Right so here’s where I am:
Machine 1 - 1GHz 12” PB G4.
- Got 9.2.2 up and running following the instructions on this site using some OF commands and the Unsupported G4 CD. I have thousands of colours, I have decent trackpad, in fact it’s a nice little system! Very fast. Just a few problems: it won’t sleep, and most importantly the screen is just too dim (brightness keys do nothing, no brightness control in Monitors control panel). It’s just a bit too dim to do actual work on.
Machine 2 - 1.5GHz 12” PB G4.
Even faster! I have upgraded the HDD to a Dogfish 128GB MSATA drive in a cheapo eBay adapter and it seems to work. Again, using OF commands and then the same CD and restoring the MacOS 9 Lives image as above. Believe it or not I am currently dual booting 10.3.7 and 9.2.2. Note: the only way to boot into 9.2.2 is to hold down option at startup. Screen nice and bright. 256 colours only. Insanely fast system. I could live with 256 colours... the killer is: trackpad doesn’t work at all. Disable all USB drive extensions and trackpad works, but so slowly as to be unusable. Aargh! So close... if you plug a mouse in it works fine (even with no USB extensions loaded!). This simply must be a solvable problem...
And finally
Machine 3 - non-booting spares/repair PB G4 12” bought accidentally from eBay
Well, I pulled the HDD and replaced with the original 10.3.7 disk from the machine above, and this 12” PB booted right up. And guess what, it turns out that it’s an 867Mhz model! Well, I got excited when I saw that and immediately tried to follow the same path as above.
I ran into a weird blocker - the keyboard modifier appears to do absolutely nothing on startup. If I put the Unsupported G4 CD in the machine, it will *always* boot from that (and crash with error 102 because I haven’t issued the OF commands to spoof the machine type). If I eject the CD, it boots 10.3.7 from the HDD. No modifier key appears to do anything, whether cmd-opt-P-R or just opt, or cmd-opt-o-f. I’ve never seen this before!
So 2 things I could really do with help on:
1) how do I speed up the trackpad on machine 2? Going to try enabling some of those USB extensions and also going to try USB Overdrive
2) how the hell do I get machine 3 to boot into Open Firmware?
Cheers,
Joel