powermac g5

VCF SoCal 2026: Strolling Among the Ancients

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Vintage Computer Festival SoCal is a highlight every year, with the bonus that it is all of 15 minutes from my house. This year, the exhibit hall and vendor booths were expanded. Consignment spread across a couple of rooms. The only downside was the limited space in the speaker’s hall. I popped in for what I could, including a little rundown of the various adventure game engines used to create Sierra Online and Lucas Arts classics.

But the fun of the experience is getting to take a look at classic machines, well-loved and honored, as well as some hilarious experiments that make you giggle. Case in point, a beautiful TRS-80 Model 4P, taking me back to my father’s numerous hours spent writing on his upgraded unit, pictured below. Also, pictured below – a husk of an Apple Lisa that someone popped a Mac Mini G4 board in. Cute!

Among the other highlights, a fine fellow had a PowerPC network running, powered by a G4 XServe and a G5 Xserve (even though it had issues). He had picked up most of the equipment from a video production business that gave him an ultimatum to get rid of it. Alongside it, a bevvy of PowerPC (and one Xeon) Mac that pulled applications and data from the central raid. You could even join the local WiFi network and read fun little webpages about the period-correct setup.

I grabbed a quick PDF of the base html page with a little bit of background info. Just fun stuff.

G5 NetworkDownload

Overall, it’s good to hear updates on great projects like FujiNet that help vintage computers access the internet and serve up new purposes. And it’s fun to see intriguing projects, nostalgia, and an appreciation for computing history mixed into one. I highly recommend.

I’m already thinking about presenting a talk on the state of PowerMac G5s as a viable machine next year.

— Nathan

G5 + Xbox 360

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I missed this article from a couple of years ago which detail how to get the Xbox 360 SDK environment working on very specific PowerMac G5s. It’s a fun read, and I think it’s worthy of a look if you are curious of how PowerMac G5s influenced console gaming history. And kind of makes me want to play some Xbox games on my old G5.

The equipment needed to get the very finicky Xbox 360 SDK image to work though is something:

• A Power Mac G5 with two 2 GHz CPUs (only this frequency). You need a 2003 or 2004 version, but not a 2005 model, nor a PCI-Express model (with a dual core processor). If your Mac has four slots for RAM (not eight), it’s not good.
• At least 512 MB of RAM. Normally, it is not a problem.
• A hard disk of 160 GB, a priori necessarily a Seagate ST3160023AS. This is the original model. I tried with an SSD without success, and my Mac no longer had the original hard drive. It is easily found on eBay for a few euros with the right reference. It may work with others, but I did not succeed.
• An IDE optical drive, mandatory. This should not be a problem: Power Macs have one.
• An Intel network card if you want to connect the machine. It requires an Intel Pro100+ PCI, reference 741462-010 (the one provided by Microsoft) or 741462-010. It’s easy to find it on eBay.
• An Xbox controller (original) with a USB adapter or a wired Xbox 360 controller. Careful, not a “Play & Charge” version.
• An ATi Radeon X800 XT 256 MB with two DVI outputs (that’s important) and a Mac BIOS. This is the complicated part, let’s detail it.

If you happen to check all of those boxes off the list and have an afternoon to kill, let us know how it goes, alright?

Read the whole article at Journal Dulapin.

Trip Report: Snow Leopard PPC

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This week, I spent a few minutes burning an old Snow Leopard Developer’s Build to an extra USB Hard Drive.

It worked. My G5 booted up, and I was able to imagine for a bit what Snow Leopard might have been like if it had kept support even for Power Mac G5s. Overall, the system ran okay, keeping in mind that I booted it from an external USB Drive which is a slow way to go about things.

My graphics card, a GeForce 7800 GT, ran just great, even if there were some graphical glitches at work.

But here’s the rub – the mach_kernel used in the build was compiled in October of 2008. The final version of Leopard, 10.5.8, was released August 5, 2009 (per Wikipedia). Snow Leopard came pretty quickly after on August 28, 2009. And while Snow Leopard’s initial release still had a lot of PowerPC code baked in, I’m unaware of anyone getting that code to work on a PowerPC.

During my test, I ended up pulling the kernel and other frameworks from a Snow Leopard install DVD to make a modified Snow Leopard PPC drive. The G5, each time, would start to load but hang. No doubt, the issue is deeper than just getting Snow Leopard to recognize hardware – there are components that do not contain PPC code. Ultimately, it may just not be possible.

One glaring example – my G5 has 10GB of RAM but only 6GB shows up in the Developer’s Build of Snow Leopard. Weird, right?

I will continue to take a look at this, but my hope dimmed a bit today. Leopard 10.5.8 is more recent a release than these Snow Leopard builds. I think it’s always worth tinkering around, but I don’t believe this will open the door to any Snow Leopard-era software. Your mileage may vary, of course, so go follow along on the MacRumors thread.

Update: I queued this post up a couple of days ago, and in that time, we continue to tinker and work with the Snow Leopard development build. I admit I sound a little pessimistic in this post. Some of that is warranted, but other posters are much more positive about what we can achieve. Stay tuned for more updates.

— Nathan

Speedtest Your Internet Connection

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On the positive side of things, despite the ongoing reopening of the Net Neutrality battle, my internet just got upgraded to near gigabit speeds. Of course, it’s probably temporary, since I’m not sure why I need that much raw throughput and most of my devices use wifi anyway. Still, it has led to me do some testing to see what speeds I am getting.

For example, on my 5ghz connection on my iPhone 7, Speedtest shows 76.35 Mbps down and 111.09 Mbps up. Not bad. This probably echoes what my AppleTV, iPad, and other devices get.

For my Dell connected via gigabit ethernet to the router, I cleared 600 Mbps up and 900 Mbps down. Very, very nice.

For my Mac Mini G4, also connected directly to the router but via a 10/100 Ethernet port, I only managed a measly (relatively) 80 Mbps up and 90 Mbps down. Is this also bottle-necked some by the CPU or older hardware in general? Perhaps.

For my Power Mac G5 which is connected via ethernet through an inexpensive TP-Link 500Mbps powerline adapter, I unfortunately had the worst performance so far – 43.99 Mbps and 34.52 Mbps. These powerline adapters are a decent alternative if you have flaky wifi and need something more robust, but they are a bit disappointing. At this point, I’m rethinking whether or not to use these powerline adapters at all and just hook a long cable from the router into my G5. We’ll see.

If you want to test your speed, unfortunately, you can’t use the classic flash version of the Speedtest site but it does redirect to a beta HTML5 version which TenFourFox handles well. Alternately, use the command line. You will need Python 2.4 or later, so I’m not sure if Tiger users are out of luck or not.

1. Install the python Speedtest script.

sudo easy_install speedtest-cli

2. Run it.

speedtest-cli

3. Share your results in the comments section below.

— Nathan

Interview with Cameron Kaiser

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I happened to be in the Bay area just as Cameron (of TenFour Firefox fame) announced his presence at the Vintage Computer Festival West. Why not stop by and get a few minutes with a guy that is a hero to us PowerPC users?

Check the video below, which should be low enough in quality (360p) to be viewable on most of our machines. If you can’t view it, let me know and I will generate a downloadable version too.

If you can’t get Youtube to work, download a MP4 version by clicking here.

Thanks to Cameron for his work and taking a couple of minutes to chat. Cool stuff!

— Nathan