When the installer is done, Leopard automatically restores your computer to its normal values. The utility puts a little script in your PRAM that changes the CPU entry in the device tree to 867Mhz, allowing the Leopard installer to pass the processor check, and work without a hitch.
You can do this manually, but why would you when LeopardAssist automates it in a nice graphical utility? It’s a small application that you run on your “unsupported” Mac, so you need Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.3 installed on it. LeopardAssist is a utility that automates the third method: using OpenFirmware to fool the Leopard installer into thinking you have a 867Mhz processor.
Luckily, a bit of Googling was all it took to find a free little application called LeopardAssist, which makes installing Leopard on “unsupported” machines as easy as a few clicks. I’d had to resort to hacking my Leopard installation DVD, and I wasn’t looking forward to that.
Since I don’t have another, more recent, supported Mac to install Leopard on, the option of using FireWire target mode was out of the question. There are three ways to get Leopard on an “unsupported” machine. Turns out this is as easy as exploiting Safari on Mac OS X (that was a joke, I command you to laugh). So, I got out my retail copy of Leopard, and dove into the process of getting Leopard installed on my “unsupported” PowerMac.
I don’t like running last year’s version, and always prefer the latest and greatest. It’s no miracle worker, of course, and processor intensive unoptimised pieces of… things like Flash will still bring it to its knees, but apart from that, it’s an absolute joy.īut I wanted more: I wanted the latest Mac OS X. Replacing the Ati Rage card with this “new” Radeon turned the PowerMac into a very usable machine, multitasking and all. I went for it, and yesterday morning the card arrived in the mail. Someone had a Radeon 8500 with 64MB of video RAM on offer for just 30EUR, which in Mac land isn’t a whole lot. A few days ago, I finally spotted a decent offer on, a website dedicated solely to selling/buying second hand Apple stuff. So, ever since I bought the machine, I was on the look-out for a nice Mac graphics card that was Quartz Extreme capable, which should deliver a serious speed boost for the PowerMac. The biggest issue was a lack of a Quartz Extreme capable video card, which meant that all the animations and window drawing and such were done by the processors, putting a lot of extra strain on the already ageing G4s. It ran Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it did so fairly well. The community soon found ways around this limitation, and recently, I found myself in a situation where I had to do the same.Ībout half a year ago, I bought a PowerMac Dual G4-450Mhz, with 1GB of RAM.
Probably similar processing power to some of the Windows netbooks or the new anemic Macbooks Apple sells now.Back when Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, there was a bit of a minor controversy around the artificially implemented cut-off point you could only install Leopard on machines with G4 processors of 867Mhz or more, leaving out capable machines like the dual 733Mhz or dual 800Mhz. Reaper has an older PPC compatible version, so you're covered on that end if you get a SATA SSD running. Well, looking it up to see which version of OSX started supporting it is still the starting point! It may be that you need a newer version of OSX than that computer can run to talk to that pci card.
You'll want to look up that card and see if OSX 10.5 PPC includes class compliant drivers for it. This is to give you SATA ports, right? (Because the native drive connections are the old parallel connection.) You should definitely install at least that. I think 10.5 is the last PPC OSX that will run on that old G4. I even booted off of Panther install CD just in case if the drive is detected that point. Now I can see the card is detected (in System Profiler),īut somehow I see no trace of the SATA - Drive. I did the WiebeSATA3512Flash and wrote the firmware to the card (option A), first it failed nagging about the kext not being authentic, but I ran the *.command again and then it succeeded.
I have a Silicon Image SIL 3512 SATA / RAID 2 Port PCI - CardĪnd a Toshiba 160GB SATA - Drive (it's a "Laptop" - model all I have in hand at this moment. I'm trying to "upgrade" my PPC (OS X - 10.3.9 / Panther) - Setup.