This is my Motorola StarMax 3000 that I bought back in the 90’s. It’s one of the Mac clones from the short period where Apple had a clone program. It has the Apple designed Tanzania board that the 4400 also used. The 4400 is generally regarded as the least “Mac” Mac, so the StarMax is even less of a Mac I guess. It was my first “Mac”, and I got it pretty cheap when they were getting rid of the old stock.
The StarMax was universally criticized for its obscene noise level, and it is really is very loud, to the point of being unusable.
I’ve worked a little on mine recently.
It has two fans - a 92mm in the PSU and a 60mm in the front, which takes care of the CPU. Yes, really. 60mm.
I have replaced those with Noctuas.
Another noise source, which is perhaps even worse, is the obscenely loud OEM IBM hard drive. I have replaced it with a CF card in the back, also making getting files across easier.
The StarMax has also been fitted with a Sonnet CPU upgrade, which replaces the L2 DIMM and needs an extension to activate.
All in all, this is a delightfully quirky system.

Did you know that you can't build #uv on #PowerPC anymore?

rustc-LLVM ERROR: out of memory
Allocation failed
error: could not compile `uv` (bin "uv")

Yep, the compiler runs out of address space. #RustLang is doing great!

Thinking Different, Thinking Slowly: LLMs on a PowerPC Mac [The Resistor Network]

http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2025/03/thinking-different-thinking-slowly-llms.html

SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator

https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/sheepshaver

Episódio 161 – Be, BeBox e BeOS – Parte A

https://retropolis.com.br/2025/03/12/episodio-161-parte-a/

Project Espresso alpha now available

"We are excited to announce that Project Espresso, our project to port Adélie Linux to the Wii U console, has just released alpha repositories. We will be providing root images for SD cards in the coming days. For more information, including links to the repositories and how to set up your existing install to use these binaries, see the linked blog post. Happy computing!"

https://blog.atwilcox.tech/2025/02/24/espresso-alpha-available/

#retro #linux #powerpc
Did some reason my ADHD brain remembered running Linux on my Apple Performa 6400/200 tower.
Found this https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4088680/mklinux-the-delightfully-weird-powerpc-mac-linux-distro-of-the-1990s
It's a good quick rundown of running a micro-kernel based OS. It was a wild time.

6400: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_6400
The main board was on a giant socket and slid in/out with little effort.
It floored my PC friends at the time how easy it was to access the internals.
That was the last/best Mac I owned. MacOS 9 was a weird thing, nevermind 10

For those with a G4 Cube, you can now light it up from the bottom with this little base, on an idea by @xodium :

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6964919

https://github.com/mmuman/cad-retro-parts/blob/main/Apple/Macintosh/G4cube_base.scad

Some real photos here:
https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/project-satanicube-or-xodiums-g4-cube-build.4206/

Does anyone know how to swap the Command and Option keys on Mac OS 8.6?

I tried following the instructions from here: https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/how-swap-cmd-and-option-windows-keyboards-classic-mac-os (which worked for me on System 7.1), but they had no effect on Mac OS 8.6.

I even tried modifying the other KMAP resources (and substituting their IDs in ROv#) but that had no effect either.

The new Power Mac 6500, "Miracle" has been moved onto the Tower of Power

The internal hard drive is truly dead - Apple System Profiler is the only thing that is able to see it. So I connected the 4 GB LaCie SCSI drive up and formatted that to use for now, until I can pop in a new internal drive or a CF to IDE adapter.

There's still a weird problem with the video. Sometimes when I boot the machine, there's no video at all, and I have to power it off and back on again a few times before the video returns. But when it does have a picture, it's stable, and not flickering like it did on the TV or the monitor that it came with.

Finding an install disc to boot this from is troublesome. Most of my classic Mac OS install discs I burned 25 years ago, and turns out they don't work properly any more and just make the CD drive spin up and down a lot (like the 8.6 disc in the attached pic).

Eventually I found the original Mac OS 8.1 install disc from my Dad's old G3, which works, so I'm going to install that for now and see if I can upgrade the OS either to 8.6 or 9.1 later, once I have the machine on the network and can install from there.

I fired up the old iMac G4 and now you can build and run #oksh using the IBM xlc compiler for Mac OS X. It works on Tiger at least, 10.4.11.

https://github.com/ibara/oksh/commit/2484299d0c295607a0b6890be9b26b5710ab48f1

EDIT: It is taken.
#Free to a good home: A Umax Storm Surge motherboard from 1996 with two ASPD slots. This was stored with a note with a question mark. I recognize the handwriting, but have no clue what that's supposed to mean.
#RetroComputing #VintageComputers #PowerPC #ASPD #PowerMacintosh #Umax #MacClone #MultiProcessor

The only way to burn a .TOAST image is with a MAC? Or do we have an alternative?

I need to burn an Install CD for MacOs 9.2.1 (fr) to restore an iMac G3.

I wrote an extensive article about the Mac Mini G4 as a retro-gaming machine.

For me it is near perfect as it is able to run almost anything from the late 80s up to early 2000s. And it has a very reduced footprint and can be easily plugged into modern display

This article also expose some technical aspects such as the way PowerPC Mac OS machines could ran 680x0 software and delves into the history of PowerPC until the G4.

https://www.xtof.info/MacMiniG4-the-best-classic-macintosh-for-retrogaming.html

I landed some improvements and small optimizations to #pixman's AltiVec code. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixman/pixman/-/merge_requests/136

It was fun working with a new (to me) instruction set and trying to figure out how to puzzle together the pieces into something that improved the `pix_multiply()` function (which is kind of the core primitive of most fast paths).

I couldn't figure out a way to use the `vec_mradds`/`vmhraddshs` instruction. Maybe you can? (see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixman/pixman/-/merge_requests/136#note_2699795)

Installed Power #MachTen 4.1.4 and upgraded to 5.0.5. After startup I got reminded quickly that backspace didn't erase characters but 'stty erase "^H"' fixed that.

MachTen is bundled with #afterstep but very few other binaries. and compiling OpenSSL might take some time...

Does anyone know any repo of precompiled #ppc binaries for this platform?

I fixed an issue in pixman's Altivec code the other day -- https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pixman/commit/?id=207626180d0282bb14a50f2e494174f54ac8a6ce

And in the process, I read through the Altivec docs and discovered that there are vector instructions that pack and unpack between a8r8g8b8 and a1r5g5b5 formats (but nothing fo r5g6b5).

Any clues why? Was a1r5g5b5 really common on Mac OS or something? I don't think I've seen a1r5g5b5 used anywhere.

"The engineering models of both the Curiosity Mars rover (fg) and the Perseverance Mars rover share space in the recently expanded garage at the Mars Yard. Curiosity’s Earthy double is called MAGGIE, short for Mars Automated Giant Gizmo for Integrated Engineering; Perseverance’s double goes by OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for...)"
[NASA
Twin Rover Twins](https://science.nasa.gov/resource/twin-rover-twins/)
#mars #nasa #space #powerpc #rover #robotics #technology #exploration #science #garage #pimpmyrover

Painter 7, running on Mac OS 9 on a 1.5Ghz G4 #PowerPC Mac Mini from 2005 + an old Wacom Graphire 2.

Not bad for a 19 year old machine. This is surprisingly useable. Excuse the quality of the art. I swear I was better at it in the past century. Holding a phone + a rotated screen + left hand doesn’t make it better …

Considering I once used (an earlier version of) this app on a 100Mhz PC this flies.
#RetroComputing