Morning all from sunny Margate, Kent, UK. I’ve been making music with Macs since mid 90s (Spectrum and Amiga before my Mac journey). I bought the holy trinity of Rebirth first, then reason and recycle and still have my original big box software with everything intact.

I have a G4 Mac mini 1.33ghz running the MacOS9lives OS 9.2.2 which is running great.

I’ll be installing all the software over Christmas and getting back into it all. I have an old M Audio keyboard with a built in soundcard I think I’ll use.

I will document the journey in this thread in case anyone is doing similar . Maybe it’ll help in some way.

I expect I’ll be installing Logic 4.8.1 (using that patcher I remember that says “Excellent!” From Bill & Ted when it’s launched  ).

I’ve just ordered a DVI-I to VGA adapter as I can’t find mine anywhere so hopefully should be up and running fairly soon. Speak soon RetroMacAudioNutters!

Basically, something BIZARRE happened when I was using Mac OS 9.2.2 recently, which made many pieces click together: I got System Sounds and FULL volume control e.g. on the Control Strip for me to adjust on the mini. "Suddenly". This is completely unprecedented to ALL of us Mac OS users on the mini.

Interesting! So far I haven't been able to reproduce this.
To confirm, do you have sound coming from the Mac mini's internal speaker?

My attempts involved:

• Switching to the 10.2.1 ROM on Mac OS 9.2.2
• Installing System 7.0 (with System Enabler 356 71x from v20251203; boot 2 and 3 copied from System 7.1)
• Experimenting with both leaving the NVRAM alone (after booting 7.0) and resetting NVRAM on different occasions.

So far no luck with changes to the onboard audio on Mac OS 9.

On the other hand, I haven't had any more stuck mouse cursors after any of my numerous restarts today with the 10.2.1 ROM, so that either looks promising or I've been exceptionally lucky.

Exciting development. It sounds like we're getting near to a v10 of the mini CD.

Yes indeed, this would certainly call for a new disc!

For the next CD, I’m hoping there can be a big upgrade, such as onboard audio functionality. The progress being made some time ago looked to be going in the right direction. It’d be great if it’s successful, but still worth investigating nonetheless.

In my case, first I tried using the latest Python 3.13.9 both from Windows 7 (bad idea due to resource fork loss) and macOS 10.14.6 Mojave, but neither worked: it seems like that version of Python was just too new. I then retried with Python 3.8.10 instead (which I chose thinking it might be more period-appropriate for the script's age) on Mojave, which worked flawlessly.

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?

you guys rock, cant waint for the installer for the rest of us

Exciting development. It sounds like we're getting near to a v10 of the mini CD.

I'm afraid I can confirm, at least on a 1.5Ghz Mac Mini, the mouse freezing issue is still there. Oh well :-)

Y'know, I have to comment on this again: by now I must have rebooted the mini from 50 to 100 times since the new ROM, and the mouse freeze glitch bug did not happen even once.

But I think I'm closer to understanding what's going on: @fergycool, if you can and are willing to try, assuming from now on you only use the 10.2.1 ROM for the mini, can you zap the NVRAM and then see if you ever get it ever again?

Basically, something BIZARRE happened when I was using Mac OS 9.2.2 recently, which made many pieces click together: I got System Sounds and FULL volume control e.g. on the Control Strip for me to adjust on the mini. "Suddenly". This is completely unprecedented to ALL of us Mac OS users on the mini.

I go through the findings a bit more in detail on this post. (Recommended read for any Mac OS 9.2.2 user on the mini.)

This is / these are a bizarre and unexpected positive side-effect of this project (or of the stock 10.2.1 ROM itself once it has the mini patches). But I very much welcome it!

metric halo channelstrip is on every track of mine since ages. all their other stuff especially their recent collab with rick "make believe" i do not like.

Top five for best customer support:

    Metric Halo

why i am not suprised.

i would never try to patch a system releated file while it is beeing loaded, it seems more safe to patch a copy, then switch files, then reboot.

It's OK because in the long run, I decided a long time ago to use the VMs available in QEMU, Virtual Box, Parallels, etc to create various virtual DAWS that work with the system emulated drivers (NOT a hardware interface), just to load old projects and export files.  You can playback projects, with some lag, but editing is out of the question.

I mean we will see what we can do here as far as an emulated G4 system in Qemu with PCI Passthrough of the 2496. I should have the card this week and start work on it, the real hangup is how slow the FPU is in emu-system-ppc vs the real G4's. Any realtime processing on the CPU is going to hammer the FPU and that's our weak point, but I can speed it up.

I already implemented Hard Float and that speeds things up, but we can offload FPU calls to SSE in x86 hosts as that is what Apple did with Rosetta I when people wanted to use PPC versions of Logic and such on x86, and that works pretty well, or it worked well enough at the time.