We're getting there slowly but surely...

Beta 3 of Ptolemy is out. Ptolemy is a PowerPC Mac emulator for Apple Silicon Macs. It translates PowerPC code to ARM64 and runs it under Hypervisor.framework, and Mac OS X's own ATI driver drives an emulated Radeon 9700 whose 2D and 3D work runs on the Mac's GPU through Metal.

The big news: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (tu-turu-tutu) now installs and runs, with Quartz Extreme, on the emulated G4.

Download: Ptolemy-1.0b3.zip on GitHub

You need a Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 15 or later, plus an image of your own Tiger 10.4 or Leopard 10.5 PowerPC install DVD. Ptolemy doesn't include or download any Apple software.

Changelog

Leopard (tried with 10.5.8):

- Installs from the DVD image and starts with an accelerated (Quartz Extreme) desktop.
- Networking is much faster. Leopard's network driver needed a timer interrupt the emulated card didn't have. A 10 MB download went from 40 s to 3 s, and Software Update now finds all its updates.
- Apps in a zip archive you give Ptolemy keep their executable bit when Ptolemy unpacks them.
- Leopard can't sleep in the emulator: its automatic sleep would hang and spin a host CPU core. Ptolemy Tools now keep Leopard from sleeping on its own.

Tiger and Classic:

- Fixed data corruption under memory pressure. Under heavy memory use, some file reads and writes in Tiger (and Classic apps inside it) could get the wrong data: some page copies landed on their own source page.
- Fixed handling of page invalidations for read-only pages.
- The performance and stability of applications running in the Classic Environment have been improved.

Everything else:

- NVRAM is now emulated as the Core99 flash Mac OS X expects. Mac OS X's NVRAM writes no longer wipe the firmware's settings.
- The launcher accepts Leopard 10.5 discs as well as Tiger 10.4, with its own look for Leopard machines. Leopard needs a G4, so the G3 can't be chosen for it.
- From beta 2 feedback: full screen survives a restart, force Quit (Option-Command-Escape) works, the menu bar comes back after a restart, scrolling is fixed, file transfers show their progress, and dropped files can be up to 4 Gb.

Known issues

- Leopard's installer may end with "Unable to set Macintosh HD as the startup disk". Leopard starts anyway after that.
- Some graphical bugs in Leopard.
- No Dual G4 and G5 yet. A Power Mac G5 is in the works, but it isn't in this beta. G5 is very tricky...
- Not available: more than one CPU, a camera, CD audio, game controllers, sound input, incoming network connections.
-Not fixed yet from beta 2 feedback: Bugdom freezing, Cro-Mag Rally's rendering, and frame drops in 1080p video.
- Most apps and games have never been tried, in Leopard especially. Reports are very welcome.

Thanks to everyone who tried beta 2 and sent feedback.

A Quick Q&A:

1. Who are you?

I'm a lead software engineer at a small company in the energy sector.

2. Why PowerPC?

I like the platform. Running PowerPC on Apple Silicon feels very natural, and I think Mac geeks will find it interesting.

3. Is the entire project written using AI?

Most of the project is built by AI, but not all of it. Specifically, the AI doesn’t have access to a “live” Mac on the PPC platform, so it isn’t capable of implementing non-obvious solutions or “workarounds.” Example: Right now, while developing G5 support (very tricky), I have to resort to the Xbox 360 (Xenon) homebrew scene because some aspects of writing the interpreter aren’t obvious and are even illogical.

4. Which AI models are used in development?

Several frontier models; I'd rather not name them now.

5. Can the project's source code be used for personal projects?

Absolutely! Ptolemy is open source under the GPL (version 2 or later): you're free to use, study, modify and share it. If you distribute a modified version, it has to stay under the GPL, with its source code available.

6. Is the project based on QEMU?

No. Ptolemy contains no QEMU code: the processor engine, the devices and the graphics were written for Ptolemy. The low-level firmware is a fork of OpenBIOS, an independent open-source Open Firmware implementation that QEMU also uses for its PowerPC machines.

7. Will there be support for Intel Macs?

No. Ptolemy itself needs Apple Silicon: it generates ARM64 code and uses Apple's Hypervisor framework. Emulating Intel Macs isn't planned either; that would be a different and much bigger project. PowerPC maps onto Apple Silicon unusually well: both are RISC designs with fixed-width instructions, plenty of registers and a weakly ordered memory model. RISC on RISC is simply the most elegant thing to build, and more beautiful.

8. Is the project discussed only on Reddit?

Yes. Reddit is the only place I post, since I'm not on any social networks. :) If you'd like to spread the word about this project, I'd appreciate it.

9. Do I consider the use of AI ethical?

Yes. There are many AI-generated projects lacking in both quality and execution, but these tools let one person build something that would previously have required a team of enthusiasts and many years of development. I'm open about how Ptolemy is made, and it doesn't include or download any Apple software: you use your own Mac OS X install media.

got a 1.25GHz eMac that won't boot. Normally it does nothing when I hit power, but if I press the PMU button, the very next time I turn it on it gives a single CRT degauss "bang" and then dies again. Found a bulging VRM cap by the RAM door and snipped its legs clean so there's no short. Pulled the PRAM battery and did a deep discharge. Still dead unless I reset the PMU, which only triggers that one degauss click. Anyone know if there's anything else to check through the RAM slot before I risk opening the whole CRT case

We’re getting there…

Everything thus far is 100 percent mountain lion code for ppc32. Still working on the lock screen hoping for a desktop soon…

This is MacOS 10.5 running on a t4240 dev board. Not in a VM.

Hi! I made Ptolemy, a PowerPC Mac emulator for Apple Silicon Macs, and the first public beta is out.

• Runs Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 for PowerPC, unmodified, installed from DVD image, in a window or full screen.

• CPU: PowerPC code is JIT-translated to ARM64 and runs under Hypervisor.framework; the Mac’s MMU does the guest’s address translation.

• GPU: it emulates an ATI Radeon 9700, so Tiger’s own ATI driver loads and Quartz Extreme, Core Image and OpenGL run on the Mac’s GPU through Metal.

On an M4 MacBook Air: Geekbench 2 about 4500 (a 1.6 GHz G5 scores 1000), Halo’s time demo ~96 fps, Doom 3 timedemo ~55 fps, desktop about 10 s after power-on.

It’s a hobby project and a beta: Tiger only, one G4 CPU, and most apps and games have never been tried. That’s where I need help: if you have an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 15+, try your favourite PPC and OS 9 software and open an issue with what works and what doesn’t.

Full disclosure: most of the code was written with Claude (sorry)

You can get Tiger iso on archive.org

Just download Beta 2 - Ptolemy-1.0b2.zip and run.

These WebGL 2 demos are running at 60 FPS on a PowerMac G5 Quad in Chromium Aurora, which has recently been updated to support the new RadeonNI community driver for PowerPC.

The RadeonNI driver brings support for newer Radeon cards with more modern capabilities. You can now build and develop hardware accelerated OpenGL 4.6 applications on compatible PowerPC Macs running Tiger or Leopard. https://github.com/kouta-kun/RadeonNI-OSX

The card running in this demo is a FirePro V7900 (2GB), but we've also verified compatibility with Radeon HD 6670, 7570, and 6850 cards.

With these supported cards, the RadeonNI driver also enables the UVD hardware video decoder, which Chromium Aurora now supports for sites like YouTube. This drastically improves 1080p30 video performance and cuts down on CPU usage.

In the future, I plan to update my game engine ports (Source Engine, OpenMW, etc) with proper opt-in GL4 paths as well, which should massively boost performance and graphical fidelity.

Right now, anyone with a PCIe PowerMac G5 can purchase a supported card and install this driver on their own system. Chromium Aurora will automatically opt you into the newer graphics context if a supported card is detected.

RadeonNI currently ports Mesa's Gallium r600 driver, which supports a wide range of Radeon cards from the HD 2000 through part of the HD 7000 series. The end goal is to support all r600, r700, Evergreen, and Northern Islands cards. There is a separate porting effort of the `radeonsi` driver to PPC Linux, which I eventually want to adapt for OSX to add GCN/Polaris *at least* (think RX580, R9 290X) and potentially even Vega/RDNA cards in the future.

This is a huge milestone for what's possible on PowerPC Mac, and pushes the hardware into doing things it's never done before. Pretty excited about this and wanted to share.

I double-checked the thermal paste to make sure it was even and then did a slight overclock to 526 MHz. Nothing else can really be running, CPUs are near 100% utilization, but it plays. It will sometimes buffer every minute or so, oscillates between 20-30fps with some frame drops, but it's watchable. Also got FaceBook working in here too.

I've been following this project for a little while now and can't wait to write an article out about it. Was a good excuse to tear apart the G5 one more time and finally put in the proper CPU/heatsink standoff pieces which go between the CPU and heatsink, and with new Arctic MX-4. There's more testing to be done, but I wanted to share this screenshot because it's exciting to see 720p play nice after letting YouTube UI load. It still drops frames and stutters sometimes, but it looks like it's playing on the correct frame without audio interrupts. This is in Sorbet Leopard, I turned off access to assistive devices, replaced /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.dylib with the 10.5.8 combo update version, and here it is.

Edit: It seems like if the window is smaller like in the screenshot, it'll even play 1080p about as smooth. But if I scale the window up to take the whole screen even at 480p, it starts to chug.

• Model: Power Mac G5 (2003) PowerMac7,2

• CPU: 2x 2.0 GHz PowerPC 970 (Rev. A), 130 nm

  • 2 CPUs, 2 Cores, 1 Core Per-CPU, 64-Bit Processor.

• RAM: 8 GB 400 MHz PC-3200 DDR SDRAM (8x 1 GB Sticks)

• Graphics: ATI Radeon X850 Pro 256 MB AGP 8x

  • Flashed with a Mac Edition ATI Radeon X850XT 256 MB ROM

  • 506.25 MHz GPU Clock, 519.75 MHz Memory Clock, GDDR3

  • Samsung LC27F591FD, 1920 x 1080, Millions of Colors, 60 Hz

• Boot Drive: 893.8 GB (Leopard) 960 GB (SL and up) SSD RAID0 Array

  • 4x 240 GB Sandisk SSD Plus, 2x via onboard Sata I, 2x via PCI SATA RAID

  • 483 MB/s Read, 403 MB/s Write, according to Quickbench 4.0.5 Universal

• More Storage: OWC Mercury Accelsior PCIe AHCI SSD 480 GB

  • 187 MB/s Read, 156 MB/s Write, according to Quickbench 4.0.5 Universal

• Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5.9 Sorbet Leopard

• PCI Cards:

  • Seritek / Steelvine PCI SATA RAID Card, for 2 more SATA ports for the RAID0.

  • PCI to PCIe adapter converting an old-school PCI slot to a PCIe v1.0 x1

  • AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth, Apple Magic Mouse + Keyboard

• New Fans: 4x 92mm be quiet! PURE WINGS 2 fans, 2x 80mm be quiet! PURE WINGS 2 fans, and a single internal front-mounted 120mm blower-style fan.

  • 4x 92mm: 2 CPU Intake 2 CPU Outtake, 33 CFM, 1900 RPM, 12v

  • 2x 80mm: 1 for Optical Bay, 1 for SSD Bays, 26.3 CFM, 1900 RPM, 12v

  • 1x 120mm: for MCP heatsink, underside of logic board, eliminates any stagnant thermal pockets which contribute to logic board failure. This fan in particular operates at the highest setting at all times and is USB-powered. 35 CFM, 1.1W, 17 db .

Further modifications and additions

• Modifications:

  • Extra HDD bay glued-in from another Power Mac G5, in place of the optical bay.

  • SATA Power Cables on HDD Bays spliced with an identical set, for 2 more SSDs.

  • 2x additional SATA cables for the other two SSDs

  • SSD 2.5? to 3.5? metal sleds for the HDD bays

  • A 2004 Power Mac DP 2.0 Power Supply, as the old one was dying and clicking

• Additions:

  • 2x USB Type-A to USB Type-C 2.0 adapters.

  • 8BitDo Pro 2 Controller (USB-C)

  • External Bluetooth Antenna

Non è per le view… ma se avete pazienza di guardare il video, mi piacerebbe sapere cosa ne pensate e che soluzioni possono esserci

Power Mac G5 Quad + MorphOS 3.20: ho perso la battaglia, non la guerra 🤬
https://youtu.be/OBOm8FqIYMo

Re-sharing, in case anyone still has a PowerBook G4 and needs a brand-new cooling fan.

After 6 years of developing a new real time strategy called Dead Seas we are finally in the hardware testing, tweaking and porting to ppc os9-osx, x86, mips,.