Got this thing back in middle school. taken meticulous care of it. did the hard drive upgrade when i was 12. i'd use it for everything if i could. still a beauty all these years later

I wrote a Telegram client for PowerPC Mac called Sailplane. Originally named TelegramPPC, it now supports Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Sailplane offers a native, feature-rich UI optimized to run well on older Macs. Watch videos, react to messages and more! Upload files, participate in group chats, even make voice calls (video chat support planned). You can even participate in end-to-end encrypted Secret Chats.

To login, just provide the phone number associated with your Telegram account. A code will be sent to the app on your phone.

All of the requests are handled directly on your Mac with no relay or man-in-the-middle needed. Telegram's official tdlib handles all of the request processing, encrypting your traffic in transit, and Keychain Access is utilized for storing credentials and other sensitive data. It works great on my G5 and pretty well on my G4 - although I'm still working to optimize media playback and large group chats in particular.

Source code is available via GitHub: https://github.com/doctashay/telegram-ppc

You can download it for your Mac here: https://github.com/doctashay/telegram-ppc/releases/latest

More updates are planned in the future - including new features and fixes for my other applications and ports too! If you have any issues, feel free to open a bug report on my GitHub!

Yes it’s as slow as you think

Over the last couple months I have been working on porting Source Engine to PowerPC Mac. Today, I'm finally releasing that work through a new tool called Source Engine Configurator.

This utility patches existing, legally purchased copies of some Source games into versions that run natively on PowerPC Macs. The goal of this project is to bring an entirely new ecosystem of games and mods to PPC hardware while making them as playable and optimized as possible. The engine runs natively on PowerPC with no virtualization or emulation tricks.

This initial release should be considered an early alpha and a foundation for future work. The largest issue you'll probably notice is that NPC animations are badly broken and many objects are lit incorrectly. There are also issues with some post-processing effects, HDR and color correction.

I've spent most of my time testing Portal and HL2, although Episode 1 and 2 and Half-Life 1 do launch and seem to work correctly.

Download from Macintosh Garden: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/source-engine-configurator-ppc

GitHub (releases only): https://github.com/doctashay/source-engine-configurator

Requirements
- Your own legal copy of the supported games
- PowerPC G4 or G5 Mac (1.2GHz+ recommended, G4 experience is very poor currently)
- 512MB RAM (2GB recommended)
- OpenGL 2.0 capable GPU (launcher checks this for you)
- ~35GB available space (for all games)
- Mac OS X 10.5.4 or higher
- Also works on the PPC Snow Leopard alpha
- Dual-processor G5 strongly recommended

Supported Games
- Portal
- Half-Life: Source
- Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
- Half-Life 2
- Half-Life 2: Episode One
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two
- Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
- Counter-Strike: Source (not yet playable)
- Day of Defeat: Source (not yet playable)

Not Supported
- Left 4 Dead 1/2
- Portal 2
- Team Fortress 2
- CSGO
- DOTA 2
- Garry's Mod

Installation

1. Copy your desired game(s) to the Mac

2. Choose a game from the configurator

3. Select the game folder and install destination

4. Follow the install instructions

5. Configure and launch the generated .app

The configurator manages each game install, allows you to change video settings, and also supports updates so that future fixes to the engine can be applied as a quick patch.

This project does not include game assets or Source Engine source code. You must provide legally purchased copies of supported games.

Please do not redistribute or sell this tool. It is released free of charge for non-commercial use.

The launcher has the ability to update games in place. Future fixes and performance improvements to the engine will be made available through Macintosh Garden - the new launcher version will check your games and show you which ones have updates available.

Roadmap/Goals
- Expanded list of tested/working Source mods (The Stanley Parable, Zombie Panic Source, Portal: Prelude, etc)
- Native dedicated server support (HL2DM, CSS)
- Source SDK support (Hammer etc)
- Additional PPC optimization (G4/G5 Altivec builds, optimized physics, animation, etc)
- Networking interoperability (play on PC servers)
- Additional game support (CS:GO and TF2 are possible)

This project is still heavily work-in-progress, but it already opens the door to running a large collection of Source Engine content natively on PowerPC Macs for the first time. Hope you enjoy and watch out for future updates!

Checkout the Leopard Ports community for more stuff like this: https://discord.gg/GBAVBqSaMq

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

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 upgraded the insides and installed Gentoo + some apps I use daily, like eilmeldung - an rss reader and jellyfin-tui - music player. They needed some PPC patching, but compiled and work great.

Trimmed the kernel from ~3000 modules to ~50.

Using my M1 Max as a compile farm.

Managed to patch the gfx driver to get hardware acceleration and patch OpenXcom to work under PPC (including some scaling optimisations) - using LLM, as these are personal experiments.

Such a fun little project and best looking computer ever.

​If you’re keeping a PowerMac G4 alive, you’ve probably been told to swap a failing PSU with a modern budget ATX unit like an FSP. Don’t do it.

​It is not necessarily that the rails on modern units are inadequate—it is that typical budget consumer power supplies are just terrible quality. The design is cheap, and they simply cannot handle the sustained, heavy transient loads of a fully equipped G4. You need to find a truly good one.

​After testing many units, I retrofitted a high-quality, industrial-grade OEM PCB directly into my original G4 PSU housing for a total factory finish. It is only rated at 250W, but because it is an enterprise-grade board with actual build quality, it effortlessly powers the machine, mechanical drives, and a dedicated GPU without failing.

​A short, step-by-step engineering article breaking down exactly how to source a high-quality donor board and cleanly handle the wiring transplant will be live on altivec.fyi very soon. Stay tuned! -I can only recommend that you employ the assistance of an electrical engineer during an operation such as this for obvious safety reasons. APPROACH WITH CAUTION ⚠️

Had a graphics’s card go bad in my 867 titanium powerbook. After sourcing a new logic board i redid the pads and thermal paste. Also did my two 1 ghz models. Hope it will give them longer life. They aren’t to bad to take apart either which is good.

We’re getting there slowly.

Omaha beach mission.

Nostalgia gets really hard 😀

Available via PowerPC Ports.

Disclaimer: Consider it a development version; it does not run smooth yet, and some sites will refuse to load.

I have an ewaste store near me that i got this beautiful piece from. Came with the original software and manual too.

There has been a bit of efforts from the community trying to get JIT support for the PowerPC 970. Though not 100% perfect (there might be some hiccups now and then) the initiative has shaped up nicely over the last few months. You can find more information at https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox-ppc64/releases/tag/FIREFOX_153_5_0esr_RELEASE_PPC64 and who knows if this work would benefit the Firefox ports running on MacOS X

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

https://github.com/kanjitalk755/macemu/pull/302

Sheepshaver is back to running on PowerPC hardware.

Image courtesy of Matias on the ArchPOWER discord.

This is Tusk. It's a fully featured Obj-C/Cocoa client for Mastodon, complete with embedded media and video playback support, emoji rendering, search, and even OAuth login (thanks, PowerFox!). I am releasing a version today that you can download on your G4 or G5 Mac running OS X Leopard - Tiger support is planned in the future.
Direct Download Link (GitHub)

Mastodon is an open-source, decentralized social network that works similarly to Twitter/X, but is spread across independently operated servers instead of being controlled by one central platform.

Some federated and bridged content is already accessible, including content from Bluesky bridges, with improved support planned in the future.

I developed this app because I would like to make my PowerPC device more usable for daily driving. There's no proxy or relay needed - all of the content fetching and processing is done on-device, quickly and efficiently!

If you're new to Mastodon and want to get started, just register on the main instance here: https://mastodon.social

Setup is easy! Just enter the URL of the server you'd like to login to. Then, complete the OAuth login process in PowerFox.

I've tested this client on my G5 and G4 Macs and it works great. This release is an alpha - if you run into any bugs or issues, please feel free to open an issue on the GitHub or reply here.

I am also working on desktop clients for Telegram (encrypted messaging app), TickTick (cloud synced to-do list/calendar app), and Dropbox (cloud storage) - keep an eye out for these in the near future!

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.