FYI. I use one specific software for programming HAM radios that relies heavily on Python. The consensus there is that one has to use nothing newer than Python 3.10, because later versions have bugs/compatibility problems.
I'm using MacPorts version 3.10.5 on Yosemite.
As to the mouse and sound issues, did you try to zap PRAM, remove battery and also press the CUDA button? Is everything OK after these procedures too?
EDIT. Another question. Does your ROM file have ATI Via driver integrated into it?
It seems they removed some HQX-related tooling in such later Python versions, yeah. Perhaps others things, too. Can't say I'm a fan of Python and nor of their decision-making, both recent and old.
I zapped NVRAM with the "PRAM" keyboard shortcut, only. Although from other people's testings, it seems zapping isn't really a requirement to reproduce the system sounds and volume control afterall. Something
else triggered it (although still NVRAM-related). Some System 7.5.x installer I ran previously, I think from another System 7 system, seems to be what has set it off and enabled it, from what I could tell.
I intend to figure out how to dump my current NVRAM state so that we can get to see what exactly is allowing these to work.
Then, perhaps, we might get something closer to being worthy of a "v10" Mac OS 9.2.2 disc for the minis.
About the ATI Via driver, AFAIK, it doesn't come integrated into the ROM. As a ROM that has the patches seen in the "v9" disc, though, it does contain some ATI-related patching (the NDRV?). The exact ATI patching present is in the end of the "macmini.py" Python script:
https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi-patches/blob/master/macmini.pyInteresting! So far I haven't been able to reproduce this.
To confirm, do you have sound coming from the Mac mini's internal speaker?
Oh, no, sadly, I did not get
that to work. To be sure, I just retested that with the mini's USB audio adapter, that I always have, unplugged before booting it fresh, and the internal speaker is still completely mute.
What I meant was 2 sound-related things started working:
-
System Sounds: For example, when you get an alert window, if you click outside its window, a regular Mac OS system will beep at you if it's not on mute, with whatever you have configured as your system sound ("Indigo", "Sosumi", "Beep", "ChuToy" etc.). Likewise, if you get an oldschool file select prompt, and you decide to click outside, some programs are coded to beep at you if you do, and that's exactly what we also get now on the mini.
There is one exception to this, though: There's also supposed to be a beep when an alert window itself pops up, but
that still won't play, curiously enough.
-
Overall volume control (via the Control Strip and Sound Control Panel): Before, moving the volume slider did not save its position in the slider, and the top-bar menus would flash blue for a moment, which is what Mac OS does when a system sound is supposed to play, but the system is on mute, as if we had just selected mute each time (despite the slider bar remaining in the middle in the Control Strip IIRC). This is no longer happening: Now I pick a volume via the slider, the system then beeps accordingly with a loudness matching the volume setting (or it doesn't beep at all, if I chose the lowest setting, which mutes the OS), then, in the case of the Control Strip, when I reopen the slider, we see the current volume slider position is still in the position we previously chose. ALL sound output is now louder/quieter accordingly, as it should be.
(Then there's the mouse freeze bug during boot, which I still have to encounter since.)
To get the internal speakers working, we will have to tweak the ROM scripting further, so that we either tweak Apple's sound drivers to somehow cooperate with the existing speakers in the mini, OR write brand new drivers for it at worst, I'd suspect. I think we cannot unfortunately dodge meeting one of these requirements with Rairii's patching alone.
I'm afraid that I've done that. Subjectively the mouse freezing issue seems to occur less often. I rebooted 15 times after I reset the NVRAM before it happened. But it did happen.
Also the sound is still muted. I even rebooted into 7.6, changed the volume via the Monitors and Sound control panel, then rebooted into 9.2.2. Still the same. But if you have another tests to do then let me know and I will. Thanks!
Thanks for checking all that again. I guess there's still some step of the puzzle I missed out on documenting... When I think back to the things I did up until the point I noticed I had system sounds suddenly, I remember I was installing various System 7.5 ~ 7.5.3 versions, then booting into them, and perhaps even installing them at one point from within another System 7 instance? Or... did I always install from Mac OS 9?
So, I really ought to capture the state of my NVRAM somehow while it lasts... This way whatever it is doing right, it can be transferred. (E.g. specific values for sound-related varibles stored in it.)
The hard way would be to get System 7.5.x installs / booting to trigger these sound features again, and pin down which install and install procedure exactly did it. That will be the last resort.
Same for the mouse freeze... There is something preventing it from happening in my machine entirely now, it would seem... (Could the mouse freeze bug, all along, have a correlation with the other sound bugs I described? Meaning that if those sound features are in order, so is the mouse movement...?)
BTW I did notice that in the Sound control panel in the INPUT tab if I toggle on SIGNAL METER it locks solid. Not sure if that is new.
I can guarantee this was always the case: anything involving a microphone / sound
input has always caused a
hard crash or failed to work on the mini under Mac OS 9.2.2, for all 4 mini models, documented in the vastness of the original Mac mini thread somewhere.
I just rechecked it on my mini in its current state, and I can see that behavior remains unchan--- WTH?! It's actually working now on my end! What the?!
On the "Input" tab, I see I have an "External Mic" option whose device is marked as "USB Audio", which I can click on to be my input source, and if I click on "Check signal level", it doesn't freeze, but actually does as it advertises. (Meanwhile, "Play sound through output device" is greyed out, which I guess makes sense?)
So I went ahead and started digging through my old stuff to see if I had an old style microphone I could plug into the USB audio adapter and... it... works? As in, the OS didn't crash, the "Sound" Control Panel didn't crash, and when I picked the "Alerts" tab and then clicked on "New Sound" and then recorded new audio, it actually captured the sound input! All of this would previously freeze or crash the OS, as far as I'm aware!
Thing is, however, the volume of the sound was
extremely low, even if I was extremely loud (being loud helped a bit, though). So I decided to search for another microphone candidate I'd have immediate access to...
... which I did. At first, it seemed to take no sound, so I rebooted. After that, it'd register the audio, but... the audio was just some random kind of static! Still "worked" in that nothing crashed and a sound file generated, but that wasn't sound from the outside per se like that...
So now I ordered in an ultra cheap microphone that should be a bit more appropriate for the task. Once it arrives, I will try again later, to see if any of them will record audio properly.
I really would love to figure out how exactly this "sound features medicine" was set up in my mini (almost guaranteed to be NVRAM, as I touched nothing in my Mac OS 9 install). Or, at the very least, how I can "capture its state" so that we can manually set it on any Mac we want (e.g. NVRAM script).
Oh, for the record, I also went ahead and retested the "External Mic" option of the "Built-in" type, and
that doesn't get to record any audio at all, still. So just how the internal speakers still don't work, the internal mic also doesn't. At least there are no crashes normally if I try using them, though at one point I got the Control Panel to crash the Finder in a way I had to reboot, and an actual bomb which also required a reboot. (But I never got any of these with the "USB Audio" source for the mic, now that is stable OS-wise.)
