So I got this iMac G5 with a defective display super cheap. Turns out that all these displays fail, so if you find one with a good display it’s either been RMA’d or its going to fail. and quickly.
cheap iMac G5
On the back of the unit there is a video out port, so you can hook up an external monitor, and now you have a chunky G5.. minmaxie.
Sadly the OS was a bit messed up, and had a bunch of user files, and I just wanted to do a fresh install. And the hard disk was LOUD and slow. Naturally I thought I’d install a SSD. I had forgotten what amazing luck I had with the Grandpa G5 back in the day, and did I just get lucky with that?
First I got this super cheap 2-Power SSD.
2-POWER SSD SATA SSD2041A
Of course it didn’t work, nothing shows up at all.
I had this fancy Kingston SSD, surely it’ll work?
Kingston SSDNOW 300 SV300S7A
NOPE, nothing from that either.
So I went ahead and ordered the cheapest Samsung I could find.
Samsung M27PC120HAFU
And yeah, whatever it is the Apple SATA controller does, that annoys all the other brands, the Samsung pulled through.
Sucess with the Samsung PM830 SSD
I did get an iMac G5 10.3 restore CD set, but sadly it didn’t want to work with this iMac. However I did get a deal on a boxed copy of OS X Tiger.
Change the way your Mac works for you
And yeah I was able to do a clean install, and patch it up. I’m still impressed that Apple keeps stuff up like the update servers & all the combined patches. I guess one thing worth mentioning is that the WiFi wouldn’t join the home LAN at all, but the 10.4.11 patch fixed that right up.
I should try some much newer Samsung SSD’s to see if it’s just this one generation, or are they just that much better? Also what about NVMe/SSD bridge?
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I like exploring vintage hypervisors and emulators. In the past I did a whole series on Merge, VP/IX and others. This time I wanted to take look at something a little more exotic – SoftWindows on Alpha OpenVMS. I have in fact installed it a while back but I could never get it properly licensed. I looked everywhere, asked everyone and of course no one had a license pack for this. Fortunately there are two license generators for OpenVMS, pakgen and lmfgen. But how do you find out what is the exact product code and vendor? VMS provides a license debug facility:
Then, when starting an app, you will get an opcom log message with all the required product name, vendor, etc. The rest is easy. For the lazy, here is a complete license pack for SoftWindows:
The install comes with it’s own version of Windows 3.1 plus some additional tools and apps, typical for Insignia products. You can map drives to folders, ports COM and LPT, etc. There are a variety of video modes – Hercules, CGA, EGA and VGA, even 256 colors. The performance is quite decent, however the CPU is pegged at 100%, as you can see in the system monitor. There is a CPU idle detection tool, however it doesn’t seem to work very well. I suspect that perhaps this may be to do with much never OpenVMS version, than the software has been designed for. The SoftWindows has been released in 1994 and not been updated since.
How do you install and run this thing? There is a full installation guide, however since this is just a PCSI file, you can simply use product install:
From a hindsight, it’s ironic how roles have reversed in 30 years. Back then MS-DOS / Windows was a toy OS, running on a toy “personal” computer, emulated in a little window on a “real” computer like DEC Alpha. In modern times you run OpenVMS as a guest VM on a Windows PC.
While I had enjoyed this fully loaded 286, it was getting a bit annoying with all the 32bit limitations I was running into. Frontier Elite was a 32bit program, Obviously no WIndows/386 nor any DooM. It seems that most of the MS-DOS fun I had really was 32bit only. So with this PS/2 model 60, I did the only real thing I could do:
PS/2 80 motherboard
I swapped the motherboard with a PS/2 model 80 board. I had seen this on eBay for a bit of an excessive price, offered 40% of said price, and woke up to having shockingly won the bid. Of course it also means that I need special 32bit RAM to boot the board, because “IBM”.
a 1MB module
I picked up 2 of these 1MB modules, they are 3 chip much like the SIMMS I had used on the PS/2 model 60 motherboard. So these are no doubt parity 256k in each row, and 2 cards giving it 2MB of RAM right off the bat. I got lucky to find these 2 cards in country and at a really reasonable rate, when compared to all the others. They did make 4MB & 8MB cards, but naturally they are incredibly expensive.
Bootup
Luckily for me the board & RAM worked (the board was listed as working), and running setup from the gotek was painless. However for the heck of it, I put in the Boca RAM/2 board to see if it works. It does. It also does the same thing where once the Boca RAM/2 board is configured the setup program only crashes on running it, meaning I need to disconnect the battery backed RAM.
I thought I could avoid setting up the RAM card, but oddly enough until I did so it would not initialize the SCSI card. Oh, sure it showed up in the setup program, saw all my disks and everything, but it would not boot or show up from a boot disk.
And now I have 32bit slots and a 32bit processor! Surely it’s going to ROCK!!!!….?
32bits of disappointment
It’s 0.3% faster.
What the actual FUCK. I mean ok BlueSCSI is great, and we’ve seen it perform faster with the ‘stupid’ card. I can’t imagine paying the $999 MSRP of this faster caching card to find out its slower. Nor the massive upgrade cost of going 32bit to find out its only slightly faster.
Wow.
Just Wow.
LANDMARK 6.00
That said, v86 mode is really cool!
My goto test for v86 is BattleTech the crescent hawk’s inception. I mean if Windows/386 can run this, everything else should be able to. And yeah, 16Mhz is almost enough to run this in a window. It screen tears like crazy and is just slow. But at least it runs!
Warning beeper music!
Although football was capable of doing this full screen in 1987, and Windows/386 could run it in a window in 1987 as well, it wasn’t until 1989/90 that OS/2 could with the much delayed 32bit version. Of course, the divorce happened after Windows 3.0 became such a massive seller, and OS/2 was delayed. again. While I had no issues under 86Box, I had plenty of weird issues on real hardware that seem to magically sort themselves out by running Infocom’s Planetfall first. I don’t know why either.
16Mhz Wing Commander
And luckily there is some difference in running at 16Mhz. Although I haven’t tried EMM386 on/off yet. The 286 had it’s excuse of copying pages in & out of protected mode, and the switch time being so horrific. But the 386 should be instant, only limited by it’s slow bus and I guess 4MB of slow RAM.
But what about DooM?
DooM v1.1 low resolution not quite postage stamp sized
Yes DooM v1.1 runs! I’ll have to try some Fast DooM later to see how much faster it can be! I’d like to think itll be faster but I am not holding out much hope.
Many of the bench stuff I had setup on the 286 to compare to the 386 sadly depend on a math processor. The problem of course is that 80287’s are very cheap for some reason. 80387’s however are not.
eBay special
And the majority of them look like this. I don’t know how on earth people have hundreds of 80287’s to sell at super cheap prices, but 80387’s all seem to have been trampled, or had their inner core’s turned into slag. I will keep a lookout, although knowing my luck it may be cheaper to find another motherboard with a 386/387 paring.
Speaking of OS/2 and weird crashes, I got this fun one from OS/2 trying to run sysinfo:
trap 000e on 038600b1
While I’d seen plenty of trapcodes in my time, but I know less than nothing about reading them. Maybe it’s burred in there somewhere. The one odd thing was the 038600b1 part… Since the 386 is a 16Mhz part, maybe it’s a crazy old version? While it does have the ฮฃฮฃ mark, maybe there is other troublesome 386’s? I really don’t know. Or maybe OS/2 is just really more sensitive to having 2MB 32bit RAM + 4MB 16bit RAM.
Way back in the old times, I had upgraded from a 12Mhz 286 to a 16Mhz 286, and life was great, although I left out of all the 32bit personal computer revolution. After a lot of hard work, I managed to secure a 386sx 16Mhz board with 4MB of RAM. It was awesome although yeah SLOW. Clock for clock, task for task the 386sx was at best the same speed. Sometimes I’d swear the 286 was faster. A few months later though I made the insane trade of some complete in box Infocom games, along with cash and was able to score a 386DX 16Mhz, along with 4MB of 32bit RAM on some massive board. Surely this was going to be great right? I found pretty much the same thing there was no perceivable difference at all. At least back then it was 1992? and the capacitor plague was still decades away, and you could just call the BBS of the motherboard vendor and download the disks if needed (I didn’t need to). It was, frankly, a big letdown after so much ’32/32 is far superior to 32/16′ and here we are again in the future and the SCSI card bears it out, that id basically didn’t matter.
I guess it really comes as no surprise that the 386 does everything the 286 can just better.
So, what have we learned? The PS/2 model 60/80 chassis is the exact same thing. The low clocked 386 chips are super unimpressive, no doubt the magic in the intel family really didn’t hit until the DX2/66 and beyond. Beta versions of software act weird, oh, and that the backup program from MS-DOS 5.00 can actually backup a dual booted OS/2 install & restore it just fine. That was a bigger surprise for me, as the great thing about the BlueSCSI i that I can have so many drives, so I made a backup of the C: OS drive and trashed it quite a bit. Not expecting anything, but yes, a restore actually worked.
I’m not sure why I never heard of this format back in the day when it was relevant. On the surface it sure sounds great, 4.7GB capacity, widespread vendor support, and there is no ‘sessions’ to close, or the entire disc needing to be erased to re-use the disc.
Enter DVD-RAM, it’s not a MO (magnetic optical drive), it works by cooking the disc to flip the bits. But still it’s a read/write optical disc, that uses lasers, what isn’t to love?
Curiosity got the best of me, I paused the video, and bought 2 used discs for a whopping 3.99, and a 4.99 drive. Sure, it’s all cheap but how bad could it be? The discs were used in some DVD video production, and formatted UDF. I used XP to format them as FAT32. First thing is format from the CLI so you can clearly see what is going on.
bad sectors
I did this after the fact, and yeah bad sectors. This is the hint of why everything I tried on this blasted disc at best ‘kinda worked’ but for the most part didn’t. It’s not a little damaged, its totally worthless.
Windows – Delayed Write Failed
Battle Tech is so small it’ll fit with a copy of Windows/386 on a 1.44mb floppy disc, and yet the DVD-RAM struggled with this level of data.
I was going to do some kind of SQL bench thing of how terrible it was, but I couldn’t even create a database.
Everything I tried was non-stop failure.
I then tried the other disc for the hell of it.
Format complete.
4,471,152 KB total disk space.
4,471,136 KB are available.
16,384 bytes in each allocation unit.
279,446 allocation units available on disk.
32 bits in each FAT entry.
Volume Serial Number is 941A-7AA7
And yeah, it worked. All my “simple” tests just worked, and they completed in a fraction of the time the other disc struggled and failed with. Using MS-DOS level file sized stuff it seemed to work great with, however remembering the optical drive they do love to spin up and down, and if the disc is spun down, reading files can take SECONDS… So that kind of sucked.
Formatting the disc takes 30-45 minutes. It is not fast by any stretch of the imagination. During the format you can hear the drive constantly spinning up and down. Clearly you can see why hard disks rock, as they can keep the media spinning at the same rate. I’m not sure if it’s seeking around a lot or what is going on. I have to wonder if it was possible for any drives to maintain a constant speed? Would it have mattered?
I’ve seen outrageous claims on how long the media should last, far too long for it to be viable. When I hear about all the early SEGA CD drives all dying, turns out those lasers don’t last for centuries, there is no way this media is going to be viable at all.
I have to wonder if there really is any validity to this medium. I mean I have 2 discs that were recorded on in 2008, and in 15 years I have a 50% failure rate. Not good.
It’d be really terrible to recommend this stuff for pretty much of anything. The spinup/spindown basically kill any hope of using it for random access.
It’s no surprise that the ever increasing capacity of flash drives, and the economies of scale driving prices of flash down killed any hope for optical media.
The real question is will any 8/16MB flash sticks work in 2024 and beyond?
It’s all so depressing. If you have anything even remotely important on any optical disks, get them over to NVME or hell anything else.
Back in the olden days of when Microsoft had pivoted out of OS/2 in a hurry, I’ve always felt that the common ‘OMF’ objects ought to link for OS/2. But for some reason I never tried. But for some reason I thought I’d try it today.
I first installed Microsoft C 6.0, and set it up for a native OS/2 to OS/2 1.2 setup. This way I get a pure OS/2 include/library directory set. In retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t just use 2 include / library directory sets to far easier target stuff, without dealing with changing the default names, and making linking an all around living hell.
So the first thing to do is to tell QuickC for Windows to default to the OS/2 include directory (turns out it wont link anyways). Compiling is nothing special. When setting up the project you’ll need a DEF file, I use this simple one:
NAME QCO2 WINDOWAPI
PROTMODE
CODE PRELOAD
Nothing to it!
I tried to fight the Windows linker, but it figures out what you are doing and won’t do it. But can you manually link? Well QuickC for Windows does include a DOS linker, and it’s oddly enough newer than the one for Microsoft C 6.0!
C:\proj\o2>msdos \WIN16APP\QCWIN\bin\link hi.obj
Microsoft (R) Segmented-Executable Linker Version 5.15
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1991. All rights reserved.
Run File [hi.exe]:
List File [NUL.MAP]:
Libraries [.LIB]: doscalls SLIBCE
Definitions File [NUL.DEF]: qco2.def
C:\proj\o2>msdos hi.exe
This program cannot be run in DOS mode.
Manually invoking the linker wasn’t all too hard, just answer the 30 questions. I did set the LIB environment variable so it picked up the libraries just fine. And yes, it created my OS/2 binary no problem!
And as you saw from above, yes it does run!
I do suppose the graphical editors would have been nice some 30 years ago, but in today’s era, sadly it doesn’t matter. QuickC for Windows won’t run under WLO, so this prevents it being a backdoor GUI/Protected mode compiler for OS/2. It’s a shame too as at least running under Windows 3.0, QuickC for Windows is WAY faster than using Microsoft C 6.00 in either read mode, protected mode with smartdrive.. I’m not sure what the deal is. Even with the advanced caching SCSI controller.
I thought with this iMac G5, the least I could do is make a quick video of how to do it.
Low effort video
I’ve done the hard work of converting the eMac 9.2 install CD to read-writeable, updating the system folder, then converting that back to a read-only image so the MacOS install can happen.
I just scored a G5 iMac for ยฃ20 with a damaged panel. It doesnโt bother me at all as Iโm not going to use it for anything serious, Iโm just wanting something mainstream.
I did want one thing which was KOTOR.
So I looked up eBay, and yeah turns out itโs a collectors thing?
ยฃ147!! No way!
I saw this for far less, the Star Wars Mac Pack!
vBut at the flip side had this ominous warningโฆ.
Intel only
I thought Iโd just try the disc anyway.. nothing to lose?
Universal!?
and yeah, not only is KOTOR is PPC, but yes it does run on OS X 10.4!
PPP KOTOR
granted itโs on steam, gog and of course available for pretty much anything modern. And sure yeah, it was originally PC/Xbox, but for some odd reason I’m feeling nostalgic for that last gen PPC.
So after basically facing defeat, I thought I’d give Linux on the PS3 another shot. Last time things just didn’t work for some reason, and although I could boot Linux from the USB, I couldn’t get it to partition the hard drive. And running from USB 2.0 is just insanely slow.. Especially when it’s trying to run X11.
Loading is a bit weird requiring you to load, then entering safe mode, re-installing, then recovering again.
One silly thing to note, is that although a USB keyboard got me through the majority of this, you ABSOLUTELY NEED a PS3 controller to his the PS button to continue in safe/recovery mode. I ended up buying a new controller for ยฃ12 on eBay. Used ones were selling for the comparable price, so why buy something with ick on it? Sadly, this did double my budget to ยฃ24.
But rest assured just keep pushing through.
Although my FLASH was clearly re-partitioned, with it not changing as I had expected the recovery boot didn’t work, so I had to jump the instructions, and install REBUG_TOOLBOX_02.03.02.MULTI_.16.pkg and select boot into safe mode from there, and re-apply the firmware.
over and over….
But eventually success!
You ABSOLUTELY need a PS3 controller to hit the PS button here!
Finally on enough reboots, I got to the setup screen for a clean system!
Re-installing the toolboox took me to repartitioning the flash (again), powering off, then loading petitboot for NOR flash (well mine is NOR), powering off, then prepping the USB, and this time booting with the ‘use current’ option.
While I had busybox & running from initrd/USB before so far so good, nothing looks different.
HOWEVER:
This time the create_hdd_region.sh actually did what it should do! Excited I rebooted back to ‘gameos’ and checked the system status
finally a partitioned PS3!
I’m not sure why it kept failing before, but this time it did what it should have done. Obviously, I screwed up something before, and I’m not sure what.
Booting back to the USB drive, Red Ribbon booted up in X11, allowing me to run run the installer.
The volumes by default are fine.
It does give the ability to set locale, region, and machine name. I don’t know why but I tried it twice and it failed every time.
So I just hit defaults, just setting input & language to EN-us for American English in Alaska. I mean why not. I gave up on just fighting and just let it go with defaults.
And with that I had the PS3 up and booting!
Sadly it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, I was noticing some important software like m4, unzip, gdb, autoconf/automake/libtool file, htop/ncurses to say a few!
Compiling however lead me to kernel crashes & panics.
Stackframe panics!
Eventually it’ll hard lock.
I speculate its probably my PS3. The optical drive doesn’t work so I’ve never played a game on it, or done anything intensive until compiling software. I did find that disabling the swap space to video ram stopped it from crashing. As a matter of fact I disabled a bunch of things to get back some performance.
In the /etc/rc2.d just rename the S*** to K*** for the following to disable all of this stuff..
So yeah, not sure why I had goofed this up so bad, but in the end I got what I wanted, a big endian machine on a budget. What is interesting about this Red Ribbon thing, is that the kernel looks 64bit, but it’s all a 32bit userland. I don’t know if it matters so much. The place to get deb’s is long gone, so I guess Id have to find something with source this was based off of to build the missing stuff, or just keep going on, and building from source. I’m find with either, but I don’t need it as a desktop so my motivation is already waning. I can’t imagine even trying to use a 256MB PS3 as a desktop. It’s just pain.
Dumping nice ‘desktop’ services conserves a great deal of RAM
Again I’m not sure why the swap to video ram thing kills the PS3, but I can live with avoiding it.
A talk from Dave Probert on the design of the NTOS kernel. Shame Microsoft didn’t put this anywhere people could have found this 20+ years ago, just as a shame they never opened up NTOS like they did that even tepid Windows Research Kernel. It goes without saying this is the ‘Linux is a cancer’ generation, with the crazed idea that looking at Linux would contaminate Windows.
So I saw this controller for sale for 20. I figured that there ought to be a way to hack it to do something useful so it may be fun. Turns out all it needs is a re-flash of new firmware and it’ll become a generic controller.
You might be slightly scared that the browser can talk directly to bluetooth devices, including the unlock, and re-programming the controller.
And yeah after that it’s all unlocked and good to go!
Not sure if it matters all that much, but for anyone wanting either a controller on the cheap, or if you bought into Stadia when it was a thing (did anyone remember other than the announcement and the expected cancellation?).
I guess it’s nice that google is providing an unlock service but I’m sure that won’t be around forever, so yeah. yay.
