Extreme 90's Macintosh Clone Build FINALE!

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Today we're taking out 1995 Power Computing PowerWave Macintosh clone build across the finish line - or at least that's the plan! We've run into a bunch of problems so far with our ancient and rare upgrades, so we'll see if we can fix them up while adding in a whole host of cool upgrades!
Will we end up with our dream build - a 1GHz Mac clone running OSX Tiger with 1gb of RAM? Join us for the exciting conclusion of our extreme Mac Clone build!
🍎 Part 1: • Extreme Macintosh Clon...
🍎 Part 2: • A 1GHz G4 Macintosh CL...
🍎 SoNNeT upgrades playlist! • SoNNeT Accelerators!
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Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com...
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💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
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#Macintosh #SoNNeT #PowerComputing

[@ActionRetro]

Thanks for watching today's clone shenanigans! It would really help the channel if you check out today's sponsor link, squarespace.com/ActionRetro. It comes with a nice 10% discount if Squarespace is something that's on your radar!

[@mildslope4204]

I agree with Benn Birch and Common-Sense-500, somewhat of a slough to get thru this one and these modern age benchmarks are pretty boring thb, show us what the upgrades *can* do instead of what it *can't* do. The 9200 can't accelerate modern web, it sits idle while the CPU renders the webpages, lets use the 9200 for what it's designed for, pumping out polygons.

[@frankieepurr]

How is squarespace got to do with computers?

[@jaimeduncan6167]

Massive effort congratulations.

[@minty_Joe]

@Action Retro Question: You showed a slot loading SCSI DVD drive for this video. What is the make & model of that drive? I'd like to see about getting one for my Power Macintosh 7500. The internal 4 or 8x SCSI CD-ROM is flaky at times. Good to see you going the distance on these upgrades, although I'd rather keep 'em in OS 9.x territory myself. The only reason I'd throw OS X on it would be for modern network file share SMB support.

[@skraegorn7317]

Next up you should try to install Windows NT Workstation 4.0 for PowerPC on it

[@ActionRetro]

Hah I love this idea

[@adwaitagnome]

Would be time appropriate too (well, without all the upgrades)

[@hyoenmadan]

Not possible. NT on PowerPC platform is very picky, and needs 2 components which have to be supplied by the manufacturer, which is a proper ARC firmware build for the machine, or an ARC firmware emulator for the OpenFirmware version built in the board (VEENER, akin to NTLDR on x86 PCs)... And a HAL which has to team with such firmware build. If Firmware/VEENER and HAL mismatch, the OS will not boot. Interesting enough, at one time Apple had both components for Macs and clones based on this Tsunami/Nitro platform, which were developed by Firmworks/Microsoft for Apple... And in fact one Mac running Windows NT native was shown in some last 90's MacWorld expo... But besides that expo, these important pieces never made on the public, as Steve Jobs killed absolutely all of it on his return to Apple, along with the clones and the whole Tsunami/Nitro platform.

[@chu-icehugehard1820]

@@hyoenmadan Another reason is that NT 4.0 on PPC is little-endian only while PPC Macs are big-endian, and Macs' Open Firmware does not have the ability to change endianness.

[@mojoblues66]

@@chu-icehugehard1820 Thank god.

[@fishmanloveslinux7978]

I love your videos! A few years ago a friend sent me a Macbook Pro from late 2011. I have High Sierra on it and it works incredible fast. Still cruise the web and can do all of the video viewing plus my document creation. Want to know more just message me.

[@yopecador910]

You should try MintPPC instead OSX

[@Unirule]

But does it leopardassist?

[@noth606]

I think this is cool hardwarewise but running modern software on it defeats the purpose to me. Modern hardware is unsurprisingly better at running modern software. But most of the time you can't run old software on new hardware.

[@RetroReviewYT]

Overclock the system bus if you can on that clone. As far as I know, the beige G3 was the first that could overclock the system bus, so a similar thing could be possible with the Power Conputing clone.

[@danaeckel]

@Cardinal Sin Can you change the multiplier on it?

[@fsfs555]

You can maaaaaaybe get 60MHz out of one of these, but it's not likely: PowerComputing had to specially test and configure the few they did sell at that speed, and they had compromises (such as the loss of memory interleaving) that meant they weren't all that much faster than the 50MHz versions. The problem is primarily that the custom Apple chipset they had to use can't handle it (they were officially maxed out at about 55MHz). Other chipsets from IBM and Motorola could go faster, but Apple didn't want to use any of those until the MPC106 in the beige G3 and B&W G3/Yikes! G4. Since the Sonnet upgrades require memory to be deinterleaved regardless, it may be worth a shot at a system bus upclock to 60MHz to try to recoup some speed. It's a question of how the Sonnet card will react after that, since they auto-sense bus speed and set CPU clocks accordingly. You'd also have to more carefully select RAM and ditch the L2 cache card (which is recommended to be removed with a G3/G4 upgrade anyway).

[@jeffwalther2023]

Bus clock speed is controlled by the CPU card on these models. On the Sonnet G4/1000 you can't really change the bus speed, without messing other stuff up. The card is sort of a miracle that it works at all. Modding it takes it out of its operable region pretty quickly. With other CPU cards, as fsfs555 wrote you might get 60 MHz if you're lucky.

[@iodinmonoxide6286]

Love the druaga1 reference…missed the weed powered computer lord

[@masonthedunce3711]

Same bro

[@peteasmr2952]

Used to watch him, it would inspire me to want to make computer videos.

[@iodinmonoxide6286]

@@peteasmr2952 true….his antics make me indulge retro pc, even though it cost me selling a kidney to get one.

[@MediocreTCG]

He'll pop back up with some random shit and fried as ever. Always does.

[@fluffycritter]

I would guess that the divide by zero error is likely because there’s a timing loop to try to do some performance test, and it’s probably running way too fast and getting a time of “0” back. This is a pretty common problem on software that was written with obsolete assumptions about the speed of the system it’s running on.

[@yukisaitou5004]

Yup, the old Jazz Jackrabbit issue

[@fluffycritter]

@@yukisaitou5004 yeah, pretty much every game that was compiled with Borland tools in the mid-90s is subject to it because of a pointless calibration loop that is in the startup routines for Borland's keyboard I/O library. Similarly, a lot of early CD-ROM games absolutely refuse to run on a 4X drive because they detect that you "must be running a drive cache" because there's no WAY that a CD-ROM drive could be providing data faster than 300KB/sec

[@AShortBusVet]

Some older versions of Linux/UNIX would sometimes have weird 'divide by zero' and other errors during installation if you had too much RAM in the system during the install process (even if the system and the OS supported it once finished installing). This eventually led to kernel parameters you could enter to limit RAM during the install.

[@fluffycritter]

@@AShortBusVet Ah yeah, that's another good point, 32-bit address space + 4 GB of RAM = "0 bytes" of RAM available

[@bruwin]

@@AShortBusVet Windows 98 has a similar issue. Anything past 512MB you should edit settings so it can even boot. Put 2GB in, and sometimes even edited settings won't work. Luckily 512 is overkill for any 98 software, but it makes installation difficult on newer hardware if you don't have small enough dimms.

[@GearSeekers]

Absolutely love this! I found a PowerWave on the side of the road about 20 years ago. with everything except the RAM and drives in it. I wish I had some kind of crystal ball so I could have kept it.

[@ActionRetro]

Haha thanks! I've also made a few nice side of the road finds back in the day. Fortunately most of them have been sitting at my moms house for the last decade!

[@beanboy89]

Will OS X 10.6 "Impossible Cat" run on this system?

[@ActionRetro]

Hahaha you read my mind!

[@JapanPop]

Yes! Saturday shenanigans! Floppy drive? DVD? Zip? It looks to be the best bridge between 68k and today for all kinds of software transmission to older machines!

[@CommonSense-hy2sn]

These modern age benchmarks such as the web are getting pretty old imo, it chugs along, to no one's surprise I imagine. Please consider games and apps that targets the upgraded hardware specs as well. It sort of sucks that there are those who generously donated or located you very rare and expensive upgrades and you use benchmarks that are ill suited to them and don't demonstrate the performace gain very well. Like that time you've been donated the Radeon 9200 for the beige G3, an 3D accelerator with no video decoding, and only tried to watch KZbin with it at 0 fps. Due to your choice of benchmarks, most of your Power Mac upgrade videos ends up being samely and therefor not as interesting as they could have been. Here's a extremely rare part, lets run a number crunching test and try an app that is nearly a decade newer than the part and is a moving target, conclusion: didn't do a good job at it. That said, I still enjoyed the video though I think it could have been more.

[@ActionRetro]

I appreciate this feedback a lot, thank you!

[@d3yuen]

Hahaha machine is so confused ... "Model info: Power Macintosh 8500 series" "Processor info: Unknown type"

[@sixteenbitify]

It needs Mac OS 9.2.2 in order to properly detect the PowerPC 7450. 9.1 is too old to know what a 7450/G4 is.

[@ppg_forever]

Nice druaga1 reference

[@BonkedByAScout]

Are you turning the L1/L2 cache back on after boot? A 500MHz CPU with L1/L2 on might be faster than a 1GHz without.

[@deneb_tm]

At least on the PC side, running without cache takes any modern CPU down to 386 levels of performance - try running any version of Firefox on a 40MHz CPU. I can only imagine it would be a similar story with PowerPC, and he's probably correct about the slow system bus.

[@deneb_tm]

Okay well neverfuckingmind apparently lmao

[@BennBirch]

Look, I get it. Old mac's getting upgraded to their max. I've watched this channel grow over the last year. I like that you don't gloss over your "oops" moments. It makes the channel very real and endearing. However... It has become a frustrating task to watch your channel over the last say, 2 months. Your ambition is definitely bigger than your goals and it just keeps me feeling unfulfilled. I had big hopes for this build but as soon as you got to the part where you had to wedge the Sonnet in with a flashlight I knew this was going to be a shit show. It was pretty cool that you were able to find the dry solder joint and get it working but the pay off at the end was probably more frustrating that I can bare. Not only did your bench marking not compare apples to apples (pun intended) because of the different applications but you didn't showcase any gameplay. I was very curious to see Unreal Tournament playing on all the upgrades but as per usual I was let down. I could have sworn you made mention that you were going to try to run Minecraft on it (though it's possible that was on a previous build and i'm miss-remembering). It has just become a bit of a cluster of failures over and over and really displays how much passion you have for the journey with no thought to the disappointment of the destination. I'm personally all about the payoff at the end and sadly there really hasn't been any for me since Powermac G4 upgrades you did in June. I feel really bad for other enthusiasts who are paying the ridiculous prices that ppl charge for these rare upgrades only to have a system that is basically unusable with anything even remotely modern as far as software. It would be like someone who's really into modifying classic cars to spend a lot of money and time sourcing and installing rare race parts only to have a car in the end that's no faster or usable than a rusted out "beater" that would be worth $200. I find myself thinking "ok wait, so all that time and money spent and you only end up with a raspberry pi?" Though then again I doubt the scene is as big as I would guess seeing that retro mac enthusiasts would more likely be back in the Apple II to Mac Classic 68000 realm rather than the Powermac architecture. Again I'm sure i'm missing the point of this channel and may be projecting what I want in a retro-tech channel rather than enjoying the content you create but for some unknown reason I felt compelled to explain why I'm not happy with the recent showings. Maybe there are others who are feeling it too... maybe (but more likely) the comments section will tell me to GTFO if i'm not happy with this free content you're providing. Either way I've said my piece. Thanks AR for the trip, but it turns out, i'm more sad than when i left upon arriving at our destination. Cursed Mac, Cube and Frogfind were awesome eps and got me hooked. I hope there will be more content like that in the future.

[@ActionRetro]

I really appreciate this well thought out and clear feedback :)

[@colinstu]

Oh, so it's not just me finding myself skipping like half of the video after seeing failure after failure? It feels like there's so much filler, explaining the same goals and ambitions over and over again, then a bunch of upgrade rabbit holes that don't lead anywhere.

[@m53rd]

To be honest, I’ve loved this miniseries. It reminds me of the weekend I shot getting 10.2.8 on a beige G3 back in high school. Maybe I’ve seen one too many episodes of 8-Bit Guy, but I’ve grown to love being along for the journey, and I appreciated the opportunity to scream “8GB limit” at the screen. You have a perfectly valid and well-reasoned opinion, my friend, but I respectfully disagree. :-)

[@BennBirch]

@@m53rd I can respect that. 8bit guy has fallen off since he built his new studio TBH so don't get me started on that channel too ;) And don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on AR. It's a great channel especially for how young it is. He's got some good style with the "hand-talking" and "put a noctua in it" mentality. It definitely sticks out in the dregs of retro-computer channels. I just had to comment to give some hopefully-constructive criticism. I'm not unsubbing, I'm definitely still keeping the bell active. I just see that the best days of this channel are yet to come.

[@3rdalbum]

It's good feedback, but for me I'm quite fascinated by the failures, even if a video ends on a low note. Sean did get the cache working later on, I think? Which would have boosted the Geekbench score. The video was already 25 minutes so I expected that he'll do some gaming on a future video. Your point of view is valid even if I don't feel the same way.

[@HikikomoriDev]

...I guess this is where coding a native MacOS PowerPC Twitter desktop app would come in handy.

[@ActionRetro]

Yes!

[@Nukle0n]

Remember the adage, MOLEX to SATA, loose all your data. Those power adapters are notorious for shorting out.

[@sydneybiscuit]

100% - though I suppose one could insulate the junction between the wires and plastic - probably with an absolute crapton of hotglue, but it could work. I think the best solution would be to create a sata power cable for the modular power supply in that machine The last thing I'd want to see is an electircal fire in this beauty

[@draggonhedd]

Never had an issue with them in 15+ years

[@Beyley]

if its like some old DOS boards, it might be possible to upgrade that bus clock crystal from 50 megahertz to 55-60 and still get away with it with a decent bump in speed

[@UpLateGeek]

Wow, only a 50MHz bus speed? That's less than a third what it should be! Now I'm wondering how the bus works on the logic board, and if it's possible to somehow overclock it while leaving the processor at the right speed. I guess the trickiest part would be making sure the PCI bus stayed the same speed, since PCI cards can be pretty sensitive to clock speed.

[@hyoenmadan]

Heh, is interesting tons of logic in later chipsets and memory controllers, go to ensure proper speed frequency dividers for the PCI and slower peripheral buses, so them could work and team properly with the ever increasing memory and CPU base frequencies.

[@amirpourghoureiyan1637]

Sean, you might be able to revive that zip drive by swapping it's internals with an external SCSI version, it looks like an early rev before they miniaturized it for 3.5" slots.

[@ironhead2008]

You probably know this, but PCs can be similarly weird about system requirements. For example, try installing Windows 98 on a system with 1 gig or more of ram. Everything from weird driver issues to not booting/installing period. 2 gigs or more just breaks everything. It's best practices to get everything installed with 512 megs (I've heard 768 is ok, too) , patch the OS, and then max the ram out (4 GB IIRC).

[@umamibeef]

A awesome upgrades! Ancient and slow bus speeds are the biggest bottlenecks to this system.

[@BrainSlugs83]

Divide by zero happens because the drive (or perhaps the CPU) is too fast. The software did a naive bench mark and checked against the milliseconds passed (which is zero) for some random operation. You could try installing it on a slower drive and then doing a block copy to the new one.

[@dennisp.2147]

Does that version of OSX support TRIM? I'd be concerned about the life expectancy of your SSD if not. Then again they're getting pretty cheap.

[@zoomzabba452]

Looks like it wasn't officially added until Snow Leopard

[@MaximNightFury]

Some SSDs have trim built into firmware, though probably not the cheap ones

[@draggonhedd]

This is my favorite project of yours yet. I love this sort of thing. I love the slot load DVD drive too. Please install it! That full size ZIP drive is wild too. As others have said, see how you can overclock the system bus. Its usually a set of SMD jumpers on the mainboard. Hey i don't usually bug folks for this sort of thing in youtube comments, but would you be willing to sell that g3 upgrade card from you if you don't end up using it? The XLR8 one i have in my Powercenter pro doesnt work right.

[@wojiaobill]

that child-like enthusiasm is infectious

[@soknightsam]

This is better than Horsepower Tv on Saturday mornings

[@JoshB4802]

LOL! So true!

[@NiPPonD3nZ0]

The drives are not form a G5, the G5 ONLY has a single 5.25" bay, those are from a MacPro :) and a later one, because the early ones are IDE!

[@Phil-D83]

Jobs should have kept the clone market going. Could have been a windows killer.

[@CasioMaker]

More powaaaaa to the EXTREEEEEEMEEEEE! Nice build, TBH. Imagine having all that power back in the day

[@kirishima638]

Nice job, particularly on that repair! "We're gonna fight back for the mac!"

[@sixteenbitify]

I’m very pleased to see that you were able to get the SATA drive working on your machine in the end. These pre-G3 Macs are so tedious to get working with all the modern peripherals as I have spend months in getting my 9600 to play nicely with modern upgrades. Keep up the good work with the interesting videos. I would love to see Leopard running on your Power Computing machine in the future. -Jorge

[@lukeweeks3470]

Brilliant video Sean! You're keeping me entertained during my 10 day self-isolation due to my sister testing positive for COVD-19 :)

[@ActionRetro]

Wishing your sis a speedy recovery!

[@lukeweeks3470]

@@ActionRetro Thank you :)

[@CybershamanX]

(0:39) I LOVE the two GIANORMOUS RAM modules in the two slots on the right! 😎😋 BTW, are all the modules the same size? Or are they mix and match? I haven't watched the whole video yet, so I don't know if you talk about them. Or did you in another video? 🙂

[@aaronjamt]

Amazing build but you need to stop. This PowerMac has better performance (in some areas) than my daily driver computer. I'm still using spinning rust and Intel Integrated graphics but this 19-something-or-other Mac clone has a full on SSD and "high-end" graphics card. Please stop, this hurts. (Don't ever stop. Loving the series. Keep up the great work!)

[@MrLukealbanese]

Love it!! I'd love to see you upgrade a PowerMac 6500/275 as far as you can go. That's because I've just bought one, its my FIRST ever Mac.

[@FirstLast-we8cb]

This whole vid is "But wait, there is more!" Good stuff and fun watch.

[@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7]

I hate how my modern gaming PC doesn't open this beautifully. I'm jealous.

[@RyanMartinez]

I would love a series on how far you can push old Macs. Name it "Push To The Limit". I would love to see what you can do with an old Macintosh IIsi and how you researched that. Like hunting down old ads for adapters and accelerators, going down the grey web to web stores stuck in the GeoCities era of the internet, and other rabbit hole adventures.

[@Ryan.Lohman]

I'm impressed. I'd be running 9.1 legacy apps and trying early CG, graphics and video editing apps for that clone. Another thing people don't keep in mind is back in 1995 people were running System 7, DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Mandrake Linux. The internet browser experience was limited to Internet Explorer, Netscape, and AOL back then. Anyone remember AppleTalk (Pre-bonjour!)

[@kargaroc386]

note that a lot of those molex-to-sata adapters can catch on fire, so make sure you have one that uses crimped connectors and isn't injection molded.

[@Litepaw]

Hope you don't get sued by apple 👀 This is exactly something they would be petty enough to sue for.

[@DrWakey]

Hey, i still want to see how Unreal Tournament performs on this :D

[@v4grbct4h5y]

Is there a chromium build you could try on this machine? I'm wondering if its javascript engine will give you better results when running modern sites.

Was looking forward to you fixing the CPU and you did! Its always satisfying when you find a fault and fix it. I also suspected benchmark scores like that, I/O is almost always the problem on old computers, the older the worse it gets and its often overlooked.

[@PedroBastozz]

Your channel is so underrated you shouldnt have 28.9k subs you should have 28.9 Million subs.

[@brianandrews5084]

Congrats on getting the 1GHz processor up and running!

[@macinjosh2223]

I have been waiting for this video! Something about running modern(ish) operating systems on old hardware makes me feel happy.

[@maltoNitho]

Like like, like like like. Hehehe. Great set of upgrades! Dang near blew my mind with the SATA card 🤯

[@Stryder_The_Nite_Owl]

Awesome video! I remember upgrading my 7600/132 to a PowerPC G3 300, and using XPostFacto, installing Mac OS X on it. I think it took 10-20 minutes just to boot into OS X. These PCI Macs were very flexible, but also difficult to troubleshoot due to all of the variables, like you encountered. Thanks so much for covering this difficult setup.

[@xmetal280]

Blast from the past! I had several of those at the time and it was a worthy machine that got me through college design classes and allowed me to do freelance web design, leading right to my career today. It was fun seeing you bring this ancient thing back.

[@tuff_lover]

Ah yes, the classic "divide by zero" error, can't go wrong there ;)

[@Firepulser]

Still more informative than the classic blue screen of death.

[@aina449]

how you get this computer

[@remoschramm]

the GIGA MAC is alive 🤘🏻

[@Robdeltonie]

Hackintosh experts: You can't install Mac OS X Tiger on a non-Apple computer from 1995! Action Retro with his PowerWave Mac clone: Hold my beer. I mean, seriously: This is as close to a PowerPC Hackintosh as you're going to get!!

[@onocoffee]

This makes me want to dig out and fire up my old PowerTowerPro225. Power Computing was the innovator in during Apple's Ho-Hum Era.

[@orestes1984]

Hmm... Is the PCI bus faster than the SCSI bus on this computer? Either way, you're going to have a massive bottleneck. I always remember the SCSI bus on these things being pretty fast. But then that was the 90s where I built a 500mhz G4 out of a 7600... Yes the video card was slow back then, on the 7600 you could upgrade the VRAM to 8mb though which fixed that issue. I'm sure the ATI card is much faster than the onboard ATI card though.

[@joetheman74]

"I'm not going to tell you everything I did to get this working. I'll just tell you the final settings that got it working. Now let me proceed to tell you EVERYTHING I DID to get it working."

[@Firepulser]

Fellow Sean, you forgot the Unreal Tournament test! "Heh!" Would not have minded seeing the soldering being done :) maybe next time. Also, looks like the hotswap ssd bay got forgotten as well. I love those things for my DIY servers.

[@Vlamat67]

The DVD drives are not from a G5 tower but from a Mac Pro 4.1 / 5.1;), the only Pro to use DVD drives with Sata bus. In fact, Mac Pro 1.1, 2.1, 3.1 use parallel drives. I say this with great certainty because I have 3 MPs. In your tests it would be interesting to see those machines working with 3D / 2D production software.

[@corradokid79]

I wonder if you remove the SATA PCI card, if that would let you re-enable L2/L3 cache and turn off throttling on the CPU - both of those can easily make the Mac feel dog slow, sadly. The SCSI2SD v5 is also probably pretty slow for a PPC Mac, where the v6 would max out the SCSI bus throughput.

[@cian87]

Have my Powermac 5400 running off a cheap half-length SATA SSD, using the jankiest SATA-IDE adapter I've ever seen - covered in hot glue blobs. Oh to have more than one PCI slot for something faster and more elegant like this.

[@orestes1984]

Some of these upgrade cards were not completely compatible with OS X as some of them ran different PPC chip versions that Apple never ran/supported. It may be an issue of complete incompatibility with OS X. It's a shame most of these vendors are dead so you can't easily access the tech specs for them or their websites. In that case you would have to check what PPC chip version it is and work out if that chip was compatible with OS X. Not all the Newer, Sonett, etc, chips were standard issue Apple some of them came from Motorola/IBM. The more I watch your channel the more I remember things I went through 20+ years ago.

[@paum2]

1st comment

[@fsfs555]

If you want more airflow you should be able to put in a small fan near the speaker behind that expansion card support bracket. I think there's even a 3-pin fan header on the logic board for one. This is one of the machines that usually plays nice with most combo USB/FW cards (assuming they're not VIA chipsets) or other things with PCI bridge chips, so you don't necessarily have to use specific cards here like you do on the fussier Alchemy, Tanzania, or Gazelle-based models. On machines like these I usually like to get a card that offers additional headers so I can use one of those FW and/or USB port slot covers. More ports are more better, after all.

[@turtle14465]

Tiger definitely struggles on this machine, but that's due to software, not hardware. Have you tried browsing the web and twittering from Claszilla under Mac OS 9?

[@m.t.lanimations9206]

What a monster! Well done!

[@muttBunch]

Lmfao. I remember when I was a graphic artist back in 98 is used this exact machine for Illustrator 8 lolololol. Wish I could go back :/ and I also still have my old G4 mirror drive from 2001. Thinking about breaking it out and firing it up

[@axi0matic]

Those DVD drives are from a Mac Pro - the G5 only has a single optical bay. In fact, the early Mac Pro's used PATA for optical drives, so they would be from a 4,1 or later.

[@orestes1984]

You're also dealing with the 32bit file size limiter.... The same as any 32bit Mac. 4GB is the largest recommended disk size for the boot disk on a 32bit Mac. There are hacks that work on the disk side to deal with the issue... or you can just put a 4GB partition on the front of the disk.... As to the bus speed, there should be pins on the motherboard that you can tinker with to overclock the front side bus, but these machines run really hot, so you will want to run a larger heat sink on the CPU otherwise you'll melt the CPU.

[@wojciechszul9472]

Might be faster with less Ram.1Gb could be struggle for this oldtimer to adress.In x86 processors that was common issue.Not sure about G4 and its L1/L2 cache.Worth to try.

[@MegaEyeTV]

I liked your video, but I think your configuration should be use on Mac OS 9. You should get much better results. May be you could find and install BeOS or try Haiku OS 32bit.

[@Vlamat67]

It is very interesting to see such an outdated machine running OSx Tiger. You didn't tell us if the G4 has a 3rd level cache, which would help it a lot with that slow system bus. The problem for the G4 is moving large chunks of ram with that slow bus and system memories that make it wait to turn its thumbs. So I'd say that machine could be better on OS9, BeOs, and MorphsOS

[@kasimirdenhertog3516]

Veritable Frankenstein machine! 🧟‍♂️ Putting the 1GHz G4 in a machine that wasn’t all that in 1995 is like getting a Ferrari and then having to navigate dirt tracks to get around. It defies common sense but it’s so very interesting! 🙃

[@sherbftfy2287]

10:50 "stop your midlife crisis please, sweetie, i'm talking about a SATA PCI card"

[@wdd6864]

Did you find the unofficial patch for 9.2.2 to work on the older PowerPCs? The name of the program is called OS9 helper

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

The 1995 Aopen super socket 7 motherboard of our Pentium 233 mmx we had from 95-2000 or 2001 had 1gb of SD Ram

[@clrlmiller]

Where can the Sonnet firmware for the Sil-3112 card be downloaded? I would LOVE to upgrade my Dual 1.8Ghz QuickSilver with SATA!!!

[@TomaszWiszkowski]

Too bad about the throttling and caches.. this could pretty much be most of the reason it is slow… Thanks for an amazing vid. We have all been looking forward to this! Great job!

[@Kiyoshi_9606]

Formatting it as 7GB was smart. Shows you inched away from that 8GB limit; I wish more people had this mindset when problem solving.

[@CRYPTiCEXiLE]

its very interesting to get a clone mac pc in 1995 running OS X tiger 10.4.11 with a 1GHZ g4 processor card and ssd on a sata controller as none of 1995 computer really even supported that .... its very interesting how powerpc is quite ahead of its time... and honestly very interesting stuff man great video as always... :)

[@ceasar12c]

like comparing a Pentium III at 800mhz, 1 gig of ram, a ati rage card, running windows xp. It's not a beast, but it was during it's time

[@richardestes6499]

I kinda want something exactly like this, but running a current version of Debian with the XFCE interface.

[@jimseibyl5140]

I believe that super drive came out of an original Intel power Mac. The g5 powermac didn’t have a carrier that looked like that.

[@LAUGHINGMANWILL]

No script or some other script blocking add-on might help with light web browsing. I also run adblock along with no flash to speed up my old G3s and G4s.

[@sydneybiscuit]

"Molex to SATA lose all your data" I'd uhhh try to find a better solution, or like hot glue the everloving crap where the wires and plastic meet.

[@michaelouz]

Wait ... is Action Retro Druaga1? Is Alex Jones actually Bill Hicks?

[@brenty4110]

Technically, installing an OEM version of any operating system software media onto any computer other than the one it was originally purchased with, is still considered piracy. BUT I got what you were saying and I know how petty this is 😂

[@eDoc2020]

I haven't tried it yet but I believe a Linux laptop with 1394 ports can emulate a Firewire drive. Perhaps the ability to snapshot disk images would make troubleshooting easier?

[@rhysholdaway]

Now I am curious what the GeekBench score would be with the 500mhz upgrade?

[@esseferio]

Pretty sure this is now as powerful as a Mac Mini M1, honestly :)

[@Melechtna]

Druaga1, is that you? Edit: I wanna mention I typed this before I reached the part of the video he up and said it himself.

[@dustinschings7042]

Mount that awesome SCSI DVD ROM in there! Great job and awesome video!

[@nticompass]

What SATA card do I need for OS 9 support? Also, I have a PowerMac G4, so are there any PCI-X SATA cards that would work?

[@markschwartz9905]

I think action retro should make a hackintosh out of a junk pc, it would make a really cool video. love these vids, keep up the good work!

[@Jackpkmn]

Please replace the molex to sata cable with a crimped one as soon as possible. The injection molded one you used in the video are the source of the saying "molex to sata, lose all your data!"

[@kadevaccari9667]

I am honestly amazed that that clone could run software from 2005 can it run leopard?

[@kiaas]

it's nice seeing them wrap the 9200 in foil, instead of directly in static-unsafe plastic.