Thread
Breakthrough!
This photo is real! It's one of my 12" PowerBook G4s running OS 9 for the first time!
So far, everything seems operational except video and AirPort (now that OS 9 on unsupported machines is a real possibility, someone has to modify the AirPort drivers to include support for the newer cards). System profiler identifies everything correctly (except for the model, it just lists the identifier, PowerBook6,4).
One caveat, however: I have to enter some commands at the OF prompt every time I boot it up, otherwise it just sits at a grey screen indefinitely.
WOW!
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Which model is that?
It's a 2004 PowerBook G4 12" running at 1.33 GHz with 1.25 GB of RAM.
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Wow! So you have the fastest powerbook running OS9 ! Congrats 
Do you think it could be doable on a 15" or 17" 1,67Ghz ?
Do you think it could be doable on a 15" or 17" 1,67Ghz ?
Don't know. I suppose I'll have to give it a try
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This would make my 12" PBG4 more useful than it is with Tiger, lol.
Well, the A1106 PowerBook G4 with 1.67 GHz processor works, sort of:
Except that it keeps bombing out:
It's probably something minor, because if it gets this far, it's obviously bootable. I have the full 2 GB of RAM in here, so I have a theory that maybe if I remove some, it'll work. I'll try it and see.
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Except that it keeps bombing out:
It's probably something minor, because if it gets this far, it's obviously bootable. I have the full 2 GB of RAM in here, so I have a theory that maybe if I remove some, it'll work. I'll try it and see.
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Cool !! Just finished cleaning one A1106 i got recently, with an empty drive.
Was wondering watch to install ...
Now if you manage to do it, i'll try
Was wondering watch to install ...
Now if you manage to do it, i'll try
Well, it's still bombing out, even with 1 GB RAM, so something else must be going on. It's beyond my abilities for the moment, so I'll let it be for now. It should still be possible eventually, though.
Check out this thread for the full story (it's a continuation of the same thread here).
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Check out this thread for the full story (it's a continuation of the same thread here).
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super awesome!
Question is, will it work reliably on slower 15 and 17" models?
Yes, I think it will:
This is an A1052 PowerBook G4 17" with specs similar to the 12" I tested earlier.
And something of interest to Hap:
Unbeknownst to me, this machine is apparently a DVT prototype (how else can I explain the weird serial number with "DVT" at the end?) The logic board and much of the internals are original, and thus still DVT, but the outer casing has been completely replaced with production parts (which probably reduces it's value somewhat, but oh, well). That explains why it came with a DVT battery, anyway!
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This is an A1052 PowerBook G4 17" with specs similar to the 12" I tested earlier.
And something of interest to Hap:
Unbeknownst to me, this machine is apparently a DVT prototype (how else can I explain the weird serial number with "DVT" at the end?) The logic board and much of the internals are original, and thus still DVT, but the outer casing has been completely replaced with production parts (which probably reduces it's value somewhat, but oh, well). That explains why it came with a DVT battery, anyway!
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Congrats.
What did you do in order to make it work??
Not much, really. it was iMic over at TC that did most of the work of hacking the Mac OS ROM file and such, I'm simply testing it out on the various machines I have.
But basically, I managed to get OS 9 working on an external FireWire drive, and I simply plug it into a given machine, adjust the OF if neccessary, and go to the disk selector to select the OS 9 disk.
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But basically, I managed to get OS 9 working on an external FireWire drive, and I simply plug it into a given machine, adjust the OF if neccessary, and go to the disk selector to select the OS 9 disk.
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I was informed that my link to the "main" thread was incorrect: https://www.thinkclassic.org/viewtopic.php?pid=3570#p3570
Sorry for any confusion!
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Sorry for any confusion!
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Hmm, I have a 1.33Ghz 15" 2003 Albook here. I might just give this a shot. 
May be a fun project to try on my 1.42 GHz iBook G4 this weekend.
Now we just need WPA/WPA2 for OS9 wifi and we'd be set 
yup too bad WPA 2 doesn't work. I could easily change that on my network but I have so many machines in my home it would take a long time to get them all changed
NJRoadfan: Yes, by all means please do test! I'm pretty sure it will work, but it never hurts to confirm.
SuperToaster: That generation of iBook shouldn't be terribly different from the PowerBooks I've been testing, but it's hard to say if it will actually work or not. I suppose it wouldn't hurt?
commodorejohn: WPA/WPA2 and Wireless G would be wonderful things to have. Even Wireless B would be enough, but it seems we'd have to come up with a new WiFi driver from scratch, so it's definitely nontrivial (unless somebody can hack up the existing AirPort drivers). Hypothetically, if that were done, we could possibly hook it into the existing AirPort software so that it would look and act as expected by the system despite having it's own driver (it would also allow us to use the existing tools and accessories unmodified).
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SuperToaster: That generation of iBook shouldn't be terribly different from the PowerBooks I've been testing, but it's hard to say if it will actually work or not. I suppose it wouldn't hurt?
commodorejohn: WPA/WPA2 and Wireless G would be wonderful things to have. Even Wireless B would be enough, but it seems we'd have to come up with a new WiFi driver from scratch, so it's definitely nontrivial (unless somebody can hack up the existing AirPort drivers). Hypothetically, if that were done, we could possibly hook it into the existing AirPort software so that it would look and act as expected by the system despite having it's own driver (it would also allow us to use the existing tools and accessories unmodified).
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You KNOW I'm excited about this! 
If the AirPort cards never work out, how about replacing them with something for which open source drivers are available? I like hardware fixes!
If the AirPort cards never work out, how about replacing them with something for which open source drivers are available? I like hardware fixes!
I figured you might be, especially since you happen to have a "supported" model!
That might actually be doable, except I'm not sure if there exists a viable card that would be compatible with the interface (the AirPort Extreme slot is some sort of proprietary thing I think).
However, if it's viable, then it would be an excellent thing.
However, even then, someone would have to still create a driver for it. It would help if it were a device where all the inner workings are well documented, though.
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That might actually be doable, except I'm not sure if there exists a viable card that would be compatible with the interface (the AirPort Extreme slot is some sort of proprietary thing I think).
However, if it's viable, then it would be an excellent thing.
However, even then, someone would have to still create a driver for it. It would help if it were a device where all the inner workings are well documented, though.
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AFAIK the AirPort cards are just PCMCIA, right? I think it's a Broadcom chipset, which is always a pain from a third-party hacking standpoint, but IIRC it's been documented enough to be supported in Linux. The big question I'd have is whether the OS9 software for wireless support is well-understood enough and whether it has enough hooks to be hackable.
Airport Extreme (IE, the 802.11g wireless in non-9 compatible PPCs) is electrically mini-PCI, not PCMCIA, and it's mechanically proprietary so you may have issues trying to plug a normal MiniPCI card into it. (It's an experiment I've never heard having been tried.) Unless someone knows of a PCI wireless chipset with 9 compatible drivers that also happens to come in a mini-PCI version I think you're pretty much starting from scratch here.
I think a PCMCIA card with OS 9 drivers is the only viable solution for now (at least for those G4s with a PCMCIA slot), at least until we can get something going with the internal slot.
I think OS 9 can see it (a PCI slot entry exists in ASP, which contains an unknown card whose name is "pci80211", which I assume is the APe card), so that part is already good (OS 9 ought to support the slot itself, since it's a variant of PCI, which has been available on Macs in some form for ages).
So, anyone here able to make up a quick driver? It needn't be pretty, it just has to work (preferably, it could just hook into the existing infrastructure provided by the existing AirPort software, so we don't have to modify everything else; doing this would hopefully also have the side benefit of perhaps making the driver little more than some simple "glue" that will translate the newer "language" of the APe card to something the old driver understands, which would probably be easier to write than a full-on driver).
Also, I think we should revisit the possibility of getting USB 2.0 working, since it would be fun.
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I think OS 9 can see it (a PCI slot entry exists in ASP, which contains an unknown card whose name is "pci80211", which I assume is the APe card), so that part is already good (OS 9 ought to support the slot itself, since it's a variant of PCI, which has been available on Macs in some form for ages).
So, anyone here able to make up a quick driver? It needn't be pretty, it just has to work (preferably, it could just hook into the existing infrastructure provided by the existing AirPort software, so we don't have to modify everything else; doing this would hopefully also have the side benefit of perhaps making the driver little more than some simple "glue" that will translate the newer "language" of the APe card to something the old driver understands, which would probably be easier to write than a full-on driver).
Also, I think we should revisit the possibility of getting USB 2.0 working, since it would be fun.
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I'm sure this is a dumb question, but has there *ever been* a third-party wireless card with an OS 9 driver? (Other than the Lucent Wavelan, which is basically cheating given it's the same chipset as the Apple one and the original Airport was essentially a licensed version of it. Pretty sure that includes the software driver as well. I know there were some companies that were selling other-branded Orinoco-chipset cards but likewise they "just worked" with the existing software.)*
OS 9 was never exactly a hotbed of open-source development so unless someone volunteers to give you the sourcecode for a network card driver they wrote at some point you're probably looking at developing a driver completely from scratch. I'm reasonably sure that the "Airport" support from Apple is pretty much a self-contained bundle and not really a modular framework for supporting arbitrary network cards. Not to say that if you could get the source for it you couldn't cut down on the amount of work required by hybridizing it with parts of a card driver lifted from Linux or one of the *BSDs, but, yeah, source, where is it? (Also, practically speaking, an 802.11g driver absent WPA support is probably of negligible usefulness, so also figure on grafting a WPA supplicant into your hybridized support package.)
I will mention that there *were* a very few 802.11b Mini-PCI cards made that incorporated a variation of the Orinoco/Prism chipset behind what was essentially a minimal PCI->ISA bridge, but I'm extremely skeptical that the standard Airport software would be able to find said chip in the nonstandard place and work with it even if one of those cards were to physically (and electrically) fit in the standard Airport slot. (When these monsters came out the Linux driver for them needed some TLC in order to initialize them properly.)
(* EDIT: Okay, I guess according to a page on LEM there was a Classic OS driver for early Cisco Aironet cards, and there was also a 9.2 driver for a USB device made by Belkin and sold under a few different names.
http://lowendmac.com/2009/wifi-for-desktop-macs-running-mac-os-9/
So Lucent isn't the *only* one. Just close.)
OS 9 was never exactly a hotbed of open-source development so unless someone volunteers to give you the sourcecode for a network card driver they wrote at some point you're probably looking at developing a driver completely from scratch. I'm reasonably sure that the "Airport" support from Apple is pretty much a self-contained bundle and not really a modular framework for supporting arbitrary network cards. Not to say that if you could get the source for it you couldn't cut down on the amount of work required by hybridizing it with parts of a card driver lifted from Linux or one of the *BSDs, but, yeah, source, where is it? (Also, practically speaking, an 802.11g driver absent WPA support is probably of negligible usefulness, so also figure on grafting a WPA supplicant into your hybridized support package.)
I will mention that there *were* a very few 802.11b Mini-PCI cards made that incorporated a variation of the Orinoco/Prism chipset behind what was essentially a minimal PCI->ISA bridge, but I'm extremely skeptical that the standard Airport software would be able to find said chip in the nonstandard place and work with it even if one of those cards were to physically (and electrically) fit in the standard Airport slot. (When these monsters came out the Linux driver for them needed some TLC in order to initialize them properly.)
(* EDIT: Okay, I guess according to a page on LEM there was a Classic OS driver for early Cisco Aironet cards, and there was also a 9.2 driver for a USB device made by Belkin and sold under a few different names.
http://lowendmac.com/2009/wifi-for-desktop-macs-running-mac-os-9/
So Lucent isn't the *only* one. Just close.)
Yes, as you already found in Low End Mac. A few USB devices were sold supporting Mac OS 9, of the extended wi/WaveLAN/PRISM family.
No good on my Powerbook G4 1.25Ghz, I have a 7447 CPU so it halts at:
DO-QUIESCE finished
.
DO-QUIESCE finished
.
Yeah, it'll do that unless you enter some OF commands in NVRAM which pertain to changing the "cpu version" property to something OS 9 understands. It's the same type of trickery used by some G4 CPU upgrades.
Details are at the TC thread I linked to.
As for WiFi, it's pretty clear to me that for anything reasonably modern needs drivers to be written from scratch, and thus is quite non trivial, unfortunately.
In the meantime, one can use an Airport compatible card (on those G4s with PC Card slots) or an ethernet bridge (for those without).
Regardless of these setbacks, it's quite a remarkable acheivement.
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Details are at the TC thread I linked to.
As for WiFi, it's pretty clear to me that for anything reasonably modern needs drivers to be written from scratch, and thus is quite non trivial, unfortunately.
In the meantime, one can use an Airport compatible card (on those G4s with PC Card slots) or an ethernet bridge (for those without).
Regardless of these setbacks, it's quite a remarkable acheivement.
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