Starting Out

Before the Computer

Thanks for stopping by and checking out this guide! To start, let's get some initial things out of the way. First, let's start with the why. Why are we messing with PowerPC computers? Idk it's fun lol. For me it's a lot of nostalgia and intrigue. Macs from the PowerPC CPU era are interesting beasts right now because they can still run relatively modern operating systems, but these computers have entire CPU architectures that aren't even widely used anymore. And yet, they can still work for a lot of different things. Work well? That's debatable, but I think it's cool seeing them work at all.

A cool forum thread that gets into this over at the indispensible MacRumors forums is "What have you done with a PowerPC today?" It's great for anyone looking to feed a computer-buying addiction on the hunt for their next purchase. I wanted to get an iMac G3 partially because it looks so dang cool. Not many computers come with clear plastic and a whole damn CRT in one package, especially not now lol.

If you're just now looking to get into these kinds of retro computers, the MacRumors forums is a great place to start. Lots of info about PowerPC Mac uses, software, troubleshooting, upgrades, etc. For some reason, there are sites and forums dedicated entirely to Apple's System 7 and OS 9, but I've yet to see a similar site dedicated largely to retro Mac OSX. (Makes me want to make a site... hmm...) There's sites like Macintosh Garden, but they serve super-vintage Mac stuff too.

Rev Up Your Engines

Okay, let's say you already have the computer. If you can turn it on and boot into your desired operating system, then great! You're off to the races and can check out places like Macintosh Garden for software and other stuff.

Buuuuuut if you're like me and others who pick up second-hand Macs, chances are there's something wrong with them. I'm mostly going to focus on my experience with my iMac G3, since I see a lot of people talking more about the G4 and G5 PPC Macs rather than the G3 ones. (To be fair, the G3 iMacs are on the lower end performance-wise, but mine has run pretty darn well so far for being around 20 years old!)

So, into the troubleshooting. If you get something like a G3 iMac and you hook it up with a known-working power cord and you're not getting ANYTHING, then I probably can't help you. I'm not good at the raw-electric stuff, and if you're getting NO response, not a tone or power light at all, then you've got bigger fish to fry like a dead power supply or something. If you hear some odd clicking from the disc or hard drives, or somehow find the RAM is loose, you can always disassemble it and check all those things.

But let's say you get a loud, monotone beep or three instead of the usual Mac startup chime. Or maybe it's booting into a sad Mac face/folder icon. First thing to try is holding down alt/option as the computer starts up. Normally, this will send you into the boot picker to select an OS to use. If you're having issues even getting this far, then it's probably time to get into Open Firmware. At this point, it's time to lock in, my friend.

Booting and Installing OSX

Open Firmware

Okay, time for some self-deprecation: whenever I first read about Open Firmware, I was disgusted because I saw those words without context and immediately assumed this would involve re-flashing the boot ROM or something - no no no. Turns out Open Firmware is just the name for the IBM protocols used here - think "open" as in an "open standard," since other PowerPC devices use similar BIOS stuff/principles. Your PPC iMac will already have Open Firmware.

To boot into Open Firmware, hold down Command + Option + O + F while the Mac is turning on. After that, this page will be your friend.

You'll end up in a Terminal-like screen. If you're familiar with the UNIX/Linux terminal, things will feel familiar, but since this is a very base-level command line, you'll notice that even commands like cp do not exist here. Some basic stuff will appear at the top, such as a Mac model identifier and the current firmware version. (An iMac G3 like mine can go up to 4.1.9. More on that later.)

Some simpler non-booting Mac issues may be resolved by some simple reset commands found at the page linked above, like reset-nvram, set-defaults or reset-all. Type such things, hit Enter and away your settings go. Maybe now you can type mac-boot, hit enter, and wind up in an OS.

Or not! I'll cover getting into OSX here, don't worry. Your next friend in Open Firmware is going to be the command devalias. Type devalias and hit enter, you'll see the whole "device tree" of your Mac. Be aware that some items listed here may be false leads - for instance, my iMac just has a CD/DVD drive and a hard drive, but it lists multiple potential entries for IDE, ATA, Ultra ATA, ZIP and so on. Between Open Firmware and a site like Every Mac, you should be able to figure out what to expect of your Mac, hardware-wise.

Okay, we can see devices, now what? Well, see for yourself: on my iMac G3 with USB for instance, I can type "dev usb0" Enter, "ls" Enter, and see my keyboard and mouse listed. My bottom USB port is usb0 here. I have a USB drive in usb1 - I can do likewise and type dev usb1, ls, and see my Mac recognizes a flash drive is plugged into the top USB port. Try this for other devices and you could troubleshoot if certain hardware is being recognized or not, perhaps.

I feel like it's worth saying here of all places that whenever I had a CD stuck in the disc drive and the stupid slot-loader wouldn't spit the disc out, I tried everything in OSX to get it to eject - the thing that finally got it out far enough for me to grab with some tweezers is typing "eject cd" in Open Firmware. Just FYI!

(And if anyone else has the relatively specific problem of accidentally selecting an invalid boot drive/partition that causes the normal multi-boot picker to fail to start up the system, a command along the lines of boot hd:9,\System\Library\CoreServices\:tbxi might help you ... be careful what system commands you use, kids)

The QEMU and You

Unless you have some proper, functioning installation media like original CDs or DVDs, chances are you're going to want to make a bootable USB flash drive. However, since it's an old CPU/BIOS config and it's Apple on top of that, of course it's not going to be easy. To summarize what we'll do: we're going to make a PowerPC emulator running OSX 10.4 Tiger so that we can use its Apple-specific file system to create a Mac-bootable USB drive with a Tiger installation disc image.

I tried eeevverryyyything I could think of to make a USB drive it would like to boot from - every non-Mac solution I tried failed, so if you're on Windows, be prepared to translate my Linux instructions to your own path. TransMac on Windows did nothing for me. Basically, I'm following this video, but adding in instructions on how to make the bootable USB OS-drive using the computer emulator QEMU.

Alright, for those on Linux, go ahead and rev up apt-get, pacman, yay, WHATEVER, and for ease of use, you can download a package called "qemu-full." Or just download "qemu-system-ppc." For another video source, check this one out.

I'm assuming you already have an OS image at this point since you've just been chomping at the bit to get this stuff working. I won't directly say where you can find such things, but I'm sure there are Macintosh-related repositories or gardens out there from which you can download such things. For simplicity's sake, I recommend making a directory where you'll be putting all your Mac-related thing so you don't have to keep specifying different directories.

For QEMU on Linux here, start by making a disk image the emulator can use. In your Linux terminal: qemu-img create hdd.img 30G

Then, for me given my OS iso and disk image filenames, I enter this to start up the PPC emulator: sudo qemu-system-ppc -M mac99 -g 1280x1024x32 -L pc-bios -hda hdd.img -m 1G -cpu g4 -cdrom tiger.iso -boot d

Of course, you can change things in the arguments above, like the resolution, disk image name, OS install image name, RAM amount, etc. Look up QEMU docs for more on that if you want. With that command above, you'll go through the OSX installation process on this emulator. Once it installs and it's up and running, go ahead and just shut it back down for now.

Now for another super-specific part: make sure to have a compatible USB drive on hand. There are too many USB drives out there to make a comprehensive list, but the bottom line is that you'll probably want something that's USB 1.0 or 2.0, lower capacity, and that draws lower power. If your USB drive is 3.0 specifically or draws a bunch of power due to some extra lights or functions, you might be out of luck. For older PPC OSX, a 128 GB drive is probably out of the question just due to how the whole Mac system is here. If you want to check if your drive will be compatible, try plugging it into the Mac before boot, go into Open Firmware and poke around usb0 and usb1 - if it lists a drive, then you should be good to use it to write this installation image onto the drive.

Okay, plug in a USB drive you want to format on your host computer (READ: DELETE ALL DATA FROM) and get the product and vendor ID of the USB drive. In my Linux console, I'm using the command "lsusb" and finding my USB drive. From lsusb, note those two strings separated by colon (:).

Now we're going to boot back into our OSX emulator but also passing our USB drive through. Using that info from lsusb, my command to start up now will be: sudo qemu-system-ppc -M mac99 -g 1280x1024x32 -L pc-bios -hda hdd.img -m 1G -cpu g4 -cdrom tiger.iso -device usb-host,vendorid=0x####,productid=0x#### -- Note I also removed "-boot d" so it does not want to start from the emulated OSX disc image. But leave the "-cdrom tiger.iso" part.

Aaaand... uh... maybe that should work. Honestly, this is one of the tougher parts, getting QEMU, emulating an old-a$$ version of OSX, speaking in different CPU-language, interfacing with actual USB hardware in a modern Linux environment. That's a lot of variables. So unfortunately for you, if this command doesn't let your OSX emulator see your USB drive, you're just going to have to do some Google-fu yourself. Search up some combination of "qemu usb passthrough linux" or "qemu powerpc usb osx" or whatever and you'll probably find the same 10 forum posts I had to sift through to get all this to work. DOUBLE unfortunately, even in the course of writing this guide I found that my original command (above) is not getting QEMU to see my USB drives!

Well, whenever you get this bastard zombie OSX emulator running and able to see your actual USB drive, go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Select the top-most USB drive item (icon should be orange and have the "official" drive/vendor name) and go to "Partition." Easiest thing to do here is make sure there's just 1 partition, name it whatever, and most importantly: click on "Options..." towards the bottom and make sure "Apple Partition Map" is selected and hit OK. Now click Partition.

That middle "Options..." button at the bottom that allows you to select Apple Partition Map is pretty much the whole reason we're emulating OSX 10.4 Tiger and not something else. As far as common OSX goes, Tiger is the best one for this - the button was certainly not there when I had Panther or Puma on my iMac G3.

Once the drive is partitioned, go to the Restore tab in Disk Utility. If you're the drag and drop type, you can drag the disc image from the left side into the "Source" field and drag the WHITE-ICON USB DRIVE to the Destination field and click Restore. Once this finishes, you now have a bootable USB flash drive of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Take a deep breath.

Steve's Revenge: Booting from USB

Now for the final boss of booting from USB. Apple preferred people boot from a CD, DVD or network location for a darn good reason, that of read speed. You're going to deal with USB 1.0 here because that's all the G3 iMacs ever had, if they even have USB at all (the earliest ones don't). They were pushing for FireWire - it had better speeds compared to what USB offered at the time. But now no one has FireWire devices! Funny how this all works out.

So with the actual Mac computer off, plug the USB drive into a port and boot into Open Firmware (Cmd + Opt + O + F, hit the computer power button). If you need a reminder on what's in which port, remember devalias and dev usb#.

Now for the magic command: probe-usb boot usb0/disk:3,\\:tbxi -- again, your USB and drive/partition numbers may vary. That "disk:3" part could be 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, I don't know. It may take a few guesses at this point. Maybe you can find the magic number from the Info button in Disk Utility in OSX.

If all went well with your drive, then you will be on your way to installing Mac OSX as if it's being read from the original install DVD. Again, though, be aware that this is going through USB 1.0. Honestly, I did this after sundown one night, dosed off and after a couple hours, the install had failed lol. But that's because I messed with too many advanced install options, I think. The next time I changed the installer parameters in the menus you get and it installed fine. But still - this process took hours when done via USB! Don't say I didn't warn you if you have somewhere else to be in 30 minutes.

Though now, assuming all went well and some ancient hard disk drive didn't give out in your iMac, congrats! You have Tiger running on your iMac. (If you want to replace the hard drive in your Mac, you'll have to research IDE to SATA adapters and get a SATA SSD no larger than 128 GB.)

So now what?

Great Software

Of course, now you're gonna get all greedy and want to DO things with your computer?! Well, I'll entertain the notion. Your best friend in this endaevor is still Macintosh Garden. Support them any way you can, since without them, our PowerPC computing dreams might be much bleaker. All the old major PowerPC-compatible OSX software is on here, so search for something and be on your way!

Some cool Mac PowerPC software I've found includes:

• Marble Blast Gold. Hood classic.
• Old Office. lol why not
• Quake (supply your own game data though!)
• AquaFox (browser)

Wait, a browser...?!

Networking

That's right - although Safari can work perfectly fine still to access basic http:// sites, your PowerPC Mac will need extra help to see anything more modern. That's what AquaFox can help out with! It's a version of Firefox specifically designed/compiled to help old computers like an iMac G3 get online again. I'm actually able to visit my own site here with it just fine! (The guy who compiled Aquafox ALSO runs off Neocities! Go say hi!)

Now, you may be wondering what your options are to get older PowerPC Macs online. First of all, if you have an AirPort card installed in your iMac G3, for instance, you may have issues getting on modern routers/gateways/whatever due to the network security protocol Tiger expects. Your best bets are using WEP or LEAP-type passwords/encryption types, but these suck and your router probably doesn't even let you select these as password options anymore.

However - and you didn't hear this from me - a quick and dirty way you can get online if your Mac has wifi capabilities is to use your phone hotspot. Most smartphone hotspots have the ability to have NO password, thus no security protocols that the Mac wouldn't recognize. Of course, this comes with the caveat that your hotspot has no password. So do this at your own risk, obviously. But once you get online, you'll actually find that your Mac is asking for updates ONLINE. This killed me whenever I first put my Mac online, why does Apple still host these updates?! It's hilarious and a little heartwarming.

There are other options to get your older Mac online such as buying older AirPort stations or using wired connections (dial-up, anyone?). But my only option for now is temporary no-password hotspots. One day I'll keep this old iMac online!!

The Current Most Important Mac Function

Last but not least, here is the single most important function your Mac can now do, once online.

Download some software that can play media from a network location, like VLC.

Open VLC on your Mac and go to File and connect to a network location.

Now enter in something like http://207.148.12.121/listen/jojo2k/radio.ogg and open it.

WHAT??? Don't look at me like that!! I don't make any money off this, y'know!! :) For real though, this is where I get my kicks... running open source software in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere, streaming bootleg video game music to a 1999 PowerPC iMac computer using an Android hotspot... I'm giggling and kicking my feet as I write this. Metaphorically, of course. Probably.

Feel free to check out my Hoarde as well, I have a list of http:// sites that work well on stock Safari. It's fun just using the base software in OSX too!