Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[theirongiant]

Hey Jubadub,

Whatever image host you used to attach the screenshot is no longer working, and the photo of your screen is gone.  Did you set the image to never expire?  Note: I'm not in the UK or any other territory with those silly age verification laws.

[nfroggy]

It's not loading because the site's HTTPS certificate expired on Dec 18. Hopefully the move to shorter certificates in a few years will force people to automate their cert renewal and make problems like this a thing of the past.

[Knezzen]

Same here. I've contacted the image hosting sites owner fogWraith (who I run Macintosh Garden with) and he's on it
EDIT: Seems to be working now!

[akator]

Has there been any progress with getting audio working... or compiling the most recent PPC compatible extensions and control panels into versions of 7.x?

[squelch41]

I've updated the Mac mini 7.6.1 CD to Test Version 0.2.

You can download the iso from the Macintosh Garden if you want to try it out:
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-mini-g4-system-7

CD 0.1 had some incorrect icons; the System itself is unchanged from 0.1.
Also now just a 43 MB download.

I tried installing on my mac mini on a partition - have OS9 and OSX already and used the Apple System Restore on the cd in mac os 9 to install on to a spare partition.
OS7.6.1 is seen on the boot menu (when hold down option key at startup) but trying to boot just gives the floppy icon with a "?"

[squelch41]

I should say it boots fine from the CD but the disk initializer shows the hard drive as empty and ready to initialize so I assume system 7 cant cope with the more modern partition table?
Guess I'd have to wipe my whole drive to install and it would have to exist on it's own?

I had formatted the spare partition (800mb) to HFS not HFS+ using the terminal in OSX

[joevt]

I should say it boots fine from the CD but the disk initializer shows the hard drive as empty and ready to initialize so I assume system 7 cant cope with the more modern partition table?
Guess I'd have to wipe my whole drive to install and it would have to exist on it's own?

I had formatted the spare partition (800mb) to HFS not HFS+ using the terminal in OSX

What do you mean "more modern partition" table? Your disk is formatted with Apple Partition Map, not GPT, correct? GPT is supported on Intel Macs and maybe Power PC Macs after July 2005. I don't have firmware dumps between April and June 2005 to check those. If you have a Mac or firmware version not listed in the "List of Open Firmware versions" at
 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/question-how-powerful-of-a-graphics-card-will-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/
then I would like a firmware dump to compare.

[squelch41]

Just supposition on my part - relatively new to old macs.
Using a PPC mac mini G4 1.25GHz and yes, formatted with APM not GPT
OSX and OS9 partitions in HFS+ and the partition I was trying to get system 7 to run on formatted in HFS+ initially, but when that didnt work, tried HFS

[davecom]

Well you made the right call going to HFS since HFS+ was only introduced with Mac OS 8.1. Also, be sure your HFS partition is bootable and less than 4 GB.

[squelch41]

I am not sure why it isnt booting unless it needs to be the only OS on the drive.

The system folder has the system folder icon so I assume it has been correctly 'blessed', and it is recognised as bootable on the boot option screen

The disk initializer does see the HDD as an ATA device when I boot from CD but doesnt see any partitions and doesnt mount any of them on the desktop either.

They all appear fine in system 9.2.2 and OSX

[laulandn]

You probably should partition the drive using the System 7 utility, to make sure it creates something it can understand, and most importantly installs the drivers. 

I used it and made two (hfs) ones, installed System 7.6, then booted into Tiger and reformatted the second partition hfs+ and restored tiger on it, so I can dual boot.  It defaults to 7, and I hold down option to get to Tiger.

[Jubadub]

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?

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.)

Little update to this investigation:

- I can use a mic to record audio just fine on the mini. I have since then bought a cheap one I could get working. Awesome.

- Rather than NVRAM circumstances, perhaps the reason the mouse freeze bugfix, the volume slider and the system sounds are all working on my Mac mini G4 1.5 GHz model is... something else.

Have you guys tried to extract the contents of the first post's attachment, "Sawteeth.sit", into your Mac OS 9.2.2 volume? Not System 7 volume or whatever, but with our regular mini OS 9 install, with either the regular v9 ROM (9.6.1-based) or Rairii's 10.2.1 ROM that has the mini v9 patches (from the first post). It's something only intended to be used, sometimes alongside Rairii's ROMs, for booting Mac OS 8.6 on other, non-Mac-mini systems, BUT I had this in my System folder on Mac OS 9.2.2 this whole time, and... Maybe... Just maybe this triggered those fixes on my Mac OS 9.2.2 install on my mini.

Is anyone else with a mini willing to try?

[Jubadub]

Hey guys, I'm bringing up this topic again very briefly across the 3 main forums to address something important, especially for Mac OS 9.2.x users on the minis:

====================================================
But how did you get the mini to boot? It requires its own special ROM!
====================================================

Indeed it does! All credit goes to ELN and all of those who helped him on Mac OS 9 Lives!: you can simply use his tooling (which was also very useful for Rairii) to re-apply the Mac-mini-G4-specific ROM patches to Rairii's latest 10.2.1 ROM, and voila! It works as well as you would hope it to!

You can even use the resulting ROM for Mac OS 9.2.2, as well, even though you don't have to [...]

(Bold emphasis added just now.)

Actually, after testing Mac OS 9.2.2 extensively with this ROM, I have to report that, while everything seems to be working perfectly well like before, ONE app isn't: it's Power MachTen. This is especially relevant if you rely on Crypto Ancienne to browse HTTPS websites with TLS up to v1.3 using either the latest Classilla or MacLynx, or if you just like Power MachTen or some other particular tool or resource it offers.

If that's not a dealbreaker, however, then there's no known problem. MachTen is particularly finicky anyway, so it wouldn't be surprising at all if this was truly the only app that gets affected.

I can also additionally confirm the following: using a stock Mac OS ROM file version 10.2.1 with CPU Software 5.9, with "ELN"'s Mac mini G4 patches, it works perfectly well for Mac OS 9.2.2, just like with the regular 9.6.1-based ROM we get from RossDarker's CDs. This way, Power MachTen works normally as always.

----------------------------

On a different note, to ANY mini user of the 1.33 GHz models and 1.5 GHz models specifically:

The patched ROM I provided in the first post uses "ELN"'s "v9" scripts, which are beyond excellent. But it should be made known and emphasized that the v9 ROM has issues with the built-in ATI Radeon 9250 GPU inside the "silent upgrade" minis (1.33 GHz and 1.5 GHz, "PowerMac10,2") exclusively. You can find a lot more info on that here, including solutions and working setups. But because of this, while the "v8" version works on ALL 4 minis, "v9" is only really suited for the original 1.25 GHz and 1.42 GHz models ("PowerMac10,1"). Grab a copy of v8 from here if that applies to you and you don't have it yet. And check that topic I just linked to for more info if you plan to use your 1.33/1.5 GHz minis on one of many non-CRTs.

Because of this, I have tweaked "ELN"'s "v9" script to do everything it always did, except the patching that injects/relates to ATI drivers. This way, the "v8" modified ATI Extensions on the Mac OS side are used instead. The script is here ("macminiv8.py"). Also in that page, for convenience, is every relevant Mac mini G4 ROM so far:

- Stock 10.2.1 CPU 5.9 with "v8" patches (using the Python script I mentioned); Recommended for Mac OS 9.2.x on Mac mini G4 1.33 GHz / 1.5 GHz models

- Stock 10.2.1 CPU 5.9 with v9 patches; Recommended for Mac OS 9.2.x on Mac mini G4 1.25 GHz / 1.42 GHz models

- Rairii's modified 10.2.1 CPU 5.9 with "v8" patches (using the Python script I mentioned); Recommended for Mac OS older than 9.2.x on Mac mini G4 1.33 GHz / 1.5 GHz models

- Rairii's modified 10.2.1 CPU 5.9 with v9 patches; Recommended for Mac OS older than 9.2.x on Mac mini G4 1.25 GHz / 1.42 GHz models

- Stock 9.6.1 with v8 patches; Not really recommended anymore, but is the one otherwise shipped with RossDarker's v8 CD

- Stock 9.6.1 with v9 patches; Not really recommended anymore, but is the one otherwise shipped with RossDarker's v9 CD

Until I switched to a "v8" ROM (be it stock 10.2.1, Rairii's 10.2.1 or the old stock 9.6.1), I would have e.g. an OpenGL error when starting Quake III Arena's demo. But with a "v8" ROM + v8 ATI Extensions, it all works smoothly. Before, I was on a v9 ROM, which was working only because I was relying on v8 modified extensions (else there are even more issues), but even then it could not dodge this OpenGL problem.

To solve ALL problems, I just use stock 10.2.1 "v8" ROM alongside an install from RossDarker's v8 CD. And, if using certain non-CRT monitors on top of that, I follow some extra steps discussed in this thread I linked to earlier.

Again, all this GPU stuff is not a concern if you are a 1.25 GHz or 1.42 GHz mini user, and both v8 and v9 work equally well as far as has been reported over the years.

----------------------------

Keep on enjoying the minis!