G4 Power Mac

Recap

In the first article about my 1999 Power Mac G4 I wrote about how I got this Macintosh out of storage and put it back into, well, service. A few modernisations were already made back then: the mechanical hard drive was replaced by a SD card reader plus the Mac got a quiet case fan and new memory was put in. Additional improvements I also discussed in part one, and some were made since then. Exciting times indeed!

Memory Max-Out

Three more modules of the same memory tested earlier had arrived. With them installed the computer‘s RAM finally amounted to 1 GB, operating at a at 100 MHz, as this is the fastest this Macintosh can handle. Stress-testing proved that the old workstation does indeed run reliably with this type of memory. But with the maximum amount of memory installed, could this computer run Crysis now? Well, to figure out how performance was affected by the upgrade a before-and-after comparison on both operating systems, Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 was due.

Benchmarks

I ran XBench 1.3 on Mac OS X and Speedometer 4 on Mac OS 9. As the individual runs‘ results varied slightly, each test was repeated three times, and for the diagram below, the average of the two best results in each set was taken into account.

On Mac OS X XBench showed a performance increase of 2–12% except for Stream Add and Strean Triad which finished with slightly lower results, up to 2%. With Speedometer on Mac OS 9 no change was measurable.

TenFourFox

While for most tasks and applications an increase in speed was not immediately noticeable, TenFourFox, a fork of Mozilla Firefox for PowerPC, launched significantly faster and page loads were also accelerated. But do not get me wrong here, faster does not mean it suddenly was blazingly fast, as we would expect from a modern computer. The biggest remaining bottlenecks – slow processor, bus and ram speeds – were unchanged. Just to give you an idea: Loading and rendering this page took about 10–15 seconds over fast broadband. Thanks to the extra memory we were not taking minutes anymore.

Would I recommend TenFourFox on the upgraded Power Mac? First, I do not recommend using a 400 MHz Power Mac as your daily driver or anything close to that at all. With this out of the way I think it is fair to say that going online with TenFourFox is not a bad idea when you either want to use modern services on your local network or visit specific light-weight websites you know and trust, especially if the whole process is still faster than switching to a modern computer and back. And for pure nostalgia why not read websites preserved from the last millennium on era appropriate hardware? Isn‘t the journey its own reward?

Conclusion

Complex applications do indeed benefit from the upgrade, TenFourFox is the best example. Mac OS X with its true multitasking and multi-user Unix foundation also profits while Mac OS 9 can function happily with a fraction of the amount of RAM available and does by itself not have any use for the extra, for its applications however the above statement applies, of course. Crysis, as you might have guessed from the beginning, does not run on this computer.

Faster USB, at last

After a bit of searching I got my hands on a used USB-2 PCI expansion card with a NEC chip on it for a good price. When it arrived a couple of days later I only had to remove a case bracket, put the card in the corresponding slot and boom... USB 2.0 with up to 480 Mbits/s on Mac OS X. I have to mention that, as expected, with Mac OS 9's USB drivers I only get 12 Mbits though. Since then I run a low-profile USB flash drive as second hard drive through the adapter card.

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Bluetooth Bites

I found a USB-Bluetooth dongle labelled BlueWalker in my old parts bin and was positively surprised when I saw it work out of the box with my Power Mac; both probably were pals twenty years ago. Thanks to the internal USB-A connector on the USB-2 expansion card I could keep it save and out of sight. This way Bluetooth felt like a feature built-in from factory. Without any issues I was able to exchange files over Bluetooth between Mac OS X Tiger and a Catalina Mac.

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Apple File Sharing

Yes, Apple once used their own file sharing protocol – Apple Filing Protocol (AFP). Initially designed for AppleTalk networks later iterations favoured TCP/IP instead. Unfortunately it is incompatible with Apple's most recent File System (APFS) and therefore you will have a hard time sharing files over AFP from your new Macs. You can however still access AFP shares from a macOS Catalina client.

As I already had some experience with netatalk I gave version 2.2.6 a go on a virtual machine (host: Oracle VirtualBox 6.1 / macOS 10.13.6, guest: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). My goal was to make content from my every-day LAN server available to older Macs, that's why I went for this centralised approach. Also being able to upload applications or fonts was a must, that is why features like resource forks and Finder info needed to work reliably. The latter includes the essential file type and file creator fields. So after setting up a writable guest share (a local folder on the virtual machine) and another read-only share forwarding folders from the host file system I had a functioning AFP server that offered plenty options for later tweaking. Both shares worked flawlessly on both, Mac OS X Tiger and Mac OS 9.2.2. I had to manually provide the server IP to point Mac OS 9's Chooser to the right direction while Tiger discovered the new server on the network by itself, thanks to the zeroconf discovery services Bonjour and Avahi.

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This was a pretty good start: I was able to bridge the gap between Mac OS 9 and macOS Catalina with one file-sharing service, which will be useful for archiving data or retro computing in the future. AppleTalk will be interesting to look into for getting even older Macs connected. Maybe more on this later.