User Installer").

Between the 10A96 build and the “Golden Master”/GM (10A432) are several releases which we are looking for. If and when these become available for testing, we can check them for their PPC compatibility!

[Protools5LEGuy]

As of now, only the following GPUs are fully hardware accelerated under builds 10A96 and/or 10A190:

GPU MODEL   MAC MODEL   FUNCTIONALITY   NOTES
Nvidia 6600GT/LE   Power Mac G5   yes   both on 10A96 & 10A190
Nvidia 7800GT   Power Mac G5   yes   both on 10A96 & 10A190
Nvidia Quadro FX4500   Power Mac G5   yes   both on 10A96 & 10A190
ATI Radeon 9x00 series   Power Mac G5
PowerBook G4
iBook G4   no   CoreImage software only; otherwise no
ATI Rage128   PowerBook G4 Ti   no   CoreImage software only; otherwise no
ATI Radeon X800XT   Power Mac G4   no   Core Image software only; otherwise no
NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200   PowerBook G4   no   Core Image software only; otherwise no

Not that matters to us, because we all Mac OS 9 and G4 users  should be using an Quartz only card (Radeon <9800 or Geforce 2-4) instead of a CoreImage card

[Protools5LEGuy]

What I posted after reading the 20 pages post

I have been a Snow Leopard hackintosh Intel user for more than 8 years. Protools 9/10 and Logic 9 were my killer app for the Core2Quad hackintosh. For me SL is the best OS ever. I love Mac OS9, Panther, Tiger and Leo on my PPC machines. For me Core Image is not esencial. In fact I only have Geforce 4MX graphics cards and it is only needed to have Quartz running to have a good UI experience.


I have reread this post and I see various and different goals:

1 Make a better Leopard with kext/frameworks from any SL versions, also called 10.5.9 (2020-2021)

2 Make a decent-mostly working SL PPC developer preview taking things from 10.5.8 (Now)

3 Make the last SL developer preview working via compiling Intel Stuff from Apple Open Source (2020-2021)

4 Make Golden Master work via adding Leopard and Apple Open Source

For me any of these are interesting, but not totally usefull if we have to make new apps for it to shine.

Also I am not sure if the golden master is better than vanilla 10.5.8. The good stuff for SL demands 10.6.3 and up, and most of this stuff isnt universal.

The most important developer for PPC in the last 5 years was Cameron with TFF and he is more interested in keep a browser in Tiger. Fortunately for us, wicknik, alex-free and other users had developed more browsers/way to use youtube.

Unless browsers benchmark higher on SL-PPC than on vanilla 10.5.8 I only see a benefit in the use of a higher Xcode.

If we ask developers to ADD SL-PPC also as a target some of them could quit developing. Hard enough to keep Tiger+Leo (and Panther) to add a 3rd (4th) platform with even less users than PPC Linux. Maybe if you all and some developers add effort we could get the last drop of juice for our PPC machines, but only with minor improvements I guess.

Dont get my words wrong. It is awesome what you have achieved. It is a dream to have another platform for PPC. But to give SL-PPC the stability of 10.5.8 will take months-years of hard work and that will only render on an almost empty platform.

Grand Central Dispatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch is a factor that can potentially increase performance on Duals and Quads(G4 or G5), but we need a libdispatch PPC and that could take months/years.

New compiles of apps ditching G3 and using GCP can render better apps, but I dont see myself as a SL-PPC user till this summer if thing mature soon.

Thanks to all and keep making the impossible achivable

[IIO]

great post & attitude by lars, will follow that from distance.

if it really helps to run more third party applications as with 10.5.x? time will show. meanwhile it is still interesting to see how it goes, maybe we can learn something from it.

[teroyk]

What I posted after reading the 20 pages post

Maybe if you all and some developers add effort we could get the last drop of juice for our PPC machines, but only with minor improvements I guess.

Maybe it is better take last drop of juice for our G5 machines with Mac OS 9 

[teroyk]

But I have to add that all operating systems are welcome for PPC.
Sadly I don't remember device anymore, but read some device driver that minimum requirements is OSX 10.6 PPC/Intel and I laughed for that, that time, but not anymore.
If even one device or one good program more works with OSX10.6 PPC than OSX10.5 then I am ready for test. I had still partition named Future OSX, what I made when I installed Tiger and Leopard in that machine about 12 years ago.

[teroyk]

Good to remember OSX 10.6 drops these features:
- AppleTalk is no longer supported.
- It is no longer possible to change an application's language using the Finder's "Get Info" dialogue.
- Creator codes, which are per-file metadata attributes that define, for a file that has a creator code, what application should open that file.
- Creating or updating a HFS (not HFS+) volume is no longer supported.

[Jubadub]

If even one device or one good program more works with OSX10.6 PPC than OSX10.5 then I am ready for test.

WindowShadeX v5.0.7

Anything targeting the 10.6 SDK whose source code is fully available applies, too. Can now be recompiled as a pure PPC binary.

[teroyk]

Anything targeting the 10.6 SDK whose source code is fully available applies, too. Can now be recompiled as a pure PPC binary.

Is there any Xcode for OSX10.6 PPC or do we have to use intel-mac:
https://tumblr.splhack.org/post/7866228357/enable-powerpc-toolchain-on-xcode-41
Any way with that we still should try compile down to OSX 10.4, because it has Classic too 

EDIT: Or do we have use help of this to compile for OSX10.6 PPC: https://github.com/devernay/xcodelegacy

[IIO]

or integrate classic into 10.6 PPC (2021 special edition)

[Jubadub]

Before I can somewhat accept Tiger, first we have to fix Tiger's (and Panther's) Classic, which is broken and horrible, compared to Jaguar's Classic (and earlier). I keep wondering if one can just paste Jaguar's Classic on Tiger, fix permissions etc., then perhaps edit a .plist file or two to prevent Tiger from complaining, and voilá. Or maybe it won't be so easy.

Even then, it ain't no Mac OS 9. What about creating an OS 9 app called "Neo Classic" to run OSX apps instead? Not that anyone would want to invest the time to do that.

...Right?

[teroyk]

Before I can somewhat accept Tiger, first we have to fix Tiger's (and Panther's) Classic, which is broken and horrible, compared to Jaguar's Classic (and earlier). I keep wondering if one can just paste Jaguar's Classic on Tiger, fix permissions etc., then perhaps edit a .plist file or two to prevent Tiger from complaining, and voilá. Or maybe it won't be so easy.

Even then, it ain't no Mac OS 9. What about creating an OS 9 app called "Neo Classic" to run OSX apps instead? Not that anyone would want to invest the time to do that.

Ok..there should be different version of Classic to choose. Even Preview-program should have different version to choose.

There actually somekind start for run OSX software in Mac OS 9 and it is made before real Mac OS X:
Tenon Power MachTen : http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=3967.0
At least Terminal programs could compile to it, but somebody else can say how compatible it can come if compile opensource BSD parts of OSX.

[Protools5LEGuy]

From Lars

Pursuing the idea of faking PCI out of AGP entries in device tree before boot for hardware-QE/CI:
Found a detailed Open Firmware page for Apple Mac here and also here for other/all manufacturers.
"Custom Devalias" might do the trick.

https://library.morph.zone/Open_Firmware

http://www.firmworks.com/QuickRef.html#Table%20of%20Contents

Are 2 interesting articles about Open Firmware

[IIO]

What about creating an OS 9 app called "Neo Classic" to run OSX apps instead?

Darwin FAT.sit ? with live 64 bit converter.

but jokes aside, the first step would of course be to bring bluebox to 10.5.

and as christmas gift i would like to have 10.5´s screensharing in 10.4.

unfortunately it wont load in 10.4

[teroyk]

Interesting...
Monolingual
Version 1.4.5 is the last version for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which also includes PowerPC support.
https://ingmarstein.github.io/Monolingual/
It might be even usefull for slimming Mac OS X 10.6 for G4:

Picture credit is from Tiger version from there: https://tigerosx.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/monolingual-put-tiger-on-diet/