Mac OS 9 Lives

Classic Mac OS Hardware => Mac OS 9 on Unsupported Hardware => Topic started by: Jubadub on November 01, 2017, 09:47:16 PM

Title: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Jubadub on November 01, 2017, 09:47:16 PM
I have been wondering: I have seen discussions on the web about people's desire to create OS 9 drivers for G5 hardware, and this made me think if there's currently any group of people, be it on this forum and/or else, that you guys may know of that is working on getting G5s, particularly the Quad Core, to boot OS 9.

I simply would like to be in touch with them, and while I realize how absolutely insane is the idea of getting any G5 to EVER boot OS 9, I still have a big interest in this, and in reaching out to those people (if they are out there).
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Daniel on November 02, 2017, 03:47:04 AM
The people who have any chance of getting this to happen are ELN and nanopico. They are the most knowledgable about the internals of the NanoKernel and the Trampoline.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: nanopico on November 02, 2017, 08:36:52 AM
I have a few views on this.
The first is that anything is possible. The requirements (usually time and money) are the biggest barriers. This would take a huge amount of time and at this point not enough is known about certain internal workings that would get this working. 
More knowledge of the inside of OS 9 is needed and we are gaining this, it just takes time and a lot of it. Not only that, but man hours are expensive monetarily.
Right now it's easier to use the G4's to gain this knowledge as all of them are of the same basic hardware (this is a very extreme generalization).  Once the all G4 hardware is supported then it's possible to move on to the G5.

As far as the G5 though, the earlier once are more likely to get working.  The later models that ditched the PCI bus will have some more difficulty.

So here is where the G5 sits and will sit for some time.  The trampoline (second stage boot loader that sets up a lot of hardware) is the first major road block.  Knowledge of it's internal workings are theoretical at best right now. We are working at it as it will absolutely be needed to even get things like the mini and other partially working systems (Xserve among others).  That will be the first step to getting it all working on a G5.  From there, I actually don't think it will be extremely difficult to get the rest of the system working, but there would still be significant work on the nanokernel and 68K emulator.  By the time we get to even attempting G5, I do believe the knowledge will be there and will just be time needed to write correct drivers for the hardware.

Now here is the reason for my thoughts above.
As of right now it is possible to boot a G5 up to the point of it starting the nanokernel at which point it fails so early that getting debug output is basically not an option.  To even get some output will require the hardware to be setup and running.  To get this happening about 80% of the hardware has to be disabled or removed from the device tree (mostly removed). Very important hardware had to be disabled such as the memory controller (not to be confused with the MMU on the CPU), PCI buss, power management, all sensors, USB, FW. Video had to be greatly modified, and almost all interrupt controllers.  The interrupt controllers actually don't seem to hold it, but how the hardware is  configured in the G5 certain hardware beyond some interrupt controllers would only disable if the interrupt controller is disabled.  OS 9 recognizes some hardware incorrectly so it really messes with stuff. It's also very dangerous if you don't want a large paper weight.  When I worked on the possibility of OS 9 on the G5, my only G5 at the time almost became a brick.  It was extremely hard to get it to boot as it was not possible to get to open firmware or reset the nvram from the keyboard.  So is it possible to boot? Yes. Is it safe? No. Can you boot far enough to do anything? Not even close. It can't even boot far enough to finish booting.

One hardware issue is the SATA ports/bus.  On the G5 only AHCI is supported and not IDE.  So essentially proper full SATA driver and support will need to be added to the system.  This can be done now by writing an system extension/driver to accomplish this, but that has not happened.  It hasn't been done because it was far easier to have IDE busses emulate SCSI for boot and such. Once SATA really came around, OS 9 was pretty much irrelevant to the hardware manufactures.  It had no value to anyone at the time to create these extensions.
So in theory, this could be worked on and developed using the G4 and non-mac SATA  cards.  Again think time.

Take all this with a grain of salt though as a lot of it is based on my knowledge and opinion.

If I get some time I will post the OF commands required to boot OS 9 on the G5 so that you can have your own giant paperweight.  Though I do believe I owe someone instructions on setting up a late model iBook G4. That would come first.

 Seriously though, the G5 doesn't do much more that crash and burn.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Jubadub on November 02, 2017, 11:13:09 AM
That was a perfect answer, I 100% agree with everything that I could relate to. Very reasonable and well-informed, very, very far ahead of my current technical understanding on things. :)

And you can be certain I would love to eventually have those OF instructions to get my own giant paperweight!

Currently, I only have G3s (no G4s) with me, so I don't have any incompatible G4 to tinker around with, but do we have a list of 100% incompatible or partially-compatible G4s? (By that, I mean those which you guys haven't managed to make 100% work yet.)
I might look into getting them, and see if I will invest enough time and dedication to reach a point where I can attain knowledge and hands-on experience that is at all relevant for the goal of making more machines capable of booting OS 9. Another brain might be useful. Needless to say, I have much catching up to do.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: nanopico on November 02, 2017, 11:38:22 AM
The only machine that is currently %100 not compatible is the mac mini.
All other G4's work at some level.  Some of them are painful to get an install on and some have really weird issues.  I know there are odd sound issues that have been found and I know that some of the notebooks have an issue with the track pad being so slow that it is unusable.
Airport extreme, usb 2 and fw 800 are not support. Airport extreme does not work at all. USB always operates at 1.1 and FW always at 400.

So that the state.  I don't think there is a definitive list of all machines and their exact state.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Jubadub on November 02, 2017, 11:52:47 AM
Thanks! I'm already arranging things so I can order a Mac Mini G4 (1.5GHz version), which should arrive in a month or two. Hopefully that will be enough time for me to study what I need to know before I start tinkering... I'll hunt down those Mac Mini threads here and elsewhere. :)
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: ELN on November 02, 2017, 04:40:03 PM
The “architecture” of the classic Mac OS helps us out here. The high-level 68k environment is neatly abstracted from the processor by the NanoKernel and Emulator, but remains tightly coupled to peripheral hardware.

So, if you can persuade the Trampoline not to freak out too badly, then the NanoKernel and Emulator will practically run on a toaster. I have used this property on the Mac mini to display debug strings from an otherwise crippled MacOS environment. (If you have a mini, could you help us out by running the latest debug ROM?)

Here’s what we’ve reverse engineered:
Trampoline structures: cracked in CDG5
Trampoline code: Powermax is making rapid progress
NanoKernel: cracked in CDG5
Emulator: untouched
68k ROM: I am making pretty good progress at github.com/elliotnunn/mac-rom
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Jubadub on November 02, 2017, 09:18:24 PM
(If you have a mini, could you help us out by running the latest debug ROM?)
Certainly. I've just ordered one, which should arrive in 1-2 months (thanks to it being an international order, and due to overall slowness from the post office in my country), but once it's here, I'll make sure running the latest debug ROM will be the first thing I do, and then report back the output.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Jubadub on November 18, 2017, 05:35:15 PM
Just a little update: I'm going to pick up my Mac Mini G4 1.5GHz next Saturday. Stay tuned. :)
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Naiw on November 28, 2017, 09:41:11 AM
I think it’s quite difficult to get OS 9 running on the G5.

First the obvious things discussed above; but the G5 also has some differences in the pagetable handling and BAT registers was absent on the G5 if I recall properly; either way both are utilitised by Mac OS <=9. The cache is a bit different as well and finally certain instructions commonly used with old software has to be trapped and emulated (I don’t remember exactly which ones, but I think it was essentially all ”with update” instructions)
But solving this is most likely the ”easy” part.

The trickiest part is probably that Mac OS 9 has no knowledge (read driver) for the bridge chipsets used in the G5, no SMC drivers (beside I’m not sure you could poke the Fan watchdog from an MPTask; if not expect jet mode) and on top that drivers for pretty much everything else.

It would probably be more realistic to try getting it booting under QEMU/KVM-PR on a G5.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: teroyk on February 10, 2018, 03:17:44 PM
It would be very hard to get G5 to boot to OS 9 even modified.
There is some good stuff for running run OS 9 3Dfx-games on classic mode in G5 Quad:
http://macglide.sourceforge.net
So it would be possible to make ASIO and OMS/Freemidi/AMM support in same way for classic mode. Is there documentation about how to call OSX from classic?
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: macStuff on February 10, 2018, 03:40:36 PM
want another opinion?
theres more important things to do with the limited time we all have on this planet

move on, find something that will offer more personal rewards
like composing your own music, walk your own path etc
(insert spiritual mumbo jumbo bs here)

the G5 has a great OS that runs perfectly fine.
our old friends OSX Panther 10.3.9 + Tiger 10.4.11;
those osx versions were designed for it + rigorously Q&A'd + tested.. etc

your time + efforts would be better spent working within the established boundaries
ie: programming software that runs on those OSes; utilizing the existing frameworks + api's that the software developers who created all the osx versions of our favourite software did back in 2002/2003

there are many many more ATTAINABLE goals that can provide you with the "progress" + "breakthrough" that you crave + desire, provided you take the blinders off and open your eyes

Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: teroyk on February 10, 2018, 04:47:05 PM
theres more important things to do with the limited time we all have on this planet

But there is only limited numbers of G3-G4 macs on this planet after our time  ;)
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: macStuff on February 10, 2018, 09:22:04 PM
one of the most important performance jump in processors in my mind was the jump to Intel Core Duo in 2006;

intel core 2 duo/quad kicked the CRAP out of the G5;
stop worrying about the G5, your electric bill will thank you

just build a hackintosh; itll be far more expandable + fruitfull

its funny because leopard + snow leopard are pretty much almost "Vintage" now
all you need is a Intel Core motherboard that supports GMA950 and iatkos v7 or S3 and you are
set to create a far more energy efficient machine

if you want something WORTHWHILE to work on;
get OS9 to run natively on an INTEL core 2 duo cpu!
now THAT would kick ass!

Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: darthnVader on February 11, 2018, 12:17:38 AM
one of the most important performance jump in processors in my mind was the jump to Intel Core Duo in 2006;

intel core 2 duo/quad kicked the CRAP out of the G5;
stop worrying about the G5, your electric bill will thank you

just build a hackintosh; itll be far more expandable + fruitfull

its funny because leopard + snow leopard are pretty much almost "Vintage" now
all you need is a Intel Core motherboard that supports GMA950 and iatkos v7 or S3 and you are
set to create a far more energy efficient machine

if you want something WORTHWHILE to work on;
get OS9 to run natively on an INTEL core 2 duo cpu!
now THAT would kick ass!

OS 9 native on an Intel or X86 cpu, near as it could be to imposible.

RISC Big Endian OS.

Now getting the Blue Box to run on Tiger for Intel, that is a goal.

Really, Rosetta on Tiger emulates a full G3 CPU to the point that it shows up in the "Device Tree". So it shouldn't be that hard to get the Blue Box to use it.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: macStuff on February 11, 2018, 03:11:59 AM
i loved the tiger OS personally that was a great time for mac; i was pissed when i bought an imac in 2008 and found out i couldnt run tiger.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: darthnVader on February 11, 2018, 07:05:17 AM
i loved the tiger OS personally that was a great time for mac; i was pissed when i bought an imac in 2008 and found out i couldnt run tiger.

I should be possible to run Tiger in Qemu-system-x86 on any modern system with KVM and PCI Passthough of a Bios based Graphics card that Tiger has GFX drivers for.

Really you just need to pass an old Hackentoch bootloader to qemu as a Kernel file. I don't remember what Bootloader we where using in the Tiger days, but the "boot" file should work as a Kernel to qemu, likely you would need one of the old Graphics injector Kext files the set the .properties in the Device Tree to allow the GFX drivers to match in Name Space.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Naiw on February 11, 2018, 09:54:09 AM
one of the most important performance jump in processors in my mind was the jump to Intel Core Duo in 2006;

intel core 2 duo/quad kicked the CRAP out of the G5;
stop worrying about the G5, your electric bill will thank you

just build a hackintosh; itll be far more expandable + fruitfull

its funny because leopard + snow leopard are pretty much almost "Vintage" now
all you need is a Intel Core motherboard that supports GMA950 and iatkos v7 or S3 and you are
set to create a far more energy efficient machine

if you want something WORTHWHILE to work on;
get OS9 to run natively on an INTEL core 2 duo cpu!
now THAT would kick ass!

Actually I find this very odd cause it’s the total opposite of my own experience.

I didn’t feel the x86 macs caught up with the G5 quad until around 2009/2010.

Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Astroman on February 12, 2018, 01:51:40 AM
imho it largely depends on (specific) code and io-programming.

I started out Prolog programming for technical/database applications (read non AI centered) with MacProlog during the days of M68k. Later switched to their WinProlog system when they ceased the Mac Line for lack of customers.
The systems are conceptually very similiar and there's a system independant benchmark included, that yields at least 20 times higher scores on Intel if you take emulation and clockrate into account (I ran it on 450/1000 Mhz PPCs).
Since that's a compiler/interpreter only dealing with the CPU, there are no side effects from the OS environment.
Huge caches at full CPU clockrate is what makes all the difference pro Intel.

Another thing I noticed with SSD disk-io: effective data transfer rates are way less than tech specs might suggest. I appreciate them for less heat and noise, but performance under OS-9 is plain ridiculous.

Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: macStuff on February 12, 2018, 02:33:55 PM
Actually I find this very odd cause it’s the total opposite of my own experience.

I didn’t feel the x86 macs caught up with the G5 quad until around 2009/2010.

well i never used a quad G5 so there you go.. i have the single CPU 1.8ghz pci-x G5 now, but i didnt even own a G5 untill i purchased this one cheap around the time snow leopard arrived. but even it sucks way too much AC $$ juice for my liking, and was somewhat unstable; i cant imagine what the quads would have pulled from 2005-2008
im sure alot of G5 users electric bills were pretty high in that time period!

in 2006, for the work i was doing, the intel powered imacs machines were a godsend
for me it felt like the first REALLY capable multi-thread multi-cpu computer.. and i was like wow! now THIS
is what the dual G4's were trying to be... but failing at it hard. i really REALLY disliked the UI changes tthat were introduced with leopard 10.5, but Tiger was perfect for me at the time.

tiger on intel was fanastic for what i was doing at the time, which was quickly cmd-tabbing around different adobe/macromedia apps aswell as 3d / Photoshop / Illustrator / After Effects Graphics
 
i had the pleasure of using the first Mac Pro's running Tiger, and i was in awe; but! i still loved mac os 9 and was still upset they couldnt have let os9 continue on seperately for those that cared for the old os, u know, the way mac had the Apple II + Macintosh seperate lines back in the day.. i never understood why they couldnt continue to support + develop the old os for those people that chose to use it still!

http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,147.0.html
2006 seems so far away now when i think about it!
i might have to dig up that old post i did on the forum here about hacking tiger onto the 2008 imac i have!
http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,308.msg454.html
i thought i posted about it on m9lives but maybe my post was nuked by a certain spaniard

Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Naiw on February 12, 2018, 03:56:26 PM
Actually I find this very odd cause it’s the total opposite of my own experience.

I didn’t feel the x86 macs caught up with the G5 quad until around 2009/2010.

well i never used a quad G5 so there you go.. i have the single CPU 1.8ghz pci-x G5 now, but i didnt even own a G5 untill i purchased this one cheap around the time snow leopard arrived. but even it sucks way too much AC $$ juice for my liking, and was somewhat unstable; i cant imagine what the quads would have pulled from 2005-2008
im sure alot of G5 users electric bills were pretty high in that time period!

in 2006, for the work i was doing, the intel powered imacs machines were a godsend
for me it felt like the first REALLY capable multi-thread multi-cpu computer.. and i was like wow! now THIS
is what the dual G4's were trying to be... but failing at it hard. i really REALLY disliked the UI changes tthat were introduced with leopard 10.5, but Tiger was perfect for me at the time.

tiger on intel was fanastic for what i was doing at the time, which was quickly cmd-tabbing around different adobe/macromedia apps aswell as 3d / Photoshop / Illustrator / After Effects Graphics
 
i had the pleasure of using the first Mac Pro's running Tiger, and i was in awe; but! i still loved mac os 9 and was still upset they couldnt have let os9 continue on seperately for those that cared for the old os, u know, the way mac had the Apple II + Macintosh seperate lines back in the day.. i never understood why they couldnt continue to support + develop the old os for those people that chose to use it still!

http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,147.0.html
2006 seems so far away now when i think about it!
i might have to dig up that old post i did on the forum here about hacking tiger onto the 2008 imac i have!
http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,308.msg454.html
i thought i posted about it on m9lives but maybe my post was nuked by a certain spaniard

I have a 1.8Ghz PCI-X G5 as well (the very first released) and yes I can agree it's not all that impressive when it comes to performance.

I don't know why people keep yabbling about power bills for the G5s weren't that bad..
 
First generation 970 * 1.8 GHz PowerPC 970, 42 Watt

(These numbers are from IBM, and unlike Intel who only give the values of how much energy dissipates as heat, IBMs numbers are the total power consumption- so heat radiated is of course lower)

The next generations improved on this significantly (especially when not loaded as they could more gracefully scale down frequency)
I can't find exact digits at the moment but I think the quad PowerPC 970MP (Technically two 970MPs as the 970MP was a dual core chip) had a PEAK consumption of 100W (per CPU)- typical usage was more in the region of 40-50W per cpu.

If you look up the numbers you see neither is actually significantly higher than the G4 systems, however the G5s had huge number of expansion ports as well as firewire 400 and 800 so when fully loaded the machine could absolutely draw up to 600W or something like that but that has nothing to do with the CPU.
(And if you look up the dual core G4s you'll see they in a similar region)

And if you look up the cpu used in the first Mac Pro you'll see it's absolutely no more power efficient.

111.45W at peak load- compared to typical consumption of 65W of the Xeon in the Mac Pro 1,0.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: macStuff on February 12, 2018, 04:35:01 PM
the Pentium II/III was really easy on power.. as was the 286/386/486
thats why i like the idea of using a 286/386 for a DOS based MIDI Seqeucner..
while composing .. then switching on whatever mac when im ready to mix and record

trust me the "Specs" on power on the g5 dont reflect reality  maybe its because i was using alot of peripherals but my draw was closer to like 200-300w from the single 1.8ghz g5

i tested the power draw of all my machines myself back in early 2015 and the g5 was one of the worst
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Naiw on February 12, 2018, 06:03:16 PM
Tested using what?
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: darthnVader on February 13, 2018, 04:45:57 AM
Tested using what?

I had a 1.8 Ghz G5 Tower, the "cheap" one with the 600mhz bus. It took around 700watts at boot. My power was out for 8 days due to an ice storm, and I rigged up a generator with two car batteries a tiller, a 60 amp Ford alt, and a 750w inverter. The G5 and an 17" LCD would pull enough that nothing else could be plugged in.

It was still a great machine, and well worth what I paid for it $1600 with tax new from the Apple store in Charlotte.

I built my first Hackintoch  with the first Developer preview of Tiger on and old Dell P4, and it was fun just to hack the OS, but not really useful. However, after I Tiger shipped, I built an AMD box and hacked the Mac OS onto it, 2Ghz 64bit Athlon  with PCIE.

Had maybe $300 in the whole system, it was night and day faster than the G5, at everything I could throw at it.

That's just the way things go, a CPU a few months newer can really do a lot more, the G5 just never scaled. It was a great value when it shipped. Faster than x86, but x86 very soon surpassed it, and IBM could never produce a chipset with low enough power to be viable in a Laptop for the G5.

Apple's bread and butter at the time was laptops, that is where the market was, and that's where they were making the most money. Any Core2 will smash any G4 or G5 at just about anything you want to throw at it, and consume much less power doing it.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: macStuff on February 13, 2018, 04:19:51 PM
Tested using what?

i could show u a pic but its just a power meter you can buy at any hardware store that plugs into a socket and provides an LCD screen showing how much power its suckin back
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Naiw on February 13, 2018, 05:10:50 PM
Tested using what?

i could show u a pic but its just a power meter you can buy at any hardware store that plugs into a socket and provides an LCD screen showing how much power its suckin back

Ok, personally I don't trust watt meters of that type the majority don't measure RMS Watt and because of the reactive power in switching power supplies it will be inaccurate.

But however, I'm not saying the G5 is energy efficient. I just think it's silly that people use the electricity bill as an argument for not using the G5. Performance come at a cost and regardless of what angle you use the G5 was significantly faster than the top model G4s (I can agree on that the first generation, especially the uni core versions wasn't that much of an upgrade though).
But I can say for pretty certain that todays workstations use as much if not more and people don't complain about that now. (They offer more performance per watt, true. but in absolute numbers the cost per hour wouldn't be significantly different)

The actual processor was never the reason we didn't get a laptop version of the G5. Apple would never even started the work on the U3Lite northbridge if the math was against it.

Anyhow the absolute max power consumption of a 1.8 Ghz G5 would be 600W (it's PSU can't deliver more) and 1000W for a dual 2.7/quad G5.
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: macStuff on February 13, 2018, 06:44:09 PM
well unfortunately electricity does cost money PER MONTH.. ongoing
and logic deduced it to being not the best way for me to use my resources..
you can draw your own conclusions of course
im just sharing what happened to me in my life !

cheers
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Jubadub on March 24, 2018, 06:26:50 AM
@MacStuff On a side note, Panther wasn't available for the Quad. Also, the difference in performance, and not just because of processors alone, between your G5 and the Quad G5 are simply without comparison. Naiw is right: it wasn't until much later when Intel Macs, in terms of hardware, started to really catch up to it (Quad). Incidentally, I believe Intel started shipping their spying and extremely-flawed (in terms of security exploits) IME (Intel Management Engine) starting with the Core 2 Duo, no? And while on the Duo (but not later) the IME could be hacked out, that'd also kill the ability to boot OS X (AFAIK), making any Intel Mac pointless in this regard, and the hardware, which is what would be left over, would also be useless, as there are far, FAR better x86 IME/PSP-free GNU+Linux boxes out there (using the ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard).

But that misses all the points completely. One of the really awesome things about the Quad is its ability to still run Tiger (and Leopard), which, while awesome by itself, also contains Classic, giving us native (although virtualized) support for an absurdly vast library of classic, juicy, "real" Mac OS software, all impossible on any Intel Mac, even though emulators exist (for which you don't even need a Mac in the first place. I have System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1 on a PSP myself, even). And this is just one little example.

This isn't simply a thrill or however other oversimplified, belittling way in which you put it: Having native, non-virtualized OS 9 running on a G5, particularly the Quad, is an excellent move forward as far as pushing OS 9 usability and purposefulness goes. :) You also are forgeting the end users, which includes, but does not limit to, the people that make it happen.

In your posts, you seemed to assume to know what it all is that is or could be attractive to make OS 9 on G5 possible for each and every one of us, and what is so awesome about having and using G5s in general, particularly in regard to the Quad, but, with all respect, and with all blunt and due honesty, you don't know. Don't assume your point-of-view to be so equally or even similarly applicable to others. (Just having another opinion, though, is obviously fine.)
Title: W
Post by: darthnVader on March 24, 2018, 07:10:09 AM
@MacStuff On a side note, Panther wasn't available for the Quad. Also, the difference in performance, and not just because of processors alone, between your G5 and the Quad G5 are simply without comparison. Naiw is right: it wasn't until much later when Intel Macs, in terms of hardware, started to really catch up to it (Quad). Incidentally, I believe Intel started shipping their spying and extremely-flawed (in terms of security exploits) IME (Intel Management Engine) starting with the Core 2 Duo, no? And while on the Duo (but not later) the IME could be hacked out, that'd also kill the ability to boot OS X (AFAIK), making any Intel Mac pointless in this regard, and the hardware, which is what would be left over, would also be useless, as there are far, FAR better x86 IME/PSP-free GNU+Linux boxes out there (using the ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard).

But that misses all the points completely. One of the really awesome things about the Quad is its ability to still run Tiger (and Leopard), which, while awesome by itself, also contains Classic, giving us native (although virtualized) support for an absurdly vast library of classic, juicy, "real" Mac OS software, all impossible on any Intel Mac, even though emulators exist (for which you don't even need a Mac in the first place. I have System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1 on a PSP myself, even). And this is just one little example.

This isn't simply a thrill or however other oversimplified, belittling way in which you put it: Having native, non-virtualized OS 9 running on a G5, particularly the Quad, is an excellent move forward as far as pushing OS 9 usability and purposefulness goes. :) You also are forgeting the end users, which includes, but does not limit to, the people that make it happen.

In your posts, you seemed to assume to know what it all is that is or could be attractive to make OS 9 on G5 possible for each and every one of us, and what is so awesome about having and using G5s in general, particularly in regard to the Quad, but, with all respect, and with all blunt and due honesty, you don't know. Don't assume your point-of-view to be so equally or even similarly applicable to others. (Just having another opinion, though, is obviously fine.)

It would be relatively trivial to  make drivers for USB2, FW800, or Airport extreme for OS 9, yet no one has done it.

With the G5, we're talking about drivers for basically everything on the logic board, once we get past the CPU incompatibilities alone. Then you'd have to worry about if our multi threaded apps could make use of more than 2 cores.

We're talking about machines that are around 15 years old, who, that has the programming skills  is going to hack together all the things needed to make OS 9 run on a G5 with no real financial incentive to do it?

I'm not going to say OS 9 will never run on a G5, never is a long time, but how many of them will still be working machines, and how useful will they really be, most importantly, how many people will chose to even run OS 9 on them?

I think there are a few people on this board with the knowledge to get the basic system up and running, but I think it will only be to say that it could be done, not that it would be all that useful to anyone by the time that ever happens. 
Title: Re: PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?
Post by: Jubadub on March 24, 2018, 07:26:12 AM
Oh, mostly for enthusiasts, which, when accounted for throughout the whole globe, would mean probably less than a thousand? Maybe a few thousands? Certainly not too many, but it's been surprising me lately, upon research, how actively people still seek out those machines in all online stores globally, from eBay (especially in the US) to other similar websites in Brazil, Pakistan and the rest of Asia, and UK and the rest of Europe, and probably everywhere else, too.
Also, yeah, naturally, OS 9 on any G5 may never happen. Probably will never happen, now I realize better than I did some months ago, and I'm sure I'm bound to understand that even better in months to come. And if it is to happen, it may not be "worth it", too. All that is... evident, after all that everyone brought up so far.

But my main points on the previous post weren't any of that. They were:
1. Problems about every Intel Mac, both in software and hardware levels;
2. Why OS 9 on G5 would be awesome, even if the endeavor of importing it is close to being a fairy tale.
3. The non-global applicability of macStuff's PoV.