Apple PPC G5 (OSX) anyone???
category: general [glöplog]
If you are running it on a G4-Mini, please make a youtube upload of some nice stuff running on it :) THX!
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Quote:Every time I think I want to play with MorphOS I go look at their utterly insane pricing/licensing scheme and remind myself not to bother
Well, I don't think 79€ for a license is that bad, especially considering all updates since version 2.0 have been free for registered users.
It looks like they changed it but they used to charge more or less for different machines, i.e. if you wanted to use it on a PowerBook you paid like 3x as much as for a Mac Mini for exactly the same product. Glad they "kind of" smartened up on that.
The pricing isn't the issue though; what really bugs me is if you buy it they hard-lock it to one machine and one machine alone, and if you sell or junk it the licence goes with it. These things break down all the time, people upgrade, sometimes people just want to play with different hardware, etc. For an experimental OS for an incredibly niche market it's beyond asinine. I understand they want to sell licences to use it on one machine *at a time* but there are far better ways to do so than such a stupid scheme.
I.e. what if I buy it for my Cube and then decide I'd rather have OS9 on that and *my* MorphOS licence on something else? Tough shit.
(Any MorphOS devs who might be reading this: I'm stating right now that you will earn ZERO money from me until you fix this. And I am literally exactly your target customer. You're shooting your own feet with this one.)
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Quote:Sure I could download the demo, but until they fix that shit I'm absolutely not gonna register it ever, so what's the point.
I'm still running the unregistered version on two machines, and it's enough for me :D
Does the unregistered version have any serious drawbacks?
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Does the unregistered version have any serious drawbacks?
You have to reboot the machine every half hour, but other than that there's no limitations compared to the registered version.
That's exactly my problem with it. One payment, one Installation, but it should be up to me, on which system I am currently using it.
BTW., Altivec was never utilized properly in Macs apart from a couple of non-demoscene stuff like CorePlayer Pro and Digigami's video encoder suite. Those few examples, however, really made the architecture show its great potential back in the days.
Alternative stdlib MacSTL for GCC and Watcom CodeWarrior made GCC's stdlib performance on Altivec PowerPC chips look like a very bad and pathetic joke. It also beat any x86 compiler+CPU combination of the era by a very significant margin.
MacSTL 0.2 benchmarks: http://www.pixelglow.com/stories/pentium-vs-g5/
MacSTL 0.3: http://www.pixelglow.com/stories/macintel-faster-than-altivec/
http://www.pixelglow.com/macstl/core/
IBM's XL compiler suite also yielded significantly faster scalar and autovectorized performance vs. GCC on PowerPC/Altivec, but IBM has dropped the support for OS X by the time OS X 10.5 was released. Somewhat connected, the autovectorizing PowerPC compiler by GreenHill that m$ has acquired(or licenced) for the X360 XDK also yielded fantastic performance compared to GCC.
So, if anyone feels like brewing some nice OS X/PowerPC demo but does not want to hand-code everything for proper performance, please download MacSTL and use it -- it comes free if you make the source of your demo public.
Alternative stdlib MacSTL for GCC and Watcom CodeWarrior made GCC's stdlib performance on Altivec PowerPC chips look like a very bad and pathetic joke. It also beat any x86 compiler+CPU combination of the era by a very significant margin.
MacSTL 0.2 benchmarks: http://www.pixelglow.com/stories/pentium-vs-g5/
MacSTL 0.3: http://www.pixelglow.com/stories/macintel-faster-than-altivec/
http://www.pixelglow.com/macstl/core/
IBM's XL compiler suite also yielded significantly faster scalar and autovectorized performance vs. GCC on PowerPC/Altivec, but IBM has dropped the support for OS X by the time OS X 10.5 was released. Somewhat connected, the autovectorizing PowerPC compiler by GreenHill that m$ has acquired(or licenced) for the X360 XDK also yielded fantastic performance compared to GCC.
So, if anyone feels like brewing some nice OS X/PowerPC demo but does not want to hand-code everything for proper performance, please download MacSTL and use it -- it comes free if you make the source of your demo public.
Which passive cooler GPU for G5 is best, fastest, with highest RAM? I have pretty cool Radeon but with huge fan...
@Hollid - pretty interesting. I always got the impression that late-PPC stuff was gimped by lack of optimization. Like, by the time the G5 rolled around most of the 3rd party stuff was ports and Apple were throwing their lot behind the secret x86 transition. Cool to see some real results.
@elan: Whether you have an AGP or a PCIe G5, the passively cooled OEM videocards are shit and you should avoid those. Both of the suggestions below give you a Cg/CGFX-compatible "relatively strong" GPU with 512 MB and SM3.0:
If you have an AGP G5, get a peesea Gainward Bliss 7800GS 512 MB (the G70-based version, G71 has no OS X/PowerPC drivers), flash it with the unofficial Mac firmware that you can find online and put one of the 3rd party 7800-compatible passive coolers on it (loadsa heatpipes and heatsinks, takes up a lotta space).
For a PCI-e G5 get a 1st gen peesea Quadro 4500FX or a 7800GTX, flash it with the corresponding unofficial Mac Quadro firmware and add a passive cooler to it (depending on the card you may also have to unsolder the 512 Kbit BIOS EEPROM and replace it with a 1Mbit chip).
In both cases the strong internal airflow of the G5 tower case cooling will make heatpipes+heatsinks a viable passive cooling solution, but you might consider to underclock/undervolt settings in the firmware just to be sure (or use the OpenFirmware-based tweak tool for customizing GPU settings).
Cg/CGFX is nice to play with on a G4/G5, too bad the GPU choices are limited to SM3.0, and CUDA is only available on OS X/x86.
If you have an AGP G5, get a peesea Gainward Bliss 7800GS 512 MB (the G70-based version, G71 has no OS X/PowerPC drivers), flash it with the unofficial Mac firmware that you can find online and put one of the 3rd party 7800-compatible passive coolers on it (loadsa heatpipes and heatsinks, takes up a lotta space).
For a PCI-e G5 get a 1st gen peesea Quadro 4500FX or a 7800GTX, flash it with the corresponding unofficial Mac Quadro firmware and add a passive cooler to it (depending on the card you may also have to unsolder the 512 Kbit BIOS EEPROM and replace it with a 1Mbit chip).
In both cases the strong internal airflow of the G5 tower case cooling will make heatpipes+heatsinks a viable passive cooling solution, but you might consider to underclock/undervolt settings in the firmware just to be sure (or use the OpenFirmware-based tweak tool for customizing GPU settings).
Cg/CGFX is nice to play with on a G4/G5, too bad the GPU choices are limited to SM3.0, and CUDA is only available on OS X/x86.
I have AGP G5. Thank you! I will search those cards!
So I have searched my old gpu cards... I own Radeon X800XL/256MB should it works? There is MOLEX connector where can I plug it??? I have dual core G5 agp version...
Back to the MorphOS topic briefly...
@jmph:
The latest hardware usually costs more, indeed. Because it includes new developments. PowerBook support was a newer development than Mac mini support, and it also required more drivers/etc to be done (battery control, power management, touchpad support, LCD control, etc, etc). The HW itself was also more expensive to get. There was *never* a 3x difference between Mac mini and PowerBook pricing tho' (it was 79 vs. 111 EUR for a long while. Now both are 79, but initially the Mac mini was also higher, but back then there was no PB support). If you want it cheaper, an Efika5200B PPC board, or an ACube Sam460 system are the alternatives, for only 49 EUR.
If your hardware breaks down, you are granted to register on another hardware. It's been like that since 2.0. It happened to many people, re-registering in place of a broken HW was never a problem. If you upgrade, and sell your previous hardware, with the license key, and you include it in the price. Then you buy your next HW and you spend the money you get back on the new license. It was good enough for others. As it was also said by others, if you keep your HW, you got all upgrades including new features for free, since 2008, almost a decade.
I'm not a developer, but from what I know it's unlikely to get "fixed". (As they don't consider it broken, for now...) If you don't like the licensing, no one forces you, there are competing products on the market. They must have much better HW support and saner licensing too!... Err, wait...
@jmph:
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It looks like they changed it but they used to charge more or less for different machines, i.e. if you wanted to use it on a PowerBook you paid like 3x as much as for a Mac Mini for exactly the same product.
The latest hardware usually costs more, indeed. Because it includes new developments. PowerBook support was a newer development than Mac mini support, and it also required more drivers/etc to be done (battery control, power management, touchpad support, LCD control, etc, etc). The HW itself was also more expensive to get. There was *never* a 3x difference between Mac mini and PowerBook pricing tho' (it was 79 vs. 111 EUR for a long while. Now both are 79, but initially the Mac mini was also higher, but back then there was no PB support). If you want it cheaper, an Efika5200B PPC board, or an ACube Sam460 system are the alternatives, for only 49 EUR.
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These things break down all the time, people upgrade, sometimes people just want to play with different hardware, etc.
If your hardware breaks down, you are granted to register on another hardware. It's been like that since 2.0. It happened to many people, re-registering in place of a broken HW was never a problem. If you upgrade, and sell your previous hardware, with the license key, and you include it in the price. Then you buy your next HW and you spend the money you get back on the new license. It was good enough for others. As it was also said by others, if you keep your HW, you got all upgrades including new features for free, since 2008, almost a decade.
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I'm stating right now that you will earn ZERO money from me until you fix this.
I'm not a developer, but from what I know it's unlikely to get "fixed". (As they don't consider it broken, for now...) If you don't like the licensing, no one forces you, there are competing products on the market. They must have much better HW support and saner licensing too!... Err, wait...
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Back to the MorphOS topic briefly...
@jmph:
The latest hardware usually costs more, indeed. Because it includes new developments. PowerBook support was a newer development than Mac mini support, and it also required more drivers/etc to be done (battery control, power management, touchpad support, LCD control, etc, etc). The HW itself was also more expensive to get. There was *never* a 3x difference between Mac mini and PowerBook pricing tho' (it was 79 vs. 111 EUR for a long while. Now both are 79, but initially the Mac mini was also higher, but back then there was no PB support). If you want it cheaper, an Efika5200B PPC board, or an ACube Sam460 system are the alternatives, for only 49 EUR.
The "latest" PowerMacs are a decade old. Hardware development is DONE. And I'm sure both people who own a Efika5200B or an ACube Sam460 have their OS needs met, and that's awesome, but I'm not rushing out to buy insanely obscure hardware to run an expensive experimental OS just to play around with.
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If your hardware breaks down, you are granted to register on another hardware. It's been like that since 2.0. It happened to many people, re-registering in place of a broken HW was never a problem. If you upgrade, and sell your previous hardware, with the license key, and you include it in the price. Then you buy your next HW and you spend the money you get back on the new license. It was good enough for others. As it was also said by others, if you keep your HW, you got all upgrades including new features for free, since 2008, almost a decade.
That's stupid. So if I want to upgrade my machine the old one basically becomes worthless to the local market, because I have to jack the price up to cover the MorphOS license, and unless I luck into finding one of the 10 people worldwide who might be in the market for that specific machine *and* its MorphOS license I'm SOL, and then I have to buy *another* one to put on the machine I'm upgrading to. PowePC Macs in general are hard to *give* away these days and most people just want them for OS9 or OSX.
Making me buy the same thing twice for no reason does NOT make me a happy customer.
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I'm not a developer, but from what I know it's unlikely to get "fixed". (As they don't consider it broken, for now...) If you don't like the licensing, no one forces you, there are competing products on the market. They must have much better HW support and saner licensing too!... Err, wait...
Yes, let's consider the competitors for a moment. AROS/IcarOS is free, and works, even happily in a VM. Linux with UAE is free. Haiku is free. ReactOS is free. AmigaOS4 is $29.95 and you can use it on whatever the hell you want. You can even buy a real copy of AmigaOS3.9 and install it in AmiKit if you want to be totally legit. And none of those come with insultingly greedy use restrictions based on a presumption of guilt of their users. The MorphOS guys need to screw their heads on straight.
If it were a mainstream OS for business clients their licensing scheme *might* make sense, but nobody's running an office full of workstations on MorphOS. The worldwide market for this thing is what, 1000 people? And they don't want to make it as appealing to own as possible? Mind bending.
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AmigaOS4 is $29.95 and you can use it on whatever the hell you want.
On whatever I want? The only options I see are WinUAE, insanely expensive used Blizzard/Cyberstorm accelerators and insanely expensive custom PPC boards...
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So I have searched my old gpu cards... I own Radeon X800XL/256MB should it works? There is MOLEX connector where can I plug it???
I had a good experience with flashing peesea 800 Pro VIVO cards for G4/G5 -- the VIVO feature was lost but the cards worked perfect. The good side with the Radeon 800** is MorpOS compatibility via the unified Radeon driver, AFAIK. The downside is lack of SM3.0 support in case you would like to play with shaders/Cg. These cards are PS2.0.
Molex splitter mod:
http://themacelite.wikidot.com/local--files/navsubcat/G5_molex.pdf
Flashing procedure How-To:
http://themacelite.wikidot.com/ati-flash
Try flashing your card with this firmware:
http://campahunta.free.fr/Downloads/ROMs/ATIhack_x800xt_reduced.rom.zip
If no cookie, try the retail Mac 800XT factory firmware:
http://campahunta.free.fr/Downloads/ROMs/ati_ret_x800xt_109_agp_full.zip
I no longer recall if you will also need to run the official ATi ROM Update on the flashed card:
http://themacelite.wikidot.com/local--files/wikidownloads2/ati-aug2005-radeon-universal-rom-update.dmg
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I have dual core G5 agp version...
If it is an AGP G5 it has to be a dual processor model, the dualcore and dual processor dualcore models are PCIe.
@Holid:
Yep its 2x cpu. Not 2x dualcore...
Holid thnx for links!!!
@JMPH:
I miss more pro - DAWs/trackers on MorphOS. On OSX there is Renoise... On MorphOS is Digibooster3. Its nice. But price is little bit high. Same as Renoise (VSTi).
Same with MorphOS licence. I will pay max 30-40 euro for it. There is HaikuOS (BeOS) or SyllableOS (BeOS) or Linux for free... And price almost same as Windows10 for very nice but still hobby OS is not good.
Yep its 2x cpu. Not 2x dualcore...
Holid thnx for links!!!
@JMPH:
I miss more pro - DAWs/trackers on MorphOS. On OSX there is Renoise... On MorphOS is Digibooster3. Its nice. But price is little bit high. Same as Renoise (VSTi).
Same with MorphOS licence. I will pay max 30-40 euro for it. There is HaikuOS (BeOS) or SyllableOS (BeOS) or Linux for free... And price almost same as Windows10 for very nice but still hobby OS is not good.
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AmigaOS4 is $29.95 and you can use it on whatever the hell you want.
Excuse me? If you want to run AmigaOS4 on Classic Amiga, AmigaONE X1000, older AmigaONE (XE etc), Pegasos2, SAM440, and SAM460, you have to buy six different copies of the OS, because they all need different version.
OS4 is practically limited to hardware too, because you can only use certain version on certain type of hardware. If you want to upgrade to a better machine, you need to get a new copy of the OS there too.
And additionally you have also pay from the upgrades. You had to buy 4.0 for all different types of machines you own, then you had to buy 4.1 for all different types of machines, and also 4.1FE for everything once again. And 4.0 and 4.1 weren't nowhere close as cheap as 4.1FE is. IIRC they were closer to 100e each.
Who knows when they're charging again, while MorphOS updates will stay free for the registered machines.
I bet MorphOS has been much cheaper for most of the users than OS4, even if you'd done some HW upgrades.
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I understand they want to sell licences to use it on one machine *at a time* but there are far better ways to do so than such a stupid scheme.
What would be your suggestion then? I hope not some Internet activation thing ala Microsoft.. brrr. In a perfect world MorphOS developers wouldn't need to tie registration to machine, but in reality they would get next to nothing sales if the OS would be freely copyable. Any piracy would do big hurt in this marginal market.
I rather take the current licencing scheme than OS4 way where they charge from updates. And MorphOS is worth for machines much longer than mainstream operating systems. I'm still happy with my MorphOS Mac mini which I registered in 2009, and I've got all the updates for free. I have 7 MorphOS compatible machines from Peg1 to G5, and they all work just fine. None of them have had any hw issues (and as said, you get free transfers if hw breaks down). I've regged ones which I use most and it's been worth it.
Probably I will buy MorphOS registration for my birthdays... There are few trackers...
- Milkytracker
- Hivelytracker
- Schismtracker
- Goattracker
- Ninjatracker
- Delitracker
- Digibooster
Any other music tracker tools???
Any native tracker? Any modern tracker with VSTi/VSTfx support???
- Milkytracker
- Hivelytracker
- Schismtracker
- Goattracker
- Ninjatracker
- Delitracker
- Digibooster
Any other music tracker tools???
Any native tracker? Any modern tracker with VSTi/VSTfx support???
I can tell you, that no G4/64MB Vram Mini is needed. MorphOS runs just fine on my 1,42Ghz Mini in Dualboot with 10.3.9. Most native MorphOS-Games are at the level of poor linux stuff, but there are exceptions. The BattleSquadron Demo is fucking awesome. It plays excellent.
There are some PPC Amiga-Demos that work just fine on MorphOS, but there are none with oldshool 2d effects (Rasterbars, Starfields, Scrollers, Plasmas, etc.) They are mostly only lowres, lowtextured 3d stuff that every old 3dfx card can do better.
Nevertheless, some 3D MorphOS PPC-Demos are quite good.
There are some PPC Amiga-Demos that work just fine on MorphOS, but there are none with oldshool 2d effects (Rasterbars, Starfields, Scrollers, Plasmas, etc.) They are mostly only lowres, lowtextured 3d stuff that every old 3dfx card can do better.
Nevertheless, some 3D MorphOS PPC-Demos are quite good.
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I can tell you, that no G4/64MB Vram Mini is needed. MorphOS runs just fine on my 1,42Ghz Mini
Well, if you want modern resolutions and fancy stuff like 3D accelerated layers effects, then you really need 64M or more, but if you're fine with more moderate stuff, then 32M machines will do.
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There are some PPC Amiga-Demos that work just fine on MorphOS, but there are none with oldshool 2d effects (Rasterbars, Starfields, Scrollers, Plasmas, etc.) They are mostly only lowres, lowtextured 3d stuff that every old 3dfx card can do better.
Nevertheless, some 3D MorphOS PPC-Demos are quite good.
There isn't much point doing oldskool effects on modern hw, which really isn't suitable for that. What's the point to push those on chunky modes? But it indeed is fun to see some classic Amiga PPC demos on more easily available hardware. You may never had a chance to see them before.
Anyway, we collected some MorphOS (compatible) demos to a pack few years ago. Haven't updated it with the latest demos, but anyway if someone likes to start from somewhere: http://amiga.bbs.fi/demopack_morphos/
I watched many of them because I installed this pack. Some of them have issues and no fullscreen, but that could be my failure. Some are really good even in lowsres and -low texture. Don't get me wrong, to be able to watch them on an old g4-Mini is a really nice way. But perhaps I expected something different.
I remind the legacy 68K for it's smooth scrolling, colorful images and high detailed pixelart.
I remind the legacy 68K for it's smooth scrolling, colorful images and high detailed pixelart.
Have you plans for an updated version of this demopack? thx!
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Have you plans for an updated version of this demopack? thx!
I guess there would be enough new releases to update it soon, but we'll see... too many projects going on :) I've updated my classic Amiga demo pack couple times and I've intented to do the same for MorphOS demo pack, but as said, too much to do :) The plan is to update it eventually anyway.
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My favorites on my G4-Mini include:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9113
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59135
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56886
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54649
@britelite
These are really good. Thx!
Do you have other good suggestions for me?
Thx
Doc
http://ada.untergrund.net/?p=demos&y=0&c=0&h=7&v=0
Seems to be very outdated.
Seems to be very outdated.