So, anybody who has been a collector of 'Old World' Macintosh paraphernalia for some time would probably be familiar with or at least know about Apple's download page for legacy software dating back to the 68k era... as far back even as to include a complete set of downloadable gsOS System 6 disks for the last Apple II, the abruptly aborted //gs.
What you may not know, however, is that the page which browses to the FTP site has been taken down now for a number of years... in fact I did not even realise this until recently. Whilst this is unfortunate, and realistically a bit of a dick move, at the end of the day, Apple probably do not actually care about their heritage or those who like to sit back and enjoy a simpler time, as it does not make them any money doing so. So from a corporate standpoint, it makes a tiny degree of sense, although I admit I do struggle to see how they gain anything substancial even in terms of hosting cost, by removing a few gig of material. That's right... the contents of the entire Apple legacy FTP library take up 7.4 gig when compressed. Not only that, as it stands some of the files remain intact and hosted off the original server anyway, in dribs and drabs, so it's not like they have even done the job properly.
I can hear you ask now, "Oh yeh and how the bloody hell do you know that the library is only 7.4Gb smartarse??"... Well, friends, the answer to that is because, as I type this, I have the entire Apple legacy FTP site downloading onto my G5's secondary hard drive as a .zip file.
Yep... that's right. How you ask? Well... some anonymous smart cookie somewhere in 2012 had the forethought to get hold of the entire site and then reupload it to an archive site, which technically isnt really illegal. Anyway, that link is here...
https://archive.org/details/download.info.apple.com.2012.11
You can choose to browse through the files individually at this page, or you may download the entire collection of site files if you wish, as I currently am, as a ZIP file.
Another option is this link, which is yet another dump of the entire library being hosted abroad and independantly by a fellow 68kmla member...
http://asa.max1zzz.co.uk/
And this one here for something a little different...
http://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/macintosh-centro/MacOS/
Some links for System 6 and 7 software I beleive specific to Mac Plus?
http://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/system/index.html
And finally, a page to download the OS9 updates...
http://www.mediafire.com/?64da0g3iih922
Whilst the actual download.info.apple pages are sort of still up as a directory structure, the site is largely now an empty shell full of broken links and dead ends, so as such I have not even bothered to include a link.
Anyway, I may at some stage also decide to upload and host my own mirror at some point in time, and when and if this happens, I shall fill everybody in. Anyway, Feel free to download away from wherever, as the more copies of this old software that exist, the stronger the chance that it will still be readily available in say 10 years time.
OMT
Friday, 20 February 2015
Tuesday, 17 February 2015
Featured Mac: The Sonnet-enhanced "Yikes" G4.
So, as of this day, I am going to be periodically blogging a writeup with pics where possible on a different Mac or piece of Apple-hardware from my decidedly large collection. Given this is some semblance of an old Mac blog, this seems like something worth doing.
As it is arguably one of my favourite Powermacs of the New World era, and has well and truly stood the test of 15 years, it seems fitting that the first featured machine should be my trusty, only recently retired Powermac G4 (PCI graphics), a machine known to most aficionados for many years now simply by it's internal Apple codename, "Yikes!" and the first of a long line of Apple pro-towers to use the well-proven PPC 7400 CPU, which still had derivitives in use on Powerbooks and the Mac Mini right up into the mid-2000's, long after the monster 64-bit G5 took pride of place as the company flagship for the pro-est of pro-users.
The "Yikes" G4 was modelled very closely after the "Yosemite" (Blue and white) G3 Powermac tower which came onto the market in 1999 as the first high-end Macintosh to use the "New World" architecture and conform to the new "look" Apple had pioneered with the iMac... More on the G3 will come in another post at a later date, but suffice to say when I say the Yikes was modelled closely on this machine, I mean they are very nearly identical, right down to logic board design, such that I have always referred to the Yikes item as being essentially Rev. 3 of the Yosemite G3 logic board. The only physical difference is that the G4 board has all ADB componentry and the ADB port itself deleted (but all the blank pads are still there), and the Firmware has code to allow the machine to recognise and work with the G4 processor, which fits into the exact same Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) Socket as the G3's used in previous PPC 750-based desktop machines. And this is piled into the exact same "El-Kapitan" style case as the Yosemite G3, except that with the advent of the G4, came the start of the "graphite era" where the rather loud blueberry and white colour scheme and kind of cheesy but cool "G3" label under the translucent white side plastics was toned down on 3 generations of G4 tower by a far more clean-cut, professional looking scheme with a graphite front, top amd rear bezel, graphite side logo's and clear transparent handles, feet, and sides, but with the sides being painted white on their inner surfaces, all of which made it look like the powerful machine it was...
Not bad to look at, huh? I thought not either!
The only major drawback of the new G4 was that, as it was rushed into production on the existing "Yosemite" platform, it lacked an AGP port which by that point in time was getting to be common-place on most mid-level and higher end IBM-compatible mainboards. Whilst, the 66mhz PCI-slot was adequate, it was still a decidedly unfavoured limitation by virtue of it's comparitively slow speed as compared to AGP, and simply because AGP was seen as the way forard, meaning that as the years went on, the development of PCI graphics controllers rapidly came to a halt as the bus became obsolete for this purpose. Nonetheless, the ATI Rage128 with 16Mb of VRAM, whilst no speed demon, was a capable enough controller for the time. All the same, the Yikes gained a stigma as "the slow G4" and has never been particularly revelled among the Mac community, as it really was just a borderline obsolete machine with a cutting-edge CPU slapped in it... It didnt even have an onboard Airport card slot, whilst the low-end of the product line, the iMac even had one (unless you bought the really cheap and nasty 350mhz model without firewire), and the Powermac also had no support for booting off Firewire devices. The real celebrating happened not even a year later when the "real" G4, the Sawtooth, entered the market. It did so sporting faster CPU options, and now had AGP, Airport-connectivity, target-disk mode, firewire-booting, a doubled RAM-ceiling, and later on even a dual-CPU option... the moment it was on the shelves the Yikes became an important but slightly embarrasing piece of Apple history.
Anyway... here is my particular setup. Has been decluttered a little since this 2013 photo.
I originally procured this machine a fair few years ago as a G4/350, with 128Mb of RAM, the original 10Gb HDD still in place, CD-ROM drive, stock video controller... pretty uninspiring, all told. These days it is running a 500mhz Sonnet Encore CPU, which is the fastest CPU these boards will support off the shelf, maxxed out at 1Gb
of RAM, and running 2x now quite aging 40Gb drives which were carried over from the G3 which this replaced. There is now also a DVD burner which is actually an OEM Superdrive removed from an eMac that I picked up specifically to scavenge parts from. In the internal pic you will see a third hard drive
in the very front mounting bay, which is a backup of the main drive that and normally
left unplugged unless being backed up to or restored from. It has both 10.3.6 and
10.4.2 installed but I usually run it on Panther only as its fast on these machines and simple, whereas Tiger contains a lot of bloatware that really does knock the comfortable usability around.
I also used to have a PCI SCSI controller in this G4 but I turfed it out and put it in
my G3 as having it installed actually slowed it down... that and I never used
it anyway. The monitor is a gargantuan Apple Studio Display 17" which uses a beautifully crisp, sharp, and nearly flat Mitsubishi Diamondtron CRT tube, itself based on the Sony Trinitron technology. These are a fantastic looking display when functioning, but unfortunately, they do tend towards eventually failing due to faulty flyback transformers... this begins as an audible snap and flicker every so often... sometimes only once every few hours. But eventually the screen will just give up and display no picture, which is a shame. They really are one of the nicest looking CRT displays produce in any case. This monitor was at one point run off an ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition 32Mb graphics controller however this unfortunately burnt out and I no longer have a need for such a fancy card, so I simply reinstalled the stock 16Mb Rage128 unit.
Some things to note about the Yikes are the following:
> It has a maximum RAM capacity of 1Gb of PC-100 or faster SDRAM. At this, I will also say, do NOT use the 168-pin DRAM from an Oldworld Mac, or it will blow up. Also, don't bother trying to use PC-66 SD-RAM as it is simply not fast enough for the system bus.
> the Yikes can recognise a maximum of 120Gb per hard drive, and will support TWO hard drives on the internal primary IDE bus. There is also the ability to address a slave drive on the secondary IDE bus, and a drive bay underneath the optical-drive which will accomodate a hard drive... DO NOT DO THIS HOWEVER, as it is designed specifically for a ZIP drive which was a factory option. This secondary IDE channel is only ATA-66 so will be slower in any case than the primary channel. Furthermore, the buildup of heat generated by a hard drive operating in the ZIP bay constantly can drastically reduce the life of both the hard disc and optical drive. The other issue is that most Mac's of this era can only boot from a CD-ROM drive that is set as a master device on any bus. Why is this a problem you ask? why not just have it set as a master then?... Well... the reason is that if you have the CD-ROM drive set as a the master device on the secondary ATA bus, and have a hard drive as a slave, the Mac will not search for and detect a slave drive UNLESS it finds an actual volume in the CD-drive first at boot-up. If there is no CD in the drive, then the machine will skip Slave detection and the hard drive will be unmountable. Conversely, if you set the CD-ROM to slave, this problem is alleviated, however your CD drive cannot be used as a bootable device.
> Yikes uses most of the same case plastics as the Sawtooth, with the exception of the rear panel. The chassis of the Yikes tower is close enough to identical to the Yosemite to be interchangable, all case plastics are interchangable between Yikes and Yosemite as are PSU, and with a Sonnet Firmware flash, a Yosemite logic board can also be used with a G4 in a Yikes in the rare event of board failure.
> The Yikes and Yosemite boards use jumpers in a plastic block (under the WARRANTY VOID sticker in the internal photo above) to set the CPU multiplier in increments of .5 from 3-5 times the 100mhz system bus speed. This makes overclocking theoretically possible, and at some point I will dedicate an entry to this topic. Some CPU cores will respond more successfully to overclocking than others... some will simply not overclock stabley. As a general rule of thumb +50Mhz is about the stable limit if any, and most *stock* CPU's will not run stable or at all on 500mhz setting. The Sonnet Encore however, uses a core rated to at least 500mhz. Please do not touch this jumper block if you do not have a sound knowledge of what you are doing, as you could render your machine inoperative.
> You will find under certain circumstances that a Yosemite/Yikes machine will refuse to turn on or boot after having RAM changed, CPU swapped, PCI cards added, drives... hell, you can sometimes sneeze and it will decide its not going to boot up. This is often mistaken for a critical failure, but usually isnt. Simply reset the cuda using the button on the logic board, that should fire it up, if in an attempt to boot, it shows no display, or turns on but does not bong on startup or do anything, hold in the interrupt button beside the reset button whilst you power up the G3/4 until you here a long, low beep. Reset the system immediately to a PRAM reset (Opt+Cmd+P+R)... reset it twice then boot to open firmware (Opt+Cmd+O+F held in straight after powerup). WHen you get th white OF screen with a commandline prompt, type the following commands in order with each followed by pressing Return.
reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all
The machine should usually boot normally after this procedure.
> Finally, if you intend on using Firewire regularly, I would highly recommend sourcing a compatible PCI Firewire card and using that, rather than the inbuilt ports, as the ports are rather fragile and break in some machines, and the controller itself can be rather flakey after some use.
Anyway... That's me done for this morning! I will definitely be doing a writeup on more Yosemite/Yikes stuff soon, namely overclocking. Watch this space!
OMT
As it is arguably one of my favourite Powermacs of the New World era, and has well and truly stood the test of 15 years, it seems fitting that the first featured machine should be my trusty, only recently retired Powermac G4 (PCI graphics), a machine known to most aficionados for many years now simply by it's internal Apple codename, "Yikes!" and the first of a long line of Apple pro-towers to use the well-proven PPC 7400 CPU, which still had derivitives in use on Powerbooks and the Mac Mini right up into the mid-2000's, long after the monster 64-bit G5 took pride of place as the company flagship for the pro-est of pro-users.
The "Yikes" G4 was modelled very closely after the "Yosemite" (Blue and white) G3 Powermac tower which came onto the market in 1999 as the first high-end Macintosh to use the "New World" architecture and conform to the new "look" Apple had pioneered with the iMac... More on the G3 will come in another post at a later date, but suffice to say when I say the Yikes was modelled closely on this machine, I mean they are very nearly identical, right down to logic board design, such that I have always referred to the Yikes item as being essentially Rev. 3 of the Yosemite G3 logic board. The only physical difference is that the G4 board has all ADB componentry and the ADB port itself deleted (but all the blank pads are still there), and the Firmware has code to allow the machine to recognise and work with the G4 processor, which fits into the exact same Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) Socket as the G3's used in previous PPC 750-based desktop machines. And this is piled into the exact same "El-Kapitan" style case as the Yosemite G3, except that with the advent of the G4, came the start of the "graphite era" where the rather loud blueberry and white colour scheme and kind of cheesy but cool "G3" label under the translucent white side plastics was toned down on 3 generations of G4 tower by a far more clean-cut, professional looking scheme with a graphite front, top amd rear bezel, graphite side logo's and clear transparent handles, feet, and sides, but with the sides being painted white on their inner surfaces, all of which made it look like the powerful machine it was...
The only major drawback of the new G4 was that, as it was rushed into production on the existing "Yosemite" platform, it lacked an AGP port which by that point in time was getting to be common-place on most mid-level and higher end IBM-compatible mainboards. Whilst, the 66mhz PCI-slot was adequate, it was still a decidedly unfavoured limitation by virtue of it's comparitively slow speed as compared to AGP, and simply because AGP was seen as the way forard, meaning that as the years went on, the development of PCI graphics controllers rapidly came to a halt as the bus became obsolete for this purpose. Nonetheless, the ATI Rage128 with 16Mb of VRAM, whilst no speed demon, was a capable enough controller for the time. All the same, the Yikes gained a stigma as "the slow G4" and has never been particularly revelled among the Mac community, as it really was just a borderline obsolete machine with a cutting-edge CPU slapped in it... It didnt even have an onboard Airport card slot, whilst the low-end of the product line, the iMac even had one (unless you bought the really cheap and nasty 350mhz model without firewire), and the Powermac also had no support for booting off Firewire devices. The real celebrating happened not even a year later when the "real" G4, the Sawtooth, entered the market. It did so sporting faster CPU options, and now had AGP, Airport-connectivity, target-disk mode, firewire-booting, a doubled RAM-ceiling, and later on even a dual-CPU option... the moment it was on the shelves the Yikes became an important but slightly embarrasing piece of Apple history.
Anyway... here is my particular setup. Has been decluttered a little since this 2013 photo.
> It has a maximum RAM capacity of 1Gb of PC-100 or faster SDRAM. At this, I will also say, do NOT use the 168-pin DRAM from an Oldworld Mac, or it will blow up. Also, don't bother trying to use PC-66 SD-RAM as it is simply not fast enough for the system bus.
> the Yikes can recognise a maximum of 120Gb per hard drive, and will support TWO hard drives on the internal primary IDE bus. There is also the ability to address a slave drive on the secondary IDE bus, and a drive bay underneath the optical-drive which will accomodate a hard drive... DO NOT DO THIS HOWEVER, as it is designed specifically for a ZIP drive which was a factory option. This secondary IDE channel is only ATA-66 so will be slower in any case than the primary channel. Furthermore, the buildup of heat generated by a hard drive operating in the ZIP bay constantly can drastically reduce the life of both the hard disc and optical drive. The other issue is that most Mac's of this era can only boot from a CD-ROM drive that is set as a master device on any bus. Why is this a problem you ask? why not just have it set as a master then?... Well... the reason is that if you have the CD-ROM drive set as a the master device on the secondary ATA bus, and have a hard drive as a slave, the Mac will not search for and detect a slave drive UNLESS it finds an actual volume in the CD-drive first at boot-up. If there is no CD in the drive, then the machine will skip Slave detection and the hard drive will be unmountable. Conversely, if you set the CD-ROM to slave, this problem is alleviated, however your CD drive cannot be used as a bootable device.
> Yikes uses most of the same case plastics as the Sawtooth, with the exception of the rear panel. The chassis of the Yikes tower is close enough to identical to the Yosemite to be interchangable, all case plastics are interchangable between Yikes and Yosemite as are PSU, and with a Sonnet Firmware flash, a Yosemite logic board can also be used with a G4 in a Yikes in the rare event of board failure.
> The Yikes and Yosemite boards use jumpers in a plastic block (under the WARRANTY VOID sticker in the internal photo above) to set the CPU multiplier in increments of .5 from 3-5 times the 100mhz system bus speed. This makes overclocking theoretically possible, and at some point I will dedicate an entry to this topic. Some CPU cores will respond more successfully to overclocking than others... some will simply not overclock stabley. As a general rule of thumb +50Mhz is about the stable limit if any, and most *stock* CPU's will not run stable or at all on 500mhz setting. The Sonnet Encore however, uses a core rated to at least 500mhz. Please do not touch this jumper block if you do not have a sound knowledge of what you are doing, as you could render your machine inoperative.
> You will find under certain circumstances that a Yosemite/Yikes machine will refuse to turn on or boot after having RAM changed, CPU swapped, PCI cards added, drives... hell, you can sometimes sneeze and it will decide its not going to boot up. This is often mistaken for a critical failure, but usually isnt. Simply reset the cuda using the button on the logic board, that should fire it up, if in an attempt to boot, it shows no display, or turns on but does not bong on startup or do anything, hold in the interrupt button beside the reset button whilst you power up the G3/4 until you here a long, low beep. Reset the system immediately to a PRAM reset (Opt+Cmd+P+R)... reset it twice then boot to open firmware (Opt+Cmd+O+F held in straight after powerup). WHen you get th white OF screen with a commandline prompt, type the following commands in order with each followed by pressing Return.
reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all
The machine should usually boot normally after this procedure.
> Finally, if you intend on using Firewire regularly, I would highly recommend sourcing a compatible PCI Firewire card and using that, rather than the inbuilt ports, as the ports are rather fragile and break in some machines, and the controller itself can be rather flakey after some use.
Anyway... That's me done for this morning! I will definitely be doing a writeup on more Yosemite/Yikes stuff soon, namely overclocking. Watch this space!
OMT
Sunday, 15 February 2015
A new forum for the Old New World... But are forums still a thing??
At this point in time, I figure it is pertinent to point out the existence of my latest hairbrain endeavour... a forum specifically for the users, collectors, and afficionado's of "New World" PowerPC systems, whether it be the original Bondi Blue iMac, or the ultimate incarnation of the PowerPC line, the monster Quad-Core PowerMac G5.
There are a lot of forums dealing with the 68k and pre-Mac side of Apple computing for the diehard enthusiasts, and there is at least one for PPC that seems far more focussed upon the earlier "Old World" 60x and G3 incarnations, as well as the usual mainstream ones which have little in the way of relevance to the vintage Mac community at all. What I havent found however, is a specific community of enthusiasts who collect, preserve , restore or modify the later post-beige era G3, G4 and G5 machines. Instead, we seem to just hang around in various other places, sometimes as outcasts, and hope to be accepted and helped out. OK, so that may have been a tad melodramatic, however the gist still stands... the late PowerPC Macs are a now-prominent niche and an important part of Apple history set among Mac collectors that arent as yet terribly well recognised or catered for.
Anyway, I do not know if forums are even really a thing anymore... I know the last Mac forum I ran, MacInYourEye, accrued a decent member base until the hosting company went bust, however that was over 10 years ago, before Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, were even a thing. At that time, forums had supplanted BBS and mailing list groups as the new streamlined, way of bringing together those with a common interest from across the globe as an online community. These days, I notice a lot of once bustling forums I used to frequent (car and computer forums primarily), have a lot less traffic than they once did, and a few (including the original MacAddict/Maclife Forums) have just shut down altogether, taking with them a wealth of knowledge gathered over many years. On the other hand, Facebook groups thrive... I myself have more active members on a particular car group I run than a related forum now has members at all. But I digress...
For as long as forum software exists, forums will exist, and as it stands, I guess computer enthusiasts are more likely to continue embracing the format than some other groups. With this said, if you happen to still like forums as a medium, and you are an afficionado of New World Mac tech, then here is your forum...
New World Powermac Forums
I have made it as intuitive in it's layout as possible, and tried to keep redundancy to a minimum. In any case, feedback is welcome and encouraged. This forum may go nowhere but hey, at least the option is now there!
OMT
There are a lot of forums dealing with the 68k and pre-Mac side of Apple computing for the diehard enthusiasts, and there is at least one for PPC that seems far more focussed upon the earlier "Old World" 60x and G3 incarnations, as well as the usual mainstream ones which have little in the way of relevance to the vintage Mac community at all. What I havent found however, is a specific community of enthusiasts who collect, preserve , restore or modify the later post-beige era G3, G4 and G5 machines. Instead, we seem to just hang around in various other places, sometimes as outcasts, and hope to be accepted and helped out. OK, so that may have been a tad melodramatic, however the gist still stands... the late PowerPC Macs are a now-prominent niche and an important part of Apple history set among Mac collectors that arent as yet terribly well recognised or catered for.
Anyway, I do not know if forums are even really a thing anymore... I know the last Mac forum I ran, MacInYourEye, accrued a decent member base until the hosting company went bust, however that was over 10 years ago, before Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, were even a thing. At that time, forums had supplanted BBS and mailing list groups as the new streamlined, way of bringing together those with a common interest from across the globe as an online community. These days, I notice a lot of once bustling forums I used to frequent (car and computer forums primarily), have a lot less traffic than they once did, and a few (including the original MacAddict/Maclife Forums) have just shut down altogether, taking with them a wealth of knowledge gathered over many years. On the other hand, Facebook groups thrive... I myself have more active members on a particular car group I run than a related forum now has members at all. But I digress...
For as long as forum software exists, forums will exist, and as it stands, I guess computer enthusiasts are more likely to continue embracing the format than some other groups. With this said, if you happen to still like forums as a medium, and you are an afficionado of New World Mac tech, then here is your forum...
New World Powermac Forums
I have made it as intuitive in it's layout as possible, and tried to keep redundancy to a minimum. In any case, feedback is welcome and encouraged. This forum may go nowhere but hey, at least the option is now there!
OMT
Friday, 6 February 2015
Now brought to you under G5 Power...
Damn!!! If this blog had any thicker a layer of dust coating it, then there is a good chance I would be sneezing hard enough to blow this here 20-something inch Studio Display clean off the desk! But I digress...
It's now 2015 and after an absolute rollercoaster ride, I am now back in a position where I may pick up where I left off and resume this here blog, and more importantly, the Mac hobby that sort of is the reason it exists. :) A bit has happened in the meatspace in that time, much of which is not really relevant to the subject matter but does nonetheless explain my sudden drop away into oblivion.
The above being said, there have been a few changes made which are VERY relevant to the primary subject matter of this blog, the most exciting, at least for me, being that I now type these words under 64-bit power. Yep, a G5 has entered my life! :) And I have to say, it is every bit as awsome as I imagined it to be a bit over 10 years ago when the first multiple thousand dollar lumps of anodised aluminium and raw power cam onto the market. Unfortunately however, it was not without succumbing to some issues that showed themselves very early in the life of these machines...
Pretty much as it stands, not long after my last blog post, the old faithful Pentium 4 2.8Ghz I had been gaming on and computing with semi-daily since 2003 finally refused to boot one day. For what it's worth I put it entirely down to malware due to my oldest younger brothers disturbing high-school porn habit... But that being said, I simply cannot find the motivation to deal with it. I simply unplugged the machine and havent switched it on since. At least that way I can't break anymore data. This seemed fine to me... the only reason I used it was because it was somewhat faster and more fluid than the old trusty Yikes G4 tower. Unfortunately however, Porsche-syndrome had well and truly set in and I must concede to feeling pretty hard done by as I sat back and waited for Firefox or Camino to load what remaining supported content was on my usual assortment of web-pages. It seemed to me the time had finally come to retire the strung out, loaded up, maxxed out old graphite boat-anchor that had provided so many years of computing pleasure to menial jukebox duties... It was just no longer practical for even simple web-browsing after 14 years, which I must admit is a great service life nonetheless!
Well, at a very opportune point in time shortly after, a Powermac G5 entered my life. At a friends house one day, I was asked if I had any use for their glitchy 2.0DP, which had gone to the dogs after a RAM upgrade and been replaced with an iMac G5... Being the enterprising Powermac afficionado and Mac collector I am, and being at a point where buying a newer Mac was now a definite must, I needless to say was more than willing to take it off their hands. I set it and it's 20" Studio Display up on my glass topped desk and was immediately confronted with.... a desktop picture and the MacOS interface. Brilliant! However it was when i opened up About this Mac to do the routine scan of the system profiler to ascertain specifics, I noted it was registering only a single CPU... at that it was also painfully slow. At that point i wasted no time in opening it up and discovered the cause immediately... all the ram was stacked in one bank rather than paired in top and bottom banks. By rights it shouldnt have actually worked at all, but it did. After rectifying this, I got a much faster boot and it now registered both CPU's... I was onto a winner it seemed until that kernel panic. I reset it and then next came a freeze during boot. Off came the side again, and after much swapping and experimenting I ascertained not one but 2 of the RAM's were bad... maybe not even bad but simply not of a quality or specification that a G5 will reliably run. They are a fickle beast when it comes to such things. After removing the bad DDR400's it booted, ran brilliantly, and was a great daily until a little while ago it started sporadically freezing. The freezes got more frequent, then became KP's... swapping RAM into different slots sometimes helped, but the problems came back every time. Then the fan's started going nuts...
That there fan development was the telltale sign that I was no longer chasing cheap RAM problems, but a more serious logic board failure, common particularly in earlier G5's. They came to be in the world at a time when a few new developments were being implemented in consumer electronics and computing... the Ball-Grid Array method of microprocessor interfacing, and low-lead solder. Whilst there are benefits to both of these developments both from a functional and manufacturing standpoint, they are not without their flaws, and these showed themselves very early in the Powermac G5's life. the BGA interface in the G5 is prone to cracking of the less compliant and less conductive low-lead solder joints on the ball-grid due to thermal expansion, which resulted in the kind of instability I found myself facing. This can be rectified by reflowing the affected joints, however I opted to go with the simpler option of purchasing another G5. Finding a decent one for a good price that was not too far to pick up however was a slightly long-winded excercise however, and in the meantime, I took my wireless LAN card out of the crippled G5, stuck it in the Yikes, and then set about beating it into submission at least to allow internettage whilst I bided my time... TenFourFox was not at all stable, Safari was useless in this time and place, so I found myself settling upon an old forgotten install of Camino which is actually still fairly functional and fast. All the same... after running a dual 2.0GHz G5 Powermac, the little 500mhz Yikes really was still painful.
Anyway, come last Saturday I had purchased a replacement G5 finally... a 2006ish 2.0GHz Dual-Core purchased for a very respectable $150 on eBay from a fellow who was 45 minutes leisurely drive away, complete with a poxy 15" LCD display. These have been considered to be a far more reliable machine than the early dual-processor models, with the only real endemic issue being failure of power supplies... That being said, the relatively large analogue componentry in a PSU is far easier to repair on a component level than the microsoldered circuitry of a logic-board. The Dual-Core is also a significantly faster machine on paper than the early Dual-processor, using 533mhz RAM and having PCI-E, all of which I must admit is a bit of a bummer as I cannot use my old G5's RAM, wireless card (which isnt a major concern as luckily my router is 2m away and wired Gigabit ethernet is much faster that 802.11G), or even my Studio Display for that matter until I buy an expensive adaptor, as the graphics card in the later G5's ditched the proprietry ADC video port (which my Studio Display utilises) for an industry standard DVI port. So as such that poxy Compaq LCD I got thrown in free was quite handy...
The compatibility issues aside though, the Dual-Core feels like a much faster machine than the DP, with far more fluidity in it's rendering of graphics, quick load and access-times, and also would seem to run a fair bit cooler, with the fans rarely even breaking a sweat. As a result, it is also far quieter than the DP which would sound like it was about to take off when you loaded up the CPU's. My only real complaint is the lack of built-in Airport... not that it is particularly concerning, as it is useless without an Apple base-station, but nonetheless I feel as though Apple cheated their pro users a bit when they deleted inbuilt Airport from the later towers. Also, the lack of ADC is a blessing and a curse... It is the industry standard, this is true. However it's rather a pain in the ass when you don't happen to have a large DVI display and yet you have a sexy Studio Display that you cant use until you order a crappy adaptor for 70 bucks from Hong Kong. Ah well... first world problems really.
So, anyway... Now that I've ranted long-windedly about a lot of everything and nothing to bring you up to date with really bugger-all, I should also point out that for my next New World Mac build-project, I will be purchasing a new logic-board for the old Dual-Processor which is currently part dismantled, and reviving it as... Well... I really don't have a clue. I'll find a use for it, I am sure of it! This however will be a blog entry for another day. I also may attempt a reflow of the faulty board and possibly purchase yet another dead machine for cheap and see what I can make happen, but this is yet another blog entry for yet another time.
Cheers!
OMT
It's now 2015 and after an absolute rollercoaster ride, I am now back in a position where I may pick up where I left off and resume this here blog, and more importantly, the Mac hobby that sort of is the reason it exists. :) A bit has happened in the meatspace in that time, much of which is not really relevant to the subject matter but does nonetheless explain my sudden drop away into oblivion.
The above being said, there have been a few changes made which are VERY relevant to the primary subject matter of this blog, the most exciting, at least for me, being that I now type these words under 64-bit power. Yep, a G5 has entered my life! :) And I have to say, it is every bit as awsome as I imagined it to be a bit over 10 years ago when the first multiple thousand dollar lumps of anodised aluminium and raw power cam onto the market. Unfortunately however, it was not without succumbing to some issues that showed themselves very early in the life of these machines...
Pretty much as it stands, not long after my last blog post, the old faithful Pentium 4 2.8Ghz I had been gaming on and computing with semi-daily since 2003 finally refused to boot one day. For what it's worth I put it entirely down to malware due to my oldest younger brothers disturbing high-school porn habit... But that being said, I simply cannot find the motivation to deal with it. I simply unplugged the machine and havent switched it on since. At least that way I can't break anymore data. This seemed fine to me... the only reason I used it was because it was somewhat faster and more fluid than the old trusty Yikes G4 tower. Unfortunately however, Porsche-syndrome had well and truly set in and I must concede to feeling pretty hard done by as I sat back and waited for Firefox or Camino to load what remaining supported content was on my usual assortment of web-pages. It seemed to me the time had finally come to retire the strung out, loaded up, maxxed out old graphite boat-anchor that had provided so many years of computing pleasure to menial jukebox duties... It was just no longer practical for even simple web-browsing after 14 years, which I must admit is a great service life nonetheless!
Well, at a very opportune point in time shortly after, a Powermac G5 entered my life. At a friends house one day, I was asked if I had any use for their glitchy 2.0DP, which had gone to the dogs after a RAM upgrade and been replaced with an iMac G5... Being the enterprising Powermac afficionado and Mac collector I am, and being at a point where buying a newer Mac was now a definite must, I needless to say was more than willing to take it off their hands. I set it and it's 20" Studio Display up on my glass topped desk and was immediately confronted with.... a desktop picture and the MacOS interface. Brilliant! However it was when i opened up About this Mac to do the routine scan of the system profiler to ascertain specifics, I noted it was registering only a single CPU... at that it was also painfully slow. At that point i wasted no time in opening it up and discovered the cause immediately... all the ram was stacked in one bank rather than paired in top and bottom banks. By rights it shouldnt have actually worked at all, but it did. After rectifying this, I got a much faster boot and it now registered both CPU's... I was onto a winner it seemed until that kernel panic. I reset it and then next came a freeze during boot. Off came the side again, and after much swapping and experimenting I ascertained not one but 2 of the RAM's were bad... maybe not even bad but simply not of a quality or specification that a G5 will reliably run. They are a fickle beast when it comes to such things. After removing the bad DDR400's it booted, ran brilliantly, and was a great daily until a little while ago it started sporadically freezing. The freezes got more frequent, then became KP's... swapping RAM into different slots sometimes helped, but the problems came back every time. Then the fan's started going nuts...
That there fan development was the telltale sign that I was no longer chasing cheap RAM problems, but a more serious logic board failure, common particularly in earlier G5's. They came to be in the world at a time when a few new developments were being implemented in consumer electronics and computing... the Ball-Grid Array method of microprocessor interfacing, and low-lead solder. Whilst there are benefits to both of these developments both from a functional and manufacturing standpoint, they are not without their flaws, and these showed themselves very early in the Powermac G5's life. the BGA interface in the G5 is prone to cracking of the less compliant and less conductive low-lead solder joints on the ball-grid due to thermal expansion, which resulted in the kind of instability I found myself facing. This can be rectified by reflowing the affected joints, however I opted to go with the simpler option of purchasing another G5. Finding a decent one for a good price that was not too far to pick up however was a slightly long-winded excercise however, and in the meantime, I took my wireless LAN card out of the crippled G5, stuck it in the Yikes, and then set about beating it into submission at least to allow internettage whilst I bided my time... TenFourFox was not at all stable, Safari was useless in this time and place, so I found myself settling upon an old forgotten install of Camino which is actually still fairly functional and fast. All the same... after running a dual 2.0GHz G5 Powermac, the little 500mhz Yikes really was still painful.
Anyway, come last Saturday I had purchased a replacement G5 finally... a 2006ish 2.0GHz Dual-Core purchased for a very respectable $150 on eBay from a fellow who was 45 minutes leisurely drive away, complete with a poxy 15" LCD display. These have been considered to be a far more reliable machine than the early dual-processor models, with the only real endemic issue being failure of power supplies... That being said, the relatively large analogue componentry in a PSU is far easier to repair on a component level than the microsoldered circuitry of a logic-board. The Dual-Core is also a significantly faster machine on paper than the early Dual-processor, using 533mhz RAM and having PCI-E, all of which I must admit is a bit of a bummer as I cannot use my old G5's RAM, wireless card (which isnt a major concern as luckily my router is 2m away and wired Gigabit ethernet is much faster that 802.11G), or even my Studio Display for that matter until I buy an expensive adaptor, as the graphics card in the later G5's ditched the proprietry ADC video port (which my Studio Display utilises) for an industry standard DVI port. So as such that poxy Compaq LCD I got thrown in free was quite handy...
The compatibility issues aside though, the Dual-Core feels like a much faster machine than the DP, with far more fluidity in it's rendering of graphics, quick load and access-times, and also would seem to run a fair bit cooler, with the fans rarely even breaking a sweat. As a result, it is also far quieter than the DP which would sound like it was about to take off when you loaded up the CPU's. My only real complaint is the lack of built-in Airport... not that it is particularly concerning, as it is useless without an Apple base-station, but nonetheless I feel as though Apple cheated their pro users a bit when they deleted inbuilt Airport from the later towers. Also, the lack of ADC is a blessing and a curse... It is the industry standard, this is true. However it's rather a pain in the ass when you don't happen to have a large DVI display and yet you have a sexy Studio Display that you cant use until you order a crappy adaptor for 70 bucks from Hong Kong. Ah well... first world problems really.
So, anyway... Now that I've ranted long-windedly about a lot of everything and nothing to bring you up to date with really bugger-all, I should also point out that for my next New World Mac build-project, I will be purchasing a new logic-board for the old Dual-Processor which is currently part dismantled, and reviving it as... Well... I really don't have a clue. I'll find a use for it, I am sure of it! This however will be a blog entry for another day. I also may attempt a reflow of the faulty board and possibly purchase yet another dead machine for cheap and see what I can make happen, but this is yet another blog entry for yet another time.
Cheers!
OMT
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