The quest for the best Mac OS 9 & OS X Mac
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2024
- I recently bought a PowerMac G4, and not just any PowerMac G4, a FW800 dual CPU, 1.4 GHz PowerPC 7455. Making it the fastest G4 Apple ever shipped in RAW performance, the fastest clock speed going to the 1.67 GHz PowerBook.
/ dmug
What makes this particular PowerMac of interest, is it that ability to OS X 10.2-10.5 and with a bit of hacking, also Mac OS 9, meaning it's also the fastest Mac OS 9 computer Apple shipped. That's an important distinction to made as you can upgrade these guys to dual 2 GHz 7448s, which are improved G4s that Apple never shipped but have double the L2 Cache, clocking at 1 MB over the 7455, faster front bus and lower power consumption thanks to a newer manufacturing node, from 130 nm to 90 nm.
My idea was that I'd have a visually clean build that sits onto of my filing cabinet, hidden cables so I'd have a functional and out of the way retro Mac.
Action Retro: Who Said Macs Can't Have Great Graphics? - Building the World's Fastest G4, Part 2
• Who Said Macs Can't Ha...
One huge lesson I learned when upgrading these G4 Macs is that when testing, use ONLY the ORIGINAL Apple keyboard and mouse. After testing that all is well, THEN you can try to use third-party devices.
Lesson I learned after-the-fact
6:59 - This little beast is an illustration and at the same time an introduction of the next topic: the "Tiger" system👍😂
I’m trying to get my cat, Jeff, more screen time
Great video, I am working on a very similar build. It was very helpful to hear some of the detail I didn’t think of like native ATA vs. PCI shared bus comparison. I also didn’t know about ADC GPU power with ATX PSU. Out of the several other videos I have watched about the MDD I have to say your video is the most complete one out there I have seen. Well done.
Welcome to the wonderful world of retro Macs!
Yeah, previously I never really cared much because I lived it but now it's been long enough that I'm getting nostalgic.
I picked one of these up at local Goodwill years ago with a dead psu, still haven't done a psu swap. Also found a Sawtooth there with an OWC Mercury upgrade.
That’s pretty great but restoring them isn’t cheap, I dropped $170 on my powermac g4 in upgrades
0:50 That is some serious b-roll footage right there! Well done!!
6:59 KITTY!!!!! 😍🐱🐈
7:30 "DIfferences"?!...
Your G4 keeps wanting to run to the cliff and regenerate like Jodie Whitaker
Oh my gosh I'm not the only one who thought this
I love this machine. No hacking, my model boots OS 9 natively and X. Added RAM, 2nd HD, another DVD drive but that’s about it. Fast.
I wish I could find the OS X 10.2 disks for it and I’d be curious if it’d boot an imaged 10.0 and 10.1
I still prefer the way the graphite towers looked. They were close to the B&W G3 towers, but with a more professional color scheme and still having a relatively cool running and quiet machine.
That G4 didn’t seem particularly noisy…though the clip of it running was short. I had one when I was a kid that the power supply could be heard a room over. And when you turned the ADC display brightness down, the power supply fan speeds would INCREASE. It was maddening. Yours sounds fine, just get the PSU recapped (ACX electronics does this too…he’s done 3 or 4 of mine) and enjoy! These aren’t the world’s quietest machines unfortunately
Question, what do you mean by getting the PSU recapped? I have one where the PSU just died on me after I had it working when I bought it. So I could get my hands on another computer for €25 just for the PSU. This one turned out nicer than the first one so I switched the CPU’s as the first one was a dual CPU. But I would still be interested in getting the first one’s PSU working as well.
Nice setup!
For my MacOS 9 setup I used my old Mac Mini G4 that I've had since launch. Disk images provided by MacOS 9 Lives made it easy to install and boot to natively.
It performs pretty well too including GPU acceleration. Although there are some issues like the internal speaker not working with MacOS 9 and I've had trouble getting digital video out, but analog video out worked fine. I'm using an old Apple VGA CRT I have and some desktop speakers with the Mac's audio out which works fine.
Most USB mice I find with my classic macs have worked for me, but sometimes some mice will unexplainably have issues. I have some original Apple USB mice and keyboards I can use if I have to though.
This is the computer that brought me to retro computer shenanigans - I had a table top RPG program that I hadn't been able to run in years that made maps, somewhat legendary in that niche. I decided that I'd build a period Mac to do so... and the rabbit hole started.
I haven't messed with OS 9 much on that system, because OS X keeps me dealing with problems, LOL (FireGL x3 flashed to Mac x800xt? Yeah, how many times do I need to tape this, and are those artifacts a sign of dying or my incompetence?).
I don't have a dual 1.42, but I did manage to get a NEW replacement - dual 1.33! It is very stable, when everything else is, at least.
I modded the snot out of Baldur's Gate, and I haven't managed to convince it that playing for me is a good a idea for a bit now... (I was running at 1600x1200, modified graphics, updated the engine, tweaked everything - it crashed, really, really, damn hard - I moved on to another project for the moment).
And, also, your mistake is that you had no beer shots in this video that I saw.
Shame.
Ha, during the filming I was sick and didn't drink for about a week, although had I included thanksgiving, many rare beers were had from De Garde, Nebelous, Floodlands, etc.
Next video has a sequence shot in a brewery in Astoria ;)
Fantastic video, super informative and kept my interest the whole time!!
I upgraded a blue/white G3; similar to you a few hitches but I really like the result. Put in a SD Card -> IDE adapter, a new CD drive, a Radeon 7000 PCI w/ hacked bios, and 1GB of ram, feels good man.
The higher end macs are cool but OS9 never seems to be all that comfortable on that hardware. Things work on my G4 Mac Mini but every time I've had issues getting back into OS9 at all, there are some quirks with how OS X interacts with OS 9 on that hardware and it may be the same on your MDD.
I haven’t spent as much time in OS 9, but it was working but now I have a 9600 XT which I don’t think is supported
Well that's one thing you don't have to worry about with the Quicksilver G4s (I have 3) -- not too noisy!
Apple made an ADC to DVI converter. Ebay has them for about $30 USD.
I had this models years ego, sold it because it did not natively supported the OS9. Now have the Dual 1,25 Ghz with tons of upgrades ( including a new SFX PSU ). An absolutely Devine retro Mac experience.
Nice, it is a little goofy for os 9 as i have to swap GPUs and option boot but it works.
Yeah, definitely a bad connection in your harness cable, there should be no issues using the DVI Port with a standard ATX Power Supply and the correct modified wiring. Also the macos9lives CD that I created works with all mice that originally worked on the 1.25 Single MDD install (since it is derived from the very last MDD 2003 Install with a modified ROM injected). Sorry you had trouble since it seems to have worked on hundreds of different mice.
Oh wow, you made the installer? It's interesting that it took four mice to try. Wireless mice shouldn't matter if they're RF as its just a dongle that appears wired to a computer. It's fascinating though that mice like the G703 won't work with the installer as macOS reports the as just 12 mbits a second. Either they're using some newer negotiation that OS 9 doesn't understand or too much power draw as the mice I tried used something 500 mA.
I'll contact the harness maker and see if they're still game for having it checked out.
Yes Greg, I started the macos9lives site back in 2012, amazingly we are still going. I have been a huge fan boy of your channel and Mac Pro guides and sent an email to your blog address re: typo corrections (but never heard back from you, lol). At any rate, TY for all you do helping so many with these now vintage Macs @@dmug
Man, I have to tell you that I screened some moments of your video, especially the ones with the Mac on the cliff with Pacific ocean behind ; so gorgeous ! Nice idea.
For my PMG4 Agp, only old mice are recognized, some with laser some without, that's why I still use the mouse ball single button one that came with the All-in-one CRT G3.
And the same too : these Macs are very very noisy.
Thanks.
Yeah, I’m new to the retro scene (even though I lived through that era) so there’s a lot of quirks I’m discovering or remembering hazily.
@@dmug That's why it's very promising... Your adventures will entertain us, and we'll probably learn a lot. Thumb up.
Love the content! Keep it up DMUG!
Thanks for this. I am on the edge on buying a MDD 1.4dp. I would want to replace the PSU as well....
I really enjoy watching your videos (and especially those nature shots). Good job! Great content.
Thanks, I try to mix hobbies, I love hiking and nature but it’s tough when it’s a tower. I lugged that computer about 100 yards for that shot. The major island/mountain has the sea cave seen later in the video. It’s this random state park in southern Oregon that no one seems to know. It’s pretty incredible.
Oregon really is a gem. Can't wait to visit.
Hey mate I think i have an old video card and lots of old os9 software for these. a couple of old pci audio interfaces like pro tools tdm. I'm in vancouver.
I had a noisy MDD about 15 years back. the quicksilver dual G4 is the way to go. much quieter
Which Vancouver? BC or Washington? International shipping sucks if Canada, if you’re looking to sell as I’m in the Portland area. People had some killer pro tools setups for these when they were dirt cheap.
@@dmugI’m in Vancouver Canada. Damn for some reason I thought you were up here. I still have quite a bit of software for these, but the PT hardware is probably too expensive to ship.
How do you handle TRIM for the SSDs with those "old" OSes?
You don't but here's a longer answer: Old OSes are pre-TRIM. Modern SSDs are fairly good at Garbage Collection Optimization, but in theory, you'll be missing out on wear leveling.
However, the likelihood of severely degrading an SSD on a retro computer is low, or rather you'd have to log serious hours. OS 9 you can run without virtual memory altogether. Writes are only happening when you're explicitly performing an interaction via an application, thus writes much much less frequent.
Early OS X is more of an issue but rarely are people using SSDs in professional/production environments with this hardware and OSes, and SSDs are quite large relative to the requirements of that era, meaning bad sectors will just be retired and new ones are used. A 512 GB SSD was unfathomably large for 2003 as the largest hard drives were 250 GBish. We didn't see 1 TB HDDs until 2007. So, if you wanted to give yourself more protection, you'd buy a bigger SSD as chances are, a 1 TB SSD is so far out of bounds what for any real use case using software from 1999-2005 you'd have quite a bit of storage left over as a buffer.
TLDR; It's a problem but not one that realistically won't be much of an issue for most people.
Came here to by coincidence. I was wondering of people still use OS 9 in a ‘proffesional’ way.
I use it monthly to play games and just fool around.
But do people still use it on a daily base?
I myself am really fond of the os. I think it still has the best layout and design.
Please let me know!
I also have a PPC G4 MDD 1.24ghz
the ADC is not needed to run. my mac 8500/ti4600 work fine with out ADC on a ribbon riser. double check your pinouts. i made my own cable, i can send you pics on its pinout and such. i build two PSU's in a 1/2U forum factor for my performa. i ran a 24v psu in there too so i could make my old ADB keybaord power button work on teh G4 MDD using a wombat and some logic circuits.
Original PSU has a +25V 4.2A output. That is not on an ATX power supply.
Dual 1.4 ghz!!!❤
I had PowerMac MDD daul 1.44 Ghz G4. It was faster than a PowerMac Single G5.I ran a benchmark on the PowerMac MDD 2xG4 and PowerMac 1xG5, at the store where I bought it.
I gave that beautiful mirror door g4 to nephew when he was 5 year old. his parents at time couldn’t afford to buy one
For whatever reason I'm looking to buy and use one of these. I think because back then things were a lot simpler. I use to own MDD and sold it to a student and have been longing to get one back. I'm thinking it might make more sense to make one out of a raspberry pi instead....did i mention i have a Mac Pro 7,1 wondering now if there a better way to get OS 9 working on that.
Sheepshaver does a reasonable job of emulating System 7 to OS 9.0.4. QEMU can emulate 9.2 but it's not great, you can use the GUI version from UTM
th-cam.com/video/lZsjWuHgngI/w-d-xo.html
There isn't an 86Box analog for the Mac where you can emulate 3Dfx cards etc.
Despite all the craziness I experienced with my Dual G4 FW800, it's the ONE Mac I still regret selling back in 2013 after heavily modifying it during the year prior 😭
Might finally get another one, soon...
I had that old mouse when I was a kid ripping putt putt goes to the moon
The old Intellimouse was a game changer, I bought the OG silver one in 2001, one of the best upgrades of all time.
That is a fine looking case!👍👍
The G4s had a great run of cases, the folding door design is so easy to work on.
@@dmug Yes, I concur and I have watched videos were those cases were fitted with modern components and a modern OS..
That part at the very end-what is HDMI Passthrough? Is that how you can screen record an old Mac using a new Mac?
USB to HDMI capture device, I have a cheap generic 1080p one and a 4k one, I'm just using it as passthrough rather than capturing. When you see captured footage of things like boot screens or old versions of OS X prior to hardware encoding, generally this is how it's done. There are apps like Snapz Pro for OS 9 and OS X but they are often choppy compared to using QuickTime in later version of macOS due to the slower nature of older computers, lack of hardware encoding and so on.
@@dmug Given that I have a USB to HDMI capture device then, how would I go about using it for passthrough to actually record the screen of another computer using, say, my 2014 Mac mini? And could I do this with devices other than computers, too?
Hi Greg, I would like to upgrade a PowerMac G4 MDD 1.25GHz with SSD, and I saw how to do it with a Startech ATA-SATA adapter configured with the jumper on the cable (as in the video). Correct? I also wanted to ask you what the best RAM for this Mac is and if possible to implement it beyond the declared 2 GB.Thank you R
I have two star techs now, just set the jumpers right and buy a SATA ssd and you’re good. The mx500 works great, and is really fast. As far as ram I just ordered name brand ram off eBay. I think I got crucial or Hynix. I didn’t check the CL timings.
@@dmugThanks Greg
I own the last one made with one single processor. Running Leopard. Ran that computer til 2016 with some Chrome script hacks. Bought it for 20 bucks in 2012. And remember people spending $$$ in 2005 for these....only for steve jobs to be the dick he was to lie and NOT give us Snow Leopard. Even though at a WWD he stated we would get Power PC support. I still have it and plan on running Sobert Leopard. It still IS a gorgeous machine that is basically useless on the Net.
Jobs did the guys who bought a quad G5s really dirty, with all of 3 years of OS updated. I remember saving money to get a Mac Pro 2008 but at least my 2003 I got 5 cursed years out of it.
I have the exact same MDD configuration as yours, including a ATX PSU with the same adapter cable and mine seems to boot fine off the DVI port. Maybe reseat the GPU or maybe the conversion cable is bad as you said.
Do you know if the additional power you’re feeding is 24V?
@@dmug I'm not too sure, though the only difference between your setup and mine is the power supply. It's a conventional Cooler Master 500W from a old pc. Sorry if that doesn't answer your question
I did this ATX conversion and my Radeon 9000pro stopped displaying on DVI also.. A different AGP GPU works.
Dual 1.42 FW800 model.
@@derekarnold8132 What agp gpu did you use?
A Mac flashed 7800gs
wow
I have a quicksilver g4.
Bro just get a Blue and White G3. does it all man, and natively to boot.
I have a Power Mac G3 Blue and White, 1.1 Ghz PowerPC G3 CPU (Powerlogix), 1 GB Ram, Sonnet SATA Card, Sonnet USB 2.0 / Firewire Card, Gigabit Ethernet, Radeon 9250 PCI Card, 500 GB Samsung Boot SSD, 1 TB WD Velociraptor, Lite On Blu Ray Burner for absolutely no reason. Its a powerful Mac. those upgrades wont be had nowadays unfortunately. But a stock G3 is good too.
@@digitalizeddeathanother tower desktop takes up a lot of space and it works fine in OS 9 now and the G3s are a lot slower than what I have. I had a G3 450 as the first computer I ever bought with my own money but I don’t miss it.
@@digitalizeddeaththose cpu upgrades are sadly rare now. My whole want for a dual 1.4 GHz g4 was based on the rarity of anything faster.
@@dmug You are absolutely right, it is sadly way slower than a G4. I actually stick with the G3 due to doing programming. I work on the RAD750 CPU for various projects. The Power Mac G3 is very close to the RAD750.
Blog it!
If i buy a 1 ghz g4 can i upgrade it?
Yes, but tracking down CPU upgrades is pretty tough as there aren't a lot of them out there and thus often cost many times more than than simply buying a faster PowerMac.
@@dmug I have a motu 828 it's a firewire 400 audio interface it needs os9 to run.
Hey, yo, you bought a new Mac Pro???
The Apple Silicon one? Nah, don't know if I ever will. The price point is too high for me to justify unless for some reason TH-cam actually starts paying serious money.
@@dmug Yeah, I've heard your opinion and that's why I was surprised. Okay, so it was someone else's then. :)
6:08 did you really have to get political with this at all?
It’s a joke, if not made clear by the gratuitous edits and sound effects.
Besides, slave and master doesn’t accurately describe the relationship between the drives either. I hardly consider it a spicy take to make a slavery = bad statement.
@@dmug So now you’re joking about slavery?
@@MathewMaher That it's bad? Yes.
@@dmug This was the first time I’ve watched one of your videos and my take away was this: I’m unprepared by not having a mouse, slavery is funny, and let’s put computers outside for B-roll for no good reason.
If that’s what the rest of you content is like, then I won’t like, subscribe or ding any bells.
@@MathewMaher That's fine. If you didn't like the video, then I wouldn't ask you watch others as it'd be a waste of your time.
I meet people from hungary. They say they arw slavs.
Nothing wrong with slave and master good lord get serious
its mostly played for a joke in the video, but even if pretend to have cultural amnesia in North America about slavery, it’s still a weird ass way to express hierarchy.
I’m hardly woke but at the same time I want to keep my information accessible, as by the metrics, I reach a surprisingly wide range of ages that is also very intentional. Often I make decisions on what I’m saying as to hopefully not be off putting by the language I use. Normally the audience is none the wiser but just dropping words like “slave” and “master” to a young viewer might sound out of bounds, as those terms fell out of fashion in the late 90s and early 2000s. So to make light of it, I actually called it out. In a vacuum the terms of slave and master would be an oddly negative but non offensive but we don’t and those words are more loaded to various people or groups. There’s hills to die on and this quite frankly isn’t one of them as after years of not using IDE it’s wierd to say out loud without explaining myself.
They are not at all out of fashion. Look at any data sheet and you’ll see master and slave being referenced. It might be out of fashion for dummies at MIT that don’t know how to separate one specific time in history from computer terms but it’s definitely still used by pretty much every manufacturer. Obviously you are free to speak as you wish but I don’t think any children are going to think about Dixie if you say master and slave.
@@throwitatthewall6289 The metric I think here is accuracy with language games.
The only places I can think of encountering the terms "slave" and "master' are IDE and database related when working with Redis, Drupal, Python and all of those dropped the terms somewhere between 2000-2015. Even SCSI used terms like Initiator, target and termination which is more descriptive (although incorrectly the Slave/Master sometimes was used). I literally cannot think of any other places I've encountered the term.
Is it silly that Github removed default for "master" branch? Sure, as we never called forks "slaves" and replacing it with main doesn't bring more clarity. There's other language shifts like blacklist/whitelist to blocklist/allowlist which to be fair, regardless of how one feels about it is more descriptive. That said, there's ones that get out right silly like trying to not use "kill", "dummy" or "sanity check" where alternatives aren't any more accurate. Almost certainly at some point in my videos I've used the phrases "Kill", "dummy", "sanity check" and "whitelist".
Slave and Master strikes me as one of the times that the people who care deeply at such things have a point as even if we step outside of the Americas, it's still an odd dynamic to bring in the concept of human chattel for something that has nothing to do with it. It doesn't exactly even properly describe the relationship of the technology as a slave as a "slave" database isn't taking marching orders from the "master", it's generally a replica, or mirror for load balancing or backups (that could be behind the current).
I suggest you look at some data sheets from microcontrollers. Atmel ie. Microchip etc. You will find all coms peripherals use MOSI and MISO or in cases where that is typically not used they will still say the “slave” device etc. I for one won’t placate leftists by changing the way I speak and it seems big chip manufacturers won’t either
funny I got an iMac G3 with that same intelimouse one time
I think everyone did, I had the silver 5 button mouse (actually owned 3 as they kept dying). I had it with a G3 450 and later my G4.
Anything under a powermac g5 is a waste of money im more of a mac pro5,1 guy
The G5 can’t boot OS 9, I wanted a Mac to cover a lot of retro OSes. I’m an Intel Mac guy myself but started using Mac since system 7
Waste of money to who? They are beautiful machines
Waste of money? You are not going to seriously use it for real work I presume. Mine is just for fun and esthetics like my other Mac’s and I do not spend much on tem.