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Originally Posted by mym6 The newer drives will usually have a jumper to set them into 1.5 mode (the older mode) and should still work with that card. It takes me a while, but I usually get it finally when it's spelled-out for me That's why the card is a bit cheaper (than say, the Sonnet Tempo). The Sonnet is listed as 3 Gb/s so I assume it would not require any drive modification to work. Unfortunately, the Sonnet is not bootable. As far as I can tell. Anyway, thanks for the info.
Updated Quicksilver machines, officially named Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver 2002), were introduced on January 28, 2002 with 800 MHz, 933 MHz and dual 1 GHz configurations. This was the first Mac to reach 1 GHz. Again, the low end 800 MHz model did not include any level three cache.
And just in case I still do not get it. Will using that card and the Hitachi drives set to 1.5 mode get me the data transfer rates I'd need to do HD TV storage/retrieval from cable (say, EYE TV)?
In fact, would Parallel ATA (IDE) drives be able to do that transfer rate? I already have a four-socket IDE/PATA PCI card for my G4. Originally Posted by chefklc it's not a jumper issue with those particular drives, it has to do with SSC being enabled on those early Hitachi drives and conflicting with that Firmtek/Seritek card. Read the OWC FAQ you linked to about it.and an old PATA drive over dog slow USB 2 can handle high def from EyeTV, so you won't have any trouble with any SATA drive connected to that PCI card.
I recommend you go with a card that is bootable. Thanks chefklc (btw: my mind still reads your handle as cheflck. I read the disclaimer, but then OWC goes on to say that all the Hitachi drives they offer 'comply with this SSC specification', which could mean they work, but also could mean they don't. So I will call them before I buy to be sure of their definition of compliance. I'm still looking at other drive mfrs because of the price change, and no others will have a problem.
I do plan to get that card, though. A last (hopefully ) question. Should I just stick with PATA? As I said, I have an Ultra ATA-133, 4-input PCI card. I also have IDE drives of 80GB, 160GB, 400GB, & 500GB that I could run off it (actually, as you said a while back, I could just run them on the Quicksilver's bus.
But it's only a 66 Mb/s I believe). My plan was to go with SATA for upgrading the total storage ability (since the 500GB is already full) and they are newer/cheaper.
If you're buying new SATA Hitachi drives from OWC that means you should be safe.if you already have some Hitachi SATA drives, those are the ones you want to check. I think you can go either way with a card and drives-especially since you already have a fast PCI card for PATA drives. Some folks have a bunch of decent sized PATA drives and specifically hold on to a G4 tower in order to fill it up with them and serve content.my two MDDs don't have any SATA drives inside them yet, and I'm actually looking at SATA and eSATA PCI cards at the moment as well. I've been accumulating SATA drives for a while, so far they're in external enclosures and on hot-swappable trays, and I'm just looking ahead a bit. This is your opportunity, as well. As usual it will come down to budget, the kind of performance you need, what kind of scalability and flexibility you want to have, etc.
But those PATA drives, inside your Quicksilver, on its internal bus or that PCI card, accessed over gigabit/n wireless will probably be plenty fast for movies and high def EyeTV recordings. Originally Posted by chefklc if you're buying new SATA Hitachi drives from OWC that means you should be safe.if you already have some Hitachi SATA drives, those are the ones you want to check. I think you can go either way with a card and drives-especially since you already have a fast PCI card for PATA drives. Some folks have a bunch of decent sized PATA drives and specifically hold on to a G4 tower in order to fill it up with them and serve content.my two MDDs don't have any SATA drives inside them yet, and I'm actually looking at SATA and eSATA PCI cards at the moment as well.
I've been accumulating SATA drives for a while, so far they're in external enclosures and on hot-swappable trays, and I'm just looking ahead a bit. This is your opportunity, as well. As usual it will come down to budget, the kind of performance you need, what kind of scalability and flexibility you want to have, etc. But those PATA drives, inside your Quicksilver, on its internal bus or that PCI card, accessed over gigabit/n wireless will probably be plenty fast for movies and high def EyeTV recordings. Thanks again!!!
Decisions, decisions. Last night I ordered up the HD Homerun and EyeTV. I picked the HD Homerun because it was dual tuner, network based and would work with DVR software on any platform.
I use a mix of Linux, Windows and Mac at home and I really liked that I could use any of them at anytime. There are a couple of other things I think I'll need at this point. I need a way to get my MDD hooked up to an older TV using either composite or coax. I know that converter boxes exist but for the price it might make more sense to find a compatible video card with svideo/composite out, if one exists for the MDD. I'll also need an IR box/software but I am already looking at the mira from twistedmelon. EDIT: If OS X supports NVidia cards, will any old NVidia AGP card work?
Just a follow up. I'm finding that the MDD just can't quite handle OTA HDTV. It is showing probably less than 20fps. I'm also finding that the storage requirements are incredible at 7.4GB per hour. I'm sure many who record HDTV a lot already knew that but it is a tad more than I thought it'd be. My 'free TV' is getting more and more expensive!
I've been using the setup on my mini (1.83Ghz C2D, 2.5GB, 80GB) a lot more than on the MDD. I'm unable to watch live TV if I've set the archive to a network share. I get one second pauses a few times per minute. I've tried both a Linux SMB/AFP server as well as using my MDD as the server, neither work well. I may try configuring EyeTV to just use memory for the live tv buffer. EyeTV is pretty decent but I do have a couple of complaints that I'll probably bring up in their forums. One is that if the live tv buffer runs out (default is 2GB) then you simply lose video.
MythTV just saves the file off and starts a new buffer, you never lose anything. Also, if you're watching live tv and decide you want to record the show, it records from the point you hit the record button, not the whole live buffer. I could be wrong but I believe if I choose to record the show from the program guide while I'm watching it will save the whole program. Not a huge deal, just something to remember. I'm also finding that the storage requirements are incredible at 7.4GB per hour. I'm sure many who record HDTV a lot already knew that but it is a tad more than I thought it'd be. My 'free TV' is getting more and more expensive!
Well said, but the video storage issue isn't new-rip a dvd with intact menus and special features and that VIDEOTS folder is often just under 8 GBs. Even without recording any TV the home theater enthusiast quickly faces a storage crunch just by becoming a more voracious consumer. That brings budget into the equation, but that's also where better codecs and good transcoding software comes into play-after you watch your OTA shows that first time, if you want to archive them, you do have some good options to reduce file size. My mac mini is now also unable to playback HDTV Well, your 1.83 C2D mini is right at the cusp of being able to play back HDTV without occasionally dropping frames-and I don't think it's powerful enough to use the best EyeTV deinterlacing setting, I think a 2.0 C2D is the current tipping point-but, it can certainly 'play back HDTV.' If you're still using the stock 80 gig drive, you might appreciate an internal drive upgrade-for me, all-around EyeTV performance using a Macbook as 'extender' picked up noticeably after swapping a Hitachi 7K200 inside.) But, there's something about your unique network setup and your archive that's still not quite right. Unfortunately, I can't be much help to you: I have 4 EyeTV tuners around the house at the moment and in 4+ years I haven't once tried to watch 'live' TV through them or start a recording from the live TV buffer.
For us, Leopard sharing and EyeTV's built-in archive sharing has basically been flawless with regard to playing back recordings over gigabit between Macs. Originally Posted by chefklc Well said, but the video storage issue isn't new-rip a dvd with intact menus and special features and that VIDEOTS folder is often just under 8 GBs. Even without recording any TV the home theater enthusiast quickly faces a storage crunch just by becoming a more voracious consumer. That brings budget into the equation, but that's also where better codecs and good transcoding software comes into play-after you watch your OTA shows that first time, if you want to archive them, you do have some good options to reduce file size.
I rip a few DVDs so I am aware of the storage requirements, but I was caught off guard by the amount of space the Olympics opening ceremony took. The shows I've recorded in the past using Myth would use less per hour, but obviously the opening ceremony was higher quality.
The downer for me is my network troubles. Originally Posted by chefklc And from over in the Linux forum you wrote: Well, your 1.83 C2D mini is right at the cusp of being able to play back HDTV without occasionally dropping frames-and I don't think it's powerful enough to use the best EyeTV deinterlacing setting, I think a 2.0 C2D is the current tipping point-but, it can certainly 'play back HDTV.' If you're still using the stock 80 gig drive, you might appreciate an internal drive upgrade-for me, all-around EyeTV performance using a Macbook as 'extender' picked up noticeably after swapping a Hitachi 7K200 inside.) I wrote that because the Mythfrontend for Mac went from being able to play HDTV just fine to being unable to play it. There are some issues (in my mind) with MythTV being a bit inefficient.
My laptop (AMD Turion 1.6Ghz, 1.25GB) also suffers from the same issue. When I originally toyed with OTA HDTV with my Linux server as a backend and the laptop running Ubuntu with mythfrontend I was able to play HDTV just fine.
Recent releases of MythTV are no longer able to play HDTV on the laptop. The mini suffers from the same problem. Now with the HDHomerun and the ability to stream directly from it into VLC my laptop is able to play HDTV just fine when using a wired network. With EyeTV, my mini is able to play HDTV and I even watched a large portion of the opening ceremony on it, it never skipped a beat so long as I was recording locally. Originally Posted by chefklc But, there's something about your unique network setup and your archive that's still not quite right.
Unfortunately, I can't be much help to you: I have 4 EyeTV tuners at the moment and in 4+ years I haven't once tried to watch 'live' TV through them or start a recording from the live TV buffer. And for me, Leopard sharing and EyeTV's built-in shared archives has basically been flawless playing back recordings over gigabit between Macs. So you're saying you never watch live TV? Just record and watch later? If I did that then putting my archive on a network would probably work better. It.appears. that something about my network just can't handle the multiple streams.
Maybe it is a bad gigabit switch or some other goofy thing. Anyway, Live TV for me is important and will become a lot more important once shows start up again. My little boy goes to bed about the time the shows start, but I like to watch them that night yet if I can so I end up being about 30 minutes behind live. It's important for me at least to be able to timeshift. My little boy goes to bed about the time the shows start, but I like to watch them that night yet if I can so I end up being about 30 minutes behind live. It's important for me at least to be able to timeshift. Understood: personal preferences will always impact how we approach our home theater hobby.
In our case-just my wife and I and no kids-I don't think I've ever found myself in that situation-where I've felt compelled to watch something '30 minutes behind live' instead of just pulling something else from the archive. It's kind of liberating, actually, but I realize that approach isn't for everyone. Some sporting events are an obvious exception, I'll watch them live-but just about everything else gets queued up in the 'big pile o' content' to watch later. As an example, I was really excited about the Julie Taymor 'Magic Flute' on PBS-HD back in April, but what was most important to me was getting a good recording of it with my EyeTV500. I still haven't watched it critically all the way through yet, though, but will at some point. During the year, something weekly on the networks and 'must-see' in high def like 'House' gets recorded-and it usually gets watched sometime before the next episode is recorded. But, we also save entire seasons of things up as well, and then blow through them later.
We're going through the first season of 'Burn Notice' right now, that was recorded last year, while we're recording the 'current' second season on USA-HD (that's over firewire, not EyeTV.) I have the fourth season of 'Battlestar Galactica' in high def queued up and waiting, and am hoping I get that in before the Fall. There's so much good TV, especially if you start dipping into the UK/ITV/BBC stuff, that we've always found it impossible to stay current.
So, with a couple of TBs of storage, and a bunch of Macs and EyeTV tuners around the house, we just stopped trying to. (For us, this is where our two MDDs really come into play: to record over firewire and USB, to rip dvds, then store and serve up all that content to the Intel Macs at our HDTVs.). Originally Posted by chefklc if you're buying new SATA Hitachi drives from OWC that means you should be safe.if you already have some Hitachi SATA drives, those are the ones you want to check. I think you can go either way with a card and drives-especially since you already have a fast PCI card for PATA drives. Some folks have a bunch of decent sized PATA drives and specifically hold on to a G4 tower in order to fill it up with them and serve content.my two MDDs don't have any SATA drives inside them yet, and I'm actually looking at SATA and eSATA PCI cards at the moment as well. I've been accumulating SATA drives for a while, so far they're in external enclosures and on hot-swappable trays, and I'm just looking ahead a bit.
This is your opportunity, as well. As usual it will come down to budget, the kind of performance you need, what kind of scalability and flexibility you want to have, etc.
But those PATA drives, inside your Quicksilver, on its internal bus or that PCI card, accessed over gigabit/n wireless will probably be plenty fast for movies and high def EyeTV recordings. Related question. Is there any reason (other than physical space. I believe there's room) I couldn't add double-drive trays in each slot on the bottom of my Quicksilver, a second SATA PCI card, and have 6 (or more, actually) SATA drives in the one Quicksilver? Is there any reason (other than physical space.
I believe there's room) I couldn't add double-drive trays in each slot on the bottom of my Quicksilver, a second SATA PCI card, and have 6 (or more, actually) SATA drives in the one Quicksilver? The practical limits you may have to be careful coming up against would be 1) the internal power supply-how many additional drives could be accommodated without exceeding spec and 2) the internal temperature-as you add more drives, how hot would it get inside? I faced a similar choice, and instead of putting more drives inside an MDD I went with adding a four drive external FW800 enclosure outside-it's very speedy over gigabit, has its own robust power supply and good fans. Since dual MDDs were prone to overheat anyway I'm better off with all that outside the case.
The best place to find out about creative mods to older Power Macs is xlr8yourmac, plus the official Apple discussion forums are pretty active, since folks tend to hold on to these models. I have two TVs that work perfectly at 1080p - each connected to a mac mini. Our main TV is a Samsung LN-46A540 and it works perfectly at 1080p. Incidentally, this is basically the same as 2 other Samsung TVs - the LN-46A550 & LN-46A530. Make sure you are using p.mode 'Just Scan'. I also have a Panasonic TH-42FD18 and it works too. For this TV, make sure overscan is on, then go into menu picture advanced then put the display mode on -1.
That may not be the right name for the mode, but I am at work. I will edit this when I get home. Added to help someone search for these TVs LN46A540 LN46A550 LN46A530 TH42FD18.
(I realise that the Power Mac is a computer designed for personal use, but I’m going to refer to computers with Intel CPUs that usually run Windows as PCs for this page. ) In early 2016, I took a shining to the Power Mac G5, and considered getting one second hand. These were Apple’s top of the range computers from 2003 to 2006, and were pretty much the last PowerPC CPU based systems that the company made. Unlike their iMac desktop computer range, this is a proper sized tower computer with all the usual internal sockets for expansion cards and RAM. Strangely though, unlike most PCs, the CPUs are not upgradeable. Because the G5 CPUs create so much heat, there are 9 cooling fans! (2 for the power supply, 4 for the CPU, 1 at the front for the card slots, 1 near the hard drives, and another next to it, which seems to cool the backside of the logic board / motherboard.
If you have a different video card with a fan, then you would have 10.) Later models used liquid cooling, but this was a little unreliable. Some people complained of leaks, which no doubt destroyed several of these systems. The fastest was a double dual-core CPU system of 2.5 GHz. Although there was also a straight dual CPU system of 2.7 GHz as well.
The slowest Power Mac G5 was a 1.6 GHz single core system. Apple only ever made the iMac and Power Mac systems with a G5 CPU. There were no laptop computers produced, due to the heat issues. The company retained the PowerPC G4 in their iBooks and PowerBooks up until the transition to the Intel CPUs.
“I’m having trouble with my G5. How much RAM do I need to properly run OS 9.6?” Says Kate in. In reality, no G5 CPU based Mac will run Mac OS 9 at all, although there is an unofficial firmware hack that will apparently allow the Power Macs to run it. Plus I think that movie was made before the G5 based computers were even made.
Although I’m not 100% sure. (Also from what I read, Mac OS 9 can only use 1 CPU.) The highest revision of Mac OS X you can run on these is Mac OS X Leopard, because it was the last OS made for PowerPCs. Because Leopard doesn’t support Classic, I’ve installed Mac OS X Tiger as well. (The 1st G5 Power Macs had Jaguar.) One issue caused by switching between the operating systems, is Spotlight’s desire to index the drives again, when you change. So you pretty much need to disable Spotlight entirely, unless you can deal with everything chunking up for about 5 minutes.
I got tired of it, and moved exclusively to Easy Find 4.5, which is more powerful anyhow. By putting a file in the root directory of your drive called “.metadataneverindex,” you can prevent Spotlight from searching the drive partitions. You need one for both the Tiger and Leopard partitions though. As I already have an Intel CPU based Mac, I wanted to branch out further into older Mac programs, but still with enough grunt to run newer stuff. I seemed to be picking up a lot of PowerPC software, and while I could run it on my iMac G4, I wanted something with a bit more oomph, especially for iDVD.
Video cards started with a nVidia GeForce FX 5200 on the initial G5 computers, with an AGP slot. On my one, it’s a PCI Express type nVidia GeForce 6600 with 128 MB of VRAM. Although I think you could get an ATi Radeon 9600 too, also with 128 MB of RAM. The Radeon has 2 DVI output sockets, but no composite video out, like my PC version. Apple did make an adaptor to allow regular video output however. The sound processor is built onto the motherboard, and there are sockets for it on the front of the case, along with a USB and 400 Mb per second FireWire socket. There is also a 800 Mb per second one on the back.
You can put up to an incredible 16 GB of RAM into this particular model of Power Mac G5, which would have been insanely huge back at the end of 2005. I decided to go with 2 GB, which should be enough for what I’m running. You can put 2 hard drives into the computer in total, although there are 3rd party adaptors to allow you to put more internal drives in there. Now, can you use the new AF drives? Well, I am, so it seems so! Unless my drive is clever enough to know how it’s being used.
It’s a 931 GB Seagate brand. (1 TB for them, but it’s really 931 GB that you actually get.) I don’t know about these with Mac OS X Jaguar though, which the original Power Mac G5s had, but it seems to be fine with Tiger and Leopard, and any G5 Mac will run them. I can’t speak for any differences in the electronics that communicate with the drives between Power Mac G5 revisions though. If there even are any. The CPU intake fans. These disconnect to allow for access to the RAM and button battery. It’s also good for cleaning.
Opening the case is a breeze. You simply lift a lever on the back and can then remove the side panel. Why more PC manufacturers didn’t take this approach, I have no idea.
So top marks for a well thought out case. Speaking of the case, you can see why it has all those air holes, what with all the internal fan-ery. It was also smartly designed for when you needed to lift it.
The obvious back and front handles are a great idea, which seem to carry on from the Power Mac G4. And you really need these, because it weighs a lot! Probably around 21 kg. Unlike the G4 and G3 Power Macs, the logic board / motherboard is not on the side of the case.
It’s inside like how most PCs have it, except on the reverse side. As such, the video card, and any other cards you have for it, go up the other way too. If you expect to use Photo Booth, and make lots of silly faces of yourself, you will need to buy a separate, compatible camera, obviously. You can also plug a microphone in the back if you have one. The computer also has a big speaker inside, like most other Macs, because you have to have the big start-up “BONG!” noise. You will also hear it through whatever other audio system you have plugged into the audio output socket at the same time.
You will also need a 3rd party remote control and sensor for it, if you’re desperate enough to want to use Front Row. Because yeah, there is no infra-red sensor anywhere. (You may also need to see if you actually have Front Row installed too!) If you have a like me, or other similar device, you can easily and instantly turn this computer into a video capturing machine! IMovie and iDVD for me, are one of the best perks of Mac OS X. Today (7 March 2017) I got a DVI to HDMI adaptor, to output video into my. I had heard stories of some people having issues with Macs and the HDCP malarkey of the HDMI, but this didn’t seem to be an issue at all, since the Gefen scaler doesn’t support it. In Mac OS X Tiger, the resolutions seem to be limited more to the standard computer monitor types.
640 × 480 pixels, 800 × 600, 1024 × 768, 1600 × 1200 and so forth. In Mac OS X Leopard however, both the NTSC and PAL resolutions and frequencies are listed.
(720 × 480 pixels at 60 Hz and 720 × 576 pixels at 50 Hz respectively.) So, perhaps Apple made some improvements to this part of Leopard. You can also rotate the display in 90° increments as well. Something else which Tiger doesn’t allow for.
So if you want to plug these computers into a TV with a HDMI socket or a similar scaler like mine, this is an option. Apple did make a composite video out adaptor for the Power Mac G5s as well, but if the quality’s like the one I have for my MacBook, then I’m glad I went for this adaptor instead. (You will need a male DVI to female HDMI type. Or a cord with the appropriate plugs. I already had the cord part, you see.) According to Apple’s web site in February 2006, these computers started at $3199 when they were new, but just over 10 years on, and I got mine for $425, which included free postage. That’s pretty much the same price I paid for my iMac G4 with postage costs, 7 years ago.
(2009.) Start-up time into Mac OS X Tiger is 48 seconds, and 1 minute and 13 seconds for Leopard, which is pretty painful, really. Out of the 2, I’d probably have to say that Tiger is the better looking, although the pseudo reflection effect on the Dock in Leopard is pretty neat. Plus the transparent & blurred effect on some of the windows. (What I mean by the “pseudo” reflection, is that while it does make a reflection of other windows and Dock icons, they appear transparent in a way that would not occur in reality.) Although it should be obvious, you don’t need to restart your computer every time you choose to change the startup drive / partition.
You can set it, and then turn off, if you’re actually finished. Then the next time you start up, it will boot into the new choice you made. (You can hold down the Option key once the computer’s been turned on to choose what drive / partition you want to boot from, but it will not permanently change to this choice.
It’s also painfully slow to start up in this manner.) Here are a few screen shots of some of the sexy interface. With 2 GB of RAM, the Power Mac doesn’t mind at all, loading up multiple programs. Although when I tried to load a big wad simultaneously, the 2 main Corel programs snuffed it. But if you do it slowly, they’ll be fine. Here I’m running Cog, Firefox 2, Corel Photo-Paint 11, Corel DRAW 11, Art Of Illusion 2.5, iCal, Open Office 3.3, TextEdit, EasyFind 4.5, Activity Monitor, Camino 2.1, DVD Player, HyperEngine-AV, Hills, MPEG Streamclip, Netscape 9, VLC 0.95 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Up until U.T. 2004 was loaded, I still had just on 1 GB of RAM free.
The weather widget will give you predictions about how hot it’s going to be and what the weather’s up to. This is all in °C, since it doesn’t say that, but you can change it to °F as well. It still seems to be able to retrieve the data from wherever it comes from, even though the O.S.
Is over a decade old now. So far, I’ve yet to see any other GUI that can top the beautiful look of Tiger. Apart from maybe some of the earlier renditions of Mac OS X. The glossy buttons, the watery looking scroll bars and pretty much all the controls are so appealing. It makes you wonder what Microsoft and Apple were thinking in downgrading the look of their operating systems now, rather than trying to make something even more amazing.
The Braun T1000 Weltempfaenger (World Receiver) Radio from 1963. It was said that this design by Dieter Rams inspired Sir Jonathan Ive in the case design of the Power Mac G5. (This is my own photo by the way — I didn’t nick it.) With that said though, customisation options for the interface are pretty slim, with only aqua and graphite colour schemes, but luckily they’re both pretty awesome anyway. You can get 3rd party software to change the look of the UI though, but that’s always a b.tch. One area where Mac OS X Tiger is more consistent than Leopard, is in terms of remembering what Finder windows you had open. Often when you come back to Mac OS X Leopard, including on my MacBook, all the windows you had open last time will be gone again, which is a bit of a pain at times.
In Tiger, they always seem to come back, and exactly where you left them as well. Unlike Windows, you can’t change your mouse cursors in an easy fashion either. You can move the Dock to the sides of your monitor, rather than the bottom though. It can’t be put at the top though, because of the Menu Bar. Even though a lot of Mac users would frown at the idea, you can run Windows via Virtual PC 7.
Earlier versions of the emulation software will not work, because they relied on the previous generations of the PowerPC CPUs’ little endian support, which is absent from the G5. These newer CPUs are big endian only. Although, apparently the G5s do almost double the amount of instructions per clock cycle as the G4s, (— some site said 38 vs 20, but I’m not sure if this is totally correct —) and their faster speed should theoretically boost performance in this area. The Low End Mac web site however, reports that Windows XP is sluggish in Virtual PC 7 and not suitable in any way for games. Although they were running it on a 800 MHz G4 iBook, which is a lot slower than my G5. Microsoft however, were able to get the original XBOX emulated on the XBOX 360, although we’re talking about a triple core 3.2 GHz PowerPC CPU, which is faster than any Power Mac, apart from maybe the parallel processing power of the double dual core 2.5 GHz model.
I don’t intend to get into all the technical details of working all that out, anyhow. Needless to say, you’ll no doubt want to stick to a PC running Windows natively if you want to play the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion, even though those games could run well on this hardware if they’d been written for the different CPU. Unreal Tournament 2004 runs okay, but it only seems to support one CPU core, and you’d probably want a better video card than the one my Mac came with.
Getting back to the hardware side of things, while a lot of people have no doubt dumped these computers, turned them into grills, tables and other furniture, they still have plenty of oomph for many tasks. Word processing of course requires barely any grunt, and the same can be said about browsing the web, editing pictures and listening to music. Processing videos and rendering 3D scenes of course, needs something quite beefy. But I’ll chuck a bit of stuff that way on mine anyhow.
And as these are the last of the PowerPC Macs, anything you run on it that gives a “real time” experience should be pretty good, because there is nothing much better in terms of PowerPC CPU hardware. Well, the “quad” 2.5 GHz model would be the mightiest. So games for this hardware are going to be pretty sweet, unless of course the developers expected Apple to continue the PowerPC range in something faster. In any case, my main computer, which I use for nearly everything, is probably only half as grunty, so for me, the Power Mac is around my 3rd most powerful computer. Even though I don’t use either, the Mac also includes Airport and Blue Tooth hardware. Although I think it may have been optional.
(Airport has nothing to do with the places planes land; it’s a cordless networking system which uses radio waves.) It had no trouble picking up one of the neighbours’ networks. Installing Tiger was a bit of a git. The version I got was actually too old for this hardware, and it caused a kernel panic trying to boot from the disc. These operating systems are expensive, so it was lucky I had another solution! I already have a bootable backup of my iMac G4’s drive, and so I was able to use this to boot the G5 with a newer revision of Tiger.
I could then run the installer from inside this environment and tell it where to install to. After it had done that, I ran the updater, which also lets you choose where to install to, and I was then in action. Could you imagine Windows letting you pull that off? (Actually I’m not sure if it would.) Unless somebody comes up with a work-around, you can only boot from a hard drive with an Apple Partition Map.
GUID Partition Tables for Intel CPU based Macs will not work. You are also limited to about 2 TB with an APM as well. If you buy a bigger drive, like 4 TB, it will not work.
You can partition it with the GUID partition table, and read it for storing other stuff, but the computer won’t be able to use it for starting up from. Removing the battery (— a CR-2032 type —) in this computer is a pain in the butt if you don’t know how to do it. What I found easiest, was to lift it up slightly from the bottom, and then twist it anti-clockwise, so that it comes out almost side-ways. Hopefully you should only need to do this if you notice that your clock is reverting back to some time in the past.
(Although it’s also responsible for some kind of settings storage IC too. Probably the PRAM or something.) I removed mine when I was having issues with the Airport card, and wanted to see how much oomph it still had, since it was in there when I bought the computer. Earlier Power Mac G5s have different, bigger batteries, so this may not apply to you, if you have one. Ripping audio CDs in Mac OS X couldn’t be easier — the tracks show up as AIFF files, so you can just drag which ones you want to whatever writable drive you want to put them on.
Apple’s own DVD player is a bit of a pain when it comes to screen shots. It actually blocks them while running. The usual Shift + + 3 method will just bring up an error message, however, if you use the Terminal, you can get around this, by entering “ screencapture -c”, and this will copy the screen to the clipboard. Better still, you can use I wrote to do that for you.
As you’d expect, Mac OS X comes with QuickTime, since it’s by Apple, so it’s already installed. It’s pretty much the main software that other programs rely on for playing videos, audio and even showing pictures in some situations. It is however, like a base rendition, and you can pay for a pro version, which has more features. This particular model of the Power Mac G5 doesn’t come with an internal modem, but no doubt you can provide your own. None of my tower computers have in-built modems anyway, so this isn’t really all that strange. In any case, my Mac connects to our network “switch”, so it can get Internet access via my main PC. So, what software can you run on these computers?
Well, I never recommend anything that’s not worth trying out, so here’s a table of stuff that I’ve run myself, and made myself. Corel DRAW 11 — This is a must-have program for bitmap and vector graphics, however the Mac version isn’t very well optimised, and even on the G5 CPUs, it’s sluggish at some operations. Version 8 on Windows is much, much snappier. This is a commercial program, so you may have to look very hard to find it now, as it came out in about 2002.
I paid about $345 for it in 2008. It’s also the very last Mac specific version, unfortunately, and one of the reasons I would never go passed a Mac OS capable of running it. — Combines text files of lists together while avoiding doubling up on entries. Useful for synchronising your BlockSite list, or even your hostperm.1 file (probably) for older versions of Firefox. Any lists of text files where the order is not important should be able to be merged, where each entry is on a new line.
(Only accepts.txt files to be dropped on it, so you may need to rename certain files that have other extensions.) Any edits you make in the large results text box will be saved as well. Basilisk 2 — A Motorola 68000 variety CPU emulator. It seems to be aimed at System 7 mainly, but can also run System 6 and Mac OS 8. Good if you want to run older Mac software that won’t behave in Classic (or run at all on newer Intel CPU based Macs). You can set resolutions and colour settings, how much RAM you want, plus you can adjust the speed as well.
You make up a hard drive “image” file, and then the OS you plan to run will need to format it. Runs pretty sweet on the Power Mac G5 and makes use of both CPU cores.