Since my first post after receiving my 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, I’ve learned a number of things about this machine.
Following the Retro Battlestations subreddit, there was a group activity a while back to dial into the group’s BBS using, yes, a real dial up modem, from your retro machine of choice. So I thought I’d give it a go.
The internal modem is on a board
Internal modem missing
about the size of a pack of cards, and it’s normally screwed to standoffs on motherboard in the top left of the motherboard in this photo. It was obviously removed in this machine, so that explains why an internal modem was not showing up as installed.
Not to be deterred, I noticed you can pick up an Apple USB modem for just $10 online so I ordered one. Wanting to give it a go truely old-style, I wanted to dial in from OS 9 – this is when I found out that this USB Modem is a ‘soft’ modem, in that it works mostly in software, and no, it’s not supported on OS 9.
In OS X 10.4 however, it gets recognized correctly as an External Modem in the System Preferences panel:
For a dial up terminal emulator for the Mac, I found most references pointing to ZTerm, so got it downloaded and installed, and it sees the USB modem. Got the BBS number configured, and off we go!
Success! Dialed in to the Level 29 BBS! I was expecting to see ANSI colors in the text display, so not sure if I need to change a setting in ZTerm, but so far pretty excited this works!
I just picked up a pretty good eBay deal on a 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver. It was sold as working, and yes it does boot up and it did come with OS X 10.4.11 installed as advertised.
Inside, it looks almost new. When I recently took some old PC towers to the electronics recycling inside they looked like they’d accumulated 100 years worth of dust and god knows what. By comparison, for a 15 year old machine, this looks like it was kept sealed in a box for most of that time – it’s spotless with no dust in sight.
Clean!
It looks like it has 10.4.11 cleanly installed, but I also picked up a used OS X 10.4 Tiger DVD to do a clean install myself.
The DVD drive in the machine does not want to open. It whirs and clicks when you hold F12, but no go. I used the paper clip trick in the manual open hole on the front of the drive, it opens up and there’s nothing jammed in there, it just doesn’t want to open. I tried putting the DVD in there, manually closing the drive and then powering on, but it doesn’t spin up and read the disk.
By the way, on this Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, the DVD manual open hole is obscured by the front of the case, so the only way to get a paper clip in the hole is to physically remove the drive from the case to get access to the hole.
Given the issues with the DVD drive, I discovered that this machine will boot from a USB flash drive (there’s a discussion in this thread about all Intel Macs will boot from USB, but this feature apparently was supported on some G4 and G5 machines but apparently not all).
To install Mac OS 9 I copied the ISO from OS9Lives universal installer to a USB using Infrarecorder on a Windows 10 desktop, and holding down Option/Alt to get the boot menu, it shows the USB, and clicking on it starts to boot. I wasn’t sure about using the ‘Restore’ option on the OS9Lives universal installer, as it seems from the instructions that it wipes your partition.
Instead I’ve read in a few different forum posts if you just copy the ‘System Folder’ from an OS 9 image to the drive, along with ‘Applications’ (rename it ‘Applications (OS 9)’ if you’re dragging them to the same partition as OS X, if it’s a different partition then the name can stay as Applications).
Interesting that this just works – if you select the OS 9 System Folder as the Startup Disk in System Preferences, then when you reboot it just starts up.
To get a copy of the OS X 10.4 DVD onto a USB flash drive, I used Infrarecorder again to make an image, and then used ‘dd’ on my MacBook Pro to write the image to a flash drive.
I’m going to do a fresh install, but booting it up and looking around at what’s already on there, OS X 10.4 on a single PowerPC cpu machine, not a dual, and only 800Mhz with 512MB, performance is not bad, it’s pretty responsive. Both Tiger and OS 9 boot pretty quick (Tiger boots a few seconds faster which is surprising).
Quick observations:
Safari on OS X is terribly slow, practically unusable
Ten Four Fox on OS X is usable but sluggish on scrolling any page. Makes you appreciate how fast modern day machines are
Classilla on OS 9 is pretty snappy. Of the browsing options available, this is the better choice on this machine so far.
Next up I’ll be trying to boot from the image of the 10.4 DVD and doing a fresh install. More to come later.
For no other good reason than “why not” I just picked up a Power Mac G4 800Mhz from eBay for < $100, with OS X 10.4 installed. I’ve been shopping for a G4 MDD for a while, but as the highest spec’d G4 that can still run Mac OS 9 these seem to go for a pretty penny on eBay given their age. I almost picked up an MDD without a HDD for a decent price, but for a working machine with a fresh OS X install this G4 seems a pretty safe bet, so fingers crossed, now waiting for my new toy to arrive.
In Windows I like that you can Shift-Rightclick in Explorer and select “Open command prompt here”. During development I often want to do the same on my Mac, and this feature is provided too, but not enabled by default. To turn it on, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, select Services on the left, and then check the option “New Terminal at Folder”:
If you want to go in the other direction, you can easily open a Finder at your current folder in Terminal by running ‘open .’
A couple of bonus tips:
To take full screen screenshot on the Mac, press Shift-Cmd-3. A file will be saved on your desktop. To take a screenshot of a selection of the screen, press Shift-Cmd-4, then drag to outline your selection.
In the Preview app, there’s a neat feature under Tools > Annotate where you can annotate your screenshots with highlighted sections, boxes, arrows, text etc. Just open your screenshot file in Preview, and then you can easily annotate and save the image:
, so got it downloaded and installed, and it sees the USB modem. Got the BBS number configured, and off we go!
I was expecting to see ANSI colors in the text display, so not sure if I need to change a setting in ZTerm, but so far pretty excited this works!
