Extreme 90's Macintosh Clone Build FINALE!
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- Опубліковано 3 вер 2021
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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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#Macintosh #SoNNeT #PowerComputing - Наука та технологія
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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.
How is squarespace got to do with computers?
Massive effort congratulations.
@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.
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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.
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!
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!
Nice druaga1 reference
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.
@Cardinal Sin Can you change the multiplier on it?
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).
Love the druaga1 reference…missed the weed powered computer lord
Same bro
Used to watch him, it would inspire me to want to make computer videos.
@@peteasmr2952 true….his antics make me indulge retro pc, even though it cost me selling a kidney to get one.
He'll pop back up with some random shit and fried as ever. Always does.
that child-like enthusiasm is infectious
I rescued one of these Power Computing PowerWave Mac clones that was being thrown out with the trash, early 2000s. Kept it in my closet and wondered what do with it and if it was worth keeping. It does look similar to the many discarded, valueless beige PC boxes from the 90s. That is until those of us in the know see the Power Computing PowerWave logo and understand that history. This channel answered a few things of what you can do with it now -- with upgrades -- which is amazing I must say (for a nearly 30 year old pc). I guess that's what brought me here.
Next up you should try to install Windows NT Workstation 4.0 for PowerPC on it
Hah I love this idea
Would be time appropriate too (well, without all the upgrades)
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.
@@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.
@@chu-icehugehard1820 Thank god.
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.
Yup, the old Jazz Jackrabbit issue
@@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
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.
@@AShortBusVet Ah yeah, that's another good point, 32-bit address space + 4 GB of RAM = "0 bytes" of RAM available
@@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.
...I guess this is where coding a native MacOS PowerPC Twitter desktop app would come in handy.
Yes!
This is better than Horsepower Tv on Saturday mornings
LOL! So true!
Remember the adage, MOLEX to SATA, loose all your data. Those power adapters are notorious for shorting out.
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
Never had an issue with them in 15+ years
Nice job, particularly on that repair!
"We're gonna fight back for the mac!"
This whole vid is "But wait, there is more!" Good stuff and fun watch.
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.
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
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.
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
A awesome upgrades! Ancient and slow bus speeds are the biggest bottlenecks to this system.
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!)
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.
Congrats on getting the 1GHz processor up and running!
More powaaaaa to the EXTREEEEEEMEEEEE!
Nice build, TBH. Imagine having all that power back in the day
Formatting it as 7GB was smart. Shows you inched away from that 8GB limit; I wish more people had this mindset when problem solving.
I have been waiting for this video! Something about running modern(ish) operating systems on old hardware makes me feel happy.
This is the type of content I pay my internet bill for. Subscribed.
When I was a kid in the 90s I would covet these mac clones so much! I had a mac iisi from 1990 to 1997! Didn't end up getting another mac, switched to PC in 97... Absolutely awesome video!
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.
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.
Will OS X 10.6 "Impossible Cat" run on this system?
Hahaha you read my mind!
Brilliant video Sean! You're keeping me entertained during my 10 day self-isolation due to my sister testing positive for COVD-19 :)
Wishing your sis a speedy recovery!
@@ActionRetro Thank you :)
Whoa. I admire your attention to these "useless" builds. It's SO satisfying to see... and absolutely admirable. Love it.
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.
What a monster! Well done!
the GIGA MAC is alive 🤘🏻
Wow! Now I know what to do, if I ever stumble upon one of these old towers!
The pinnacle of upgradability. Marvellous!
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.
That is really crazy you got it working !
Way to keep at it! This looks like it was quite a ride
Love your videos. Thanks for the continued excellence in content!
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.
I hate how my modern gaming PC doesn't open this beautifully. I'm jealous.
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).
You sir are nuts and I love it. I love this upgrade series. Looking forward to what you have planned in the future.
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.
Great video!
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!
Amazing man
I love my hakko soldering iron, definitely the best purchase ive made.
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.
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!
Nice video, thank you. Back in the day I had an 9600 with lots of Ram and a G4; Leopard on that felt sluggish compared to a low end G4 Digital Audio a friend of mine had. I sold the upgrade, got an G3/300 and went back to 9.2. It felt better suited and I still had USB/Firewire/IDE from the Tempo Trio (which worked on Leopard btw)
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... :)
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.
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.
Okay well neverfuckingmind apparently lmao
Sean Glad you Got the Sonnet 1Gb Upgrade card Working Very Cool Build Neat To See All The Upgrade Things You Can Stuff into This Beast Tiger Seems To Run Very Smooth Great Build
Thanks Dave!
Ah yes, the classic "divide by zero" error, can't go wrong there ;)
Still more informative than the classic blue screen of death.
Mount that awesome SCSI DVD ROM in there! Great job and awesome video!
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.
i really enjoy this series, this is just beautiful
@@jamiedoesstuff4877 i saw your username on twitter as well lol
Show off and good work👍
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.
To watch mid 2000's OS's on that nice Sony CRT gives me eMac vibes. I know, not the most exciting of machines to many, but I love mine.
Like like, like like like. Hehehe. Great set of upgrades! Dang near blew my mind with the SATA card 🤯
Sean, you absolute nutbar, congratulations on seeing this one through to successful completion! 😮 Amazing accomplishment to actually make this thing actually work! That I/O bottleneck is a bit of a killer for regular usage as a "modern"ish machine, but even so the fact that it can make an attempt at it is just jaw-droppingly cool! You are a legend. An insane legend, but a legend nonetheless.
Your videos make me remeber my first Mac that was a power pc that was 75mhz, I worked at compusa right after graduating hs in 98 , the store was circuit city then campus and now a best buy lol 😆
Your channel is so underrated you shouldnt have 28.9k subs you should have 28.9 Million subs.
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.
Cool!
Amazing
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! 🙃
Very nice. I could never get SATA work in my 9600. It would never boot from the drive. I think i have to look into that again.
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.
When that computer was brand new DVD hadn't even been released yet.
Soooo sick
Cool series. This does remind me back early 2000's I upgraded my Beige G3 to Radeon(Mac Edition), G4(Overclocked to 666MHZ), IDE 133, 768MB and running 10.2 along with 9.2.2 Even a 2nd HDD with YellowDog Linux. I remember it was a tedious project, and everything has to be set just right, and right order and took days of work before I got it to where I wanted it to be. I think we would like to see the gaming results on your upgrade.
Great video as usual. How would the machine perform on 9.1?
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.
I'm looking into getting a hot air rework station for the exact situation you had with your bad solder joint. 😉
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!
One day I'm half expecting to see a glove puppet appear on the screen instead of just a hand. 😁
What SSDs do you recommend?
Yes, the 50 Mhz FSB limitation turns any procesor speeds above 400-500 Mhz pretty much meaningless. Which is also why it performs around a low end G4 tower. But still a huge improvement over the 180 Mhz 604 in the PPC 8500. :-) I put a 400 Mhz G3 upgrade into my 7500 and am pretty happy with the result.
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.
I kinda want something exactly like this, but running a current version of Debian with the XFCE interface.
(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? 🙂
it's nice seeing them wrap the 9200 in foil, instead of directly in static-unsafe plastic.
Hey, i still want to see how Unreal Tournament performs on this :D
"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."
Does the L2/L3 cache re-enable itself after boot?
Pretty sure this is now as powerful as a Mac Mini M1, honestly :)
I recognize that. Not sue what speed mine were last built to. At a point had to switch to Photoshop on PC for work. but definitely that strange case.
Now I am curious what the GeekBench score would be with the 500mhz upgrade?
Oooof that 50MHz bus.... Can it be overclocked? lol
I was waiting for those SSDs to fly out of his hand 😂
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
Amazing haha
can the system buselneck be overclocked?
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.
Looks like it wasn't officially added until Snow Leopard
Some SSDs have trim built into firmware, though probably not the cheap ones
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?