BRAVO Jubadub!

Had been wondering about your absence ‘round here lately.
Now that’s evident, considering what you’ve been working on.

Extremely well done and VERY highly commendable.

Not everyone is capable of pulling all of that information together
and then presenting it in such a concise, yet clearly written manner.

Kudos!

Great Post!

This is EPIC!

Agree!

@Jubadub, thank you for writing all this! I will need to re-read it several times to fully grasp what's going on there.
This is EPIC!

Okay, this topic is now locked @ 78 pages.

So, anything new and / or related? Start another topic.

Have questions about OS 9 on the G4 Mac minis?

Start another topic. Thank you.

 
Jubadub has already just begun:
System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4!
https://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=7711.msg59712#msg59712

Also, why 9.6.1 was chosen and not 10.2.1 or even something earlier, like 8.7 is still a mistery to me. I think I've asked the same question in the past but got no answers.

It seems like using 10.2.1 was fine all along, from what I can tell.

As for why not 8.7, I know of at least one reason: ROM versions earlier than 9.1 lack the "Kauai" drivers, required for ATA-6 AKA Ultra ATA/100 support. The mini needs that for the CD/DVD drive as well as the internal disk drive.

Now, technically @ELN's script tries to patch in the Kauai drivers if the ROM version we are adding Mac mini compatibility to is of a version earlier than 9.1 for this very reason, but from what I tested, the script could not handle ROM version 8.7 completely, and when I tried to use the patched 8.7 ROM I got despite that, the mini could not boot with it from its own internal disk drive.

I would love to see whatever needs to be tweaked to the macmini.py script to be done, so that ROM 8.7 can be used successfully. Rairii's "super" ROM 10.2.1, as a ROM that is truly based on ROM 10.2.1 with CPU Software 5.9, contains the graphic glitch that affects the few games I spoke of previously, as with any other Mac OS ROM version 8.8 or later.

If only @ELN saw this message, to learn about this issue... I wonder what he might have suggested.

Quote from: Jubadub on November 27, 2025, 10:13:03 AM

I have thoroughly tested Mac OS 9.2.2 with this new ROM combination (latest Rairii 10.2.1 + latest Mac mini G4 patches AKA v9 patches), and from what I could tell, everything behaves exactly the same as with the previous ROM we always used.

Long shot, but, is the mouse-freezing bug still present?

You know... Now that you mention it, I don't think I encountered it. But maybe I was just "lucky": even with the previous ROM, it was not THAT common for me to encounter it (but at the same time, it wasn't exactly very rare).

If you have a mini, are you able to check it on your end, as well? The more people we have trying this out, the more likely we are to truly find out.

I suspect the mouse glitch probably remains, since as far as we know it's a shortcoming to be addressed in our patches for the mini rather than Apple's own code, but... who knows?

Good evening once again, gentlemen.

I'd like to report an extremely handy launcher combo less for kids, as has been the focus of this thread so far, but for regular users.

I've used Program Switcher, which I had installed anyways, to set a keyboard shortcut to launch an application. Which application? It's called "smart launcher," and you can find it on the Garden. I'd link you but I seem to be (hopefully temp-)banned after having logged in on IE5 and downloaded a single small file. There are two applications by that name, it's the one identified on the Garden as having been made with RealBASIC.

Smart Launcher does one thing and one thing well: it creates an index of all applications on your drive(s), and then lets you search for it. Best of all, it has a "quit after launching" option, so your program launching routine looks like this:

Step 1) press your keyboard shortcut to launch Smart Launcher (sadly, Apple-Space doesn't work, I settled on Ctrl-Shift-Z)

Step 2) type the name of the application you want to launch and press return

Step 3) there is no step three... there is no step three! /goldblum

It feels like spotlight on a modern slave terminal, very convenient.

I have thoroughly tested Mac OS 9.2.2 with this new ROM combination (latest Rairii 10.2.1 + latest Mac mini G4 patches AKA v9 patches), and from what I could tell, everything behaves exactly the same as with the previous ROM we always used.

Long shot, but, is the mouse-freezing bug still present?

yes, OS9 requires a <192 partition (not drive) to boot. (for mount, read and write it is <2000)

let us know if that fixes it, and anyway thanks for the contribution.

For the record, I posted this on all these 3 places for greater reach:

- Here (where the Mac mini G4 ROM is);
- Macintosh Garden;
- System 7 Today.

These posts were also linked to from the following places, with discussions of their own:
- MacRumors PPC;
- 68kMLA.

I'm mentioning this here in case anyone wants to quickly jump to discussions happening on either side of the isle.

EDIT: For some reason I seem unable to make posts with attachments (they just erase my message and prompt me to start a new topic), so I'm trying to see what file upload service I should use for the Mac mini G4 ROM that boots System 7 (and the "Sawtooth.bin" file).

I'd rather not create a Garden page just for this just yet as this project is still in its infancy, so any Mac-friendly file upload service recommendations would be appreciated.

EDIT 2: Ah, I got it figured out: Attachments cannot be ".bin" nor ".hqx"... This should change... I repackaged the contents as ".sit" for now and put them up in the first post, as intended.