If your Mac will support it, restore OS X Snow Leopard; 2. If your Mac will support it, partition your hard drive or add an external hard drive and install Snow Leopard into it and use the 'dual-boot' method to choose between your PowerPC software or Lion/Mt. PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM.PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been named Power ISA, while the old name lives on as a. Classilla and TenFourFox – ports of the current Firefox web browser, optimized for Mac OS 9 (Classilla) and PowerPC Macs running OS X Tiger (TenFourFox). Get online with your vintage Mac! PrintToPDF – a free utility to create PDF files on classic Macs running System 7 through Mac OS 9. This is a handy way to keep the formatting of old.
Blog 2020/5/7
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Here are some notes on how I set up an installation of OS X Tiger (10.4)on an emulated PowerPC G4 using QEMU,on a modern x86_64 Mac.
This setup was performed using QEMU 5.0.0 (obtained via brew install qemu
).
Note: at some point during this process -cdrom /dev/cdrom
seems to have stopped working, but -cdrom /dev/disk2
works.
Step 1: Initial installation
In this step we will format the disk and perform the initial OS X installation.
Download a copy of the2Z691-5305-A OS X Tiger installation DVDand burn it to a physical DVD.
Note: for some reason qemu does not seem to be able to boot .iso
files of the OS X installation DVD (using -cdrom tiger.iso
),but if you burn that .iso
to a physical DVD and then use -cdrom /dev/disk2
, it works.
Boot the DVD to verify it works:
If you see the grey Apple logo, the DVD is working correctly with QEMU:
Quit QEMU and create a 127GB QEMU disk:
Boot the install DVD with the disk attached and being the installation. QEMU will exit when the installer reboots.
When the installer reaches the disk selection screen, there will be no disks to choose from, because the disk has not been partitioned yet:
Start up Disk Utility:
'Erase' the disk to partition and format it:
Quit Disk Utility and the installer should now see the newly formatted partition:
The install will take quite some time (over an hour). When it completes, it will reboot, which will cause QEMU to exit (due to the -no-reboot
flag).
At this point you may (physically) eject the installation DVD (from your host Mac).
Mark the disk as read-only to prevent any accidental writes to it (which would cause any snapshots based on this disk to become corrupt):
Step 2: User account creation, system updates
In this step we will create a user account and install all of the system updates.
Create a snapshot of the disk (think of this as forking the hard drive):
The system updates can either be installed using the Software Update utility (iteratively repeated across many reboots),or you can download and install them manually.
The manual route is quicker because some of the updates are bundled, and you don't have to wait on Software Update to detect which updates have / haven't been installed yet.
To install the updates manually,download (on your host Mac) item #29 (Tiger_Updates.dmg_.zip)from the 'Mac OS X for PPC' pageof macintoshgarden.org.
Unzip that file and convert the dmg to a DVD image:
We can now use tiger-updates.cdr
as a virtual DVD with QEMU.
Boot the G4 and create a user account:
Note: if you plan on using Software Update rather than tiger-updates.cdr, you man omit the -cdrom tiger-updates.cdr
line from the above command.
Note: this boot may take several minutes to get started.
This install was set up with user macuser
and password macuser
:
This installation was set up with the Central timezone:
Disable the screen saver and power-saving features:
Open up System Preferences and:
- Display & Screen Saver -> Screensaver -> Start screen saver -> Never
- Energy Saver
- Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for -> Never
- Put the display to sleep when the computer is inactive for -> Never
If you did not use Software Update, open up the Tiger_Updates 'DVD' and install all of the updates:
If you go with the updates DVD route, make sure you run Software Update at the end just to be sure you've covered everything.
Mark the snapshot read-only to prevent accidental writes to it:
Step 3: Web browser, video player, text editor
In this step we will install TenFourFox, VLC and TextWrangler.
Create a snapshot of the disk:
TenFourFox is a fork of the Firefox web browser which is currently supported on Tiger/PPC.Their website links to the latest version,FPR22.
The latest version of VLCfor Tiger/PPC is 0.9.10,which is still available from their downloads page.
The latest version of TextWranglerfor Tiger/PPC is 3.1,available via Bare Bonesor macintoshgarden.org.
Strangely, no combination of using Disk Utility and hdiutil to create .dmg
or .cdr
images of TenFourFox.app
seemed to work with Tiger:
Open Firmware Mac Ppc Commands
Note: in retrospect, perhaps this was an APFS vs. HFS+ issue?
I resorted to burning TenFourFox, VLC, and TextWrangler to a physical DVD and passing it through to QEMU.
Note: even burning to a physical CD-ROM didn't work -- it had to be a DVD.
Drag the applications into /Applications
.
Shutdown the G4 and mark the disk read-only:
Step 4: Xcode, Tigerbrew
In this step we will set up a development environment for building modern Unix software.
Create a snapshot of the disk:
The latest version of Xcode Tools for Tiger/PPC is 2.5,which is still available via Apple (search for 'xcode 2.5' at https://developer.apple.com/download/more/, requires login),or via macintoshgarden.orgfrom their Xcode page.
Again, I had to burn this to a physical DVD in order to use it with QEMU.
Boot the G4 and install the Xcode Tools:
Tigerbrewis a fork of Homebrewfor PowerPC Macs running Tiger or Leopard.
Open up a terminal on the emulated G4 and use the following commands to install Tigerbrew:
Also, change Terminal.app to spawn a 'login' bash shell:
- Terminal -> Preferences -> Execute this command ->
/bin/bash -l
Don't forget to mark the disk image read-only:
Using these QEMU hard drive images
At this point we've created a series of four chained hard drive images:
We can squash these images into a single, combined, stand-alone hard drive image:
We can then boot using that combined image directly, without the use of any snapshots.This is analogous to having a real Mac with a physical hard drive:
Or, we could treat combined.qcow2
as a 'golden master'and create snapshots based off of it, perhaps to try out some experimental tigerbrew packages:
You will need to take part and win different racing events in order to gain XP, unlock new cars and upgrades. It’s a long way until you will reach that title, but it will be a very good one. It is a direct sequel to the Need for Speed SHIFT, which you can also download from.Your main goal in Shift 2 Unleashed Mac OS X is to become the World Champion of FIA GT1. New features were introduced in this sequel. Mac need for speed shift.
Perhaps in experiment-1.qcow2
we try out gcc-7
, and in experiment-2.qcow2
we try out llvm
, etc.
Each of these snapshots can be used with the above command line as the -hda
argument:
qemu-system-ppc .. -hda experiment-2.qcow2
Mac Os X 10.0 Iso
We could even create further branches off of e.g. experiment-2.qcow2
:
Perhaps we decide that experiment-2B.qcow2
was the keeper and the rest can be gotten rid of?
combined.qcow2
now contains the changes from experiment-2.qcow2
and experiment-2B.qcow2
.
Thus far we've been branching off of the 'tip',but we could just as easily branch off several points in the snapshot tree.For example, if we hadn't merged the images into combined.qcow2
,we could make a 'daily driver' snapshot for web browsing based off of 3-browser.qcow2
,and a 'dev box' for doing development work based off of 4-tigerbrew.qcow2
:
Ppc For Mac Os
Let's say we accidentally hosed our dev box with a careless rm -rf /
. Starting over with a new dev box is trivial:
Etc :)
Resources:
Devices and Mac OS X version
VLC media player requires Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later. It runs on any 64bit Intel-based Mac. Previous devices are supported by older releases.
Note that the first generation of Intel-based Macs equipped with Core Solo or Core Duo processors is no longer supported. Please use version 2.0.10 linked below.
Web browser plugin for Mac OS X
Support for NPAPI plugins was removed from all modern web browsers, so VLC's plugin is no longer maintained. The last version is 3.0.4 and can be found here. It will not receive any further updates.
Older versions of Mac OS X and VLC media player
We provide older releases for users who wish to deploy our software on legacy releases of Mac OS X. You can find recommendations for the respective operating system version below. Note that support ended for all releases listed below and hence they won't receive any further updates.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Use VLC 2.2.8. Get it here.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Use VLC 2.0.10. Get it for PowerPC or 32bit Intel.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later is required
Use VLC 0.9.10. Get it for PowerPC or Intel.
Mac OS X 10.3 Panther
QuickTime 6.5.2 or later is required
Use VLC 0.8.6i. Get it for PowerPC.
Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar
Use VLC 0.8.4a. Get it for PowerPC.
Ppc Mac Games
Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah and 10.1 Puma
Ppc Mac
Use VLC 0.7.0. Get it for PowerPC.