It’s been… a trying year, and unfortunately the nonsensical stuff I had planned to do this year fell through. Sadly all I have is this half baked idea, so I’m sorry but I guess it’s better than nothing?

OS X 10.4.1 / Maklar, a lump of coal

While talking about Mach/XNU and of course how obvious with how ‘easy’ it was to build Darwin 0.3 for i386, I had noticed that the original Marklar 10.4.1 deadmoo image had all up and disappeared from the internet. Obviously, that had to be fixed, and I was able to locate a copy, and upload it to archive.org! (merry christmas?!)

Digging around further lead me to this post on macrumors.com, detailing the hardware that Apple used for the Apple Development Transition Kit, and how it was an Intel D915 Pentium 4 board. Neat! So digging around some more and I find this:

An entire setup guide by Mark Hoekstra! (RIP). The big takaway here is that if you want the accelerated graphics for the best Marklar experience you need an Intel board with the 915 chipset. Combing through theretroweb.com, you can find quite a few boards that used this chipset. I didn’t want to spend a lot of pateron money on this, so I thought I could do it on the cheap. I picked up a Dell 4700 motherboard, and some ‘as is’ 915 boards for their CPU’s and RAM.

I really need to get some SATA cables, I had to pull one out of my AMD64 machine to get this thing going. Which leads to the other issue how to boot this thing?!

I won’t touch much onto it as I couldn’t get any custom menus working at all so the usefulness is super limited, but I setup netboot.xyz at home, was able to netboot the board, and dd a deadmoo onto the SATA disk I pulled from the G5 iMac.

On many of these Dell boards there is only one fan jack, so I just made a simple breakout so I could drive some fans & a AIO liquid cooler. Although the dell boards suck when it comes to easy heatsink mounting.

It wasn’t pretty but it did work.

So yeah it booted up into OS X! It’s super fast. One thing that was always interesting is that running 10.4.1 under VMware or Qemu is that there is a lot of blitting ‘bugs’ that artifacts like crazy. And it does it on real hardware. It was pretty neat to see. Unfortunately there was a long term issus with the board that I didn’t really pay attention to the USB ports.

Even OS X noticed the USB problem

Since I was using PS/2 peripherals I thought I could just ignore it.

In order for the accelerated video to work you need the Intel 915 chipset with GMA-900 support.

I do have the PCI-E adapter, the ADD2 card that is apparently needed, but I was copying over some video files and the board suddenly powered off, never to power up again.

So in the end, I just had an hour or so running 10.4.1, and now I have 3 processors, about 4GB of RAM, and a box of dead boards. I did get lucky that the 22 GoodBoyPoints (GBP) did refund me the price of the board. So maybe I’ll tackle it again next year.

BOW the gift that keeps on giving

In BOW news, the excellent Win16 emulator WineVDM had enough updates where BOW starts to run. And yes my hammering of Apache does in fact run! I can’t imagine what to really put on a page to make it interesting, but behold bow.superglobalmegacorp.com.

I was going to try to do some DOSBox using Trumpet PPP to a Linux VM to give it internet access this way, but WineVDM is far easier to get working. YAY.

That about wraps it up

Sorry if you were expecting anything cohesive or making sense, but sadly it hasn’t. I’m not sure if pursuing the Marklar thing is worth it, although it was cool.