Make a mini PPC Mac

About Qemu-system-ppc, a PPC Mac emulator for Windows, macOS and Linux that can run Mac OS 9.0 up to Mac OS X 10.5

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mePy2
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Make a mini PPC Mac

Post by mePy2 »

Hello everyone,

Is it possible to make a mini pc that runs PPC Mac OS? (ex. a Raspberry Pi with QEMU inside that runs Mac OS on startup).

- Little
- Faster than original Macs
- Useful

I would buy tons of them!!
darthnvader
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Re: Make a mini PPC Mac

Post by darthnvader »

PPC emulation is pretty demanding, requires very fast single threaded performance from the host.

68k emulation on something like a Pi would be very fast, likely faster than any 68k Mac that ever shipped, but it's going to be some years before we can emulated PPC on Arm faster than a 1 Ghz G4.
mePy2
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Re: Make a mini PPC Mac

Post by mePy2 »

You are right...

It would be nice if we could assemble a PowerPC hackintosh from scratch. Is it possible? I know about IBM POWER family processors (actually the POWER9 is the processor of the most powerful supercomputer in the world).

https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ this is a project to design a powerpc notebook from zero. open source software and hardware.
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adespoton
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Re: Make a mini PPC Mac

Post by adespoton »

You could probably do what I do: pick up G4 Minis on the cheap.

The only real hackintosh option I know of would be to run ShapeShifter on the Amiga PPC spec board (like the AmigaOne X5000/20). It'll emulate the missing Mac hardware, but use the PPC CPU natively.
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24bit
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Re: Make a mini PPC Mac

Post by 24bit »

Off topic:
Did you consider Snow Leopard with Rosetta?
A ThinkCentre M91 for example wii run 10.6.8 quite nice, USB3 may need tinkering.
Sure its not the real thing, but it will be low cost, fast and available.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkce ... :rk:1:pf:0
A low profile ATI HD 5XXX graphics should be added for OSX compatibility.

I did post a screenshot here from a SandyBridge rig at #13: http://macintoshgarden.org/forum/mac-os ... r-mid-2011
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Nowhere Man
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Re: Make a mini PPC Mac

Post by Nowhere Man »

It would be nice to have small, cheap PowerPC processors on modern boards akin to what we have now with ARM. Such a system could then run QEMU or something like it and use native CPU instructions to run a fast virtual machine. Unfortunately, PPC has never had that much popularity. It is caught between the power of POWER and x86 on one side, and the versatility, smallness and cheapness of ARM on the other. No one needs it for anything any more :(
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