General DTK question: has anybody looked at operating systems other than Mac OS X on them? Windows 7, 8.1U1 or 10TP would probably do really well on this thing, especially if the Pentium 4 CPU in it has HyperThreading and you can get 2 or more gigs of RAM in it. (915 chipset should happily run 3 or 4 gigs.)

Click to expand...

That's something I'd definitely look into.

Not specifically to run a different operating system, but because Windows and DOS have plenty of utilities to dump the BIOS of a machine, while I don't think OS X has any (because it doesn't use BIOS at all). It'd be interesting to look at it and see exactly what's different (and also keep it for archiving: we're already lucky enough that these machines survived at all, since they were supposed to be returned to Apple, if something goes wrong and the motherboard dies this software is gone forever).

For the BIOS, the chip is on a support, and a colleague can help me to dump directly the content, i will try that next week.

Dandu said:

For the BIOS, the chip is on a support, and a colleague can help me to dump directly the content, i will try that next week.

Click to expand...

Awesome information! I had initially thought about this, but I had just supposed that it was soldered and thus the only viable way of getting data out of it was running a BIOS dumper. 

Keep us updated on your progress with this!

Little news :

I have found a 'patched' version of 10.4.3, with the original kernel, and it works. I can launch Intel apps without problem, when i found a Tiger compatible version.

It's faster...



Next step, dump the BIOS, install Windows.

Faster than before, or faster than another machine? I'd love to see these compared to a G5 Quad.

Any update on the BIOS dump? Have you had any success?

It'd be interesting to compare it with the "plain" Intel version and see where the main differences are.

I try this this week

Today, i have connected a VGA header (with haplain help) and it works : i have connected two display 

Cool!

The BIOS is a custom one based on the intel reference bios for this board series. It pre-dates the "retail" board used in the D915GXX series by a little bit (no surprise there as the board and TPM were pre-programmed by Intel for apple.

The Installer for this system was fully leaked in the early days of "hackintoshing"

Look up "Marker-Tiger.dmg"

This will be the unmatched copy of the install disc designed for the encryption keys stored in the TPM.

Upgrading the bios will not actually prevent any of the 10.4.x Marklar builds from working, but you'll loose the pretty boot screen and some of the System Profiler text.

I've done a bit of experimentation with the DTK bios on non-DTK D915GXX boards and vice-versa- just dropping in the actual bios chip from one of those boards.

There is NO matching consumer SKU for the combination of TPM, Firewire, and Gigabit in the 915 boards, but the board in the DTK IS a D915GXX series board, just with a custom form factor from Intel. NO other differences.

Also, the ADD2 support is very limited, but I have run other PCI cards off the board, simply never played with display cards. 

There are 3 install discs that were issued by apple to DTK owners:

Mac OS X 10.4.1 8B1025

Mac OS X 10.4.1 8B1099

Mac OS X 10.4.3 8F1111

All of these have been patched in various forms, but for a DTK, the more original, the better.

I spent quite a while sorting the mess out a few years ago when I got my DTK, the results of which are below:

ORIGINAL DISCS (iso and dmg are identical, just different container):

6671b06db57db94bebffdd2cffc2c78e marklar-tiger.dmg

e78fe52e30a1f8c5b29d4b7932a16c5e marklar-tiger.iso

daf72f000bd860360ae494d915058af6 10.4.3_8f1099_for_dtk_userdvd.dmg

e7d86fefb4b5155890addbf7fae19398 10.4.3_8f1099_for_dtk_userdvd.iso

3665735d1b651b5a4ad15ca59ab40142 macosx_10.4.3_8f1111_for_dtk_userdvd.dmg

f086fa1cdd01013c9787dfd1e92c2078 macosx_10.4.3_8f1111_for_dtk_userdvd.iso

I've as of yet, been unable to find the 8F1111 build in unmodified form, but the following will work fine on a DTK as it simply has the TPM encrypted files pre-decrypted (Finder et al.):

macosx_10.4.3_8f1111_for_dtk_userdvd (wesleypatch_8f1111_v1.1).iso

Thank you