Mac OS 8 on a G4 QuickSilver 2002

[Ryaneric77]

Hi, I'm new here. I've been looking everywhere on how to be able to do this. I want to be able to run OS 8 on my PPC G4 QuickSilver 2002. I stumbled upon this article, just now, written in 2006. http://lowendmac.com/sable/06/0911.html It states that you can somehow get older machines to run newer OS's than officially supported by Apple. What I want to do is basically the opposite. I have a PPC QuickSilver G4 2002 with Mac OS 10.3.9 & Mac OS 9.2.2 on a single partition on the same HD. I also have an empty partition formated as Mac OS Standard (HFS), also on that HD. I was wondering if I would somehow be able to boot up in OS 8 on that empty partition. I installed OS 8 on it by booting up on the OS 9.2.2 partition and installing it to the empty Mac OS Standard (HFS) partition. It appeared to be successful. Though when I tried to boot from it, I got a flashing ? folder and then it booted into 10.3.9, if I remember correctly. The above link had a link within it, here. http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/os8_68030.html which as I already stated, showed basically how do the opposite of what I am trying to accomplish. I was wondering if that could somehow be applied to what I am trying to do. I also own a Performa 630 CD running OS 8.1 and it runs great. From what I can decipher, I will probably need to use that in this process somehow. Right now I'm running on a PPC G5, so there is nothing I need on the G4. So If I had to format the drive it wouldn't be a problem as I have transfered everything over. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me. :beige:

 

[ealex79]

It is just impossible. It's missing drivers and makes wrong assumptions on the hardware.

You can try MacOnMac or MOL on Linux, but it will not run nativly.

 

[Ryaneric77]

Thanks for the quick reply. I know some early G4s shipped with what they call a Borg 8.6.1 disc. I guess this was basically a disc that only came with certain iMac G3 and the first G4s. I know someone who has one of those. Do you know if that would run natively. Thanks

 

[ealex79]

No, only on Jikes and Sawtooth G4's.

 

[Ryaneric77]

OK. Thanks for clearing this up for me.

 

[ealex79]

No problem! It was even difficult for me to install 8.6 on my Sawtooth G4. People here helped to make it happen.

[] ]'>

 

[Bunsen]

You can try MacOnMac or MOL on Linux, but it will not run nativly.

On the other hand ...

MacOnMac and MacOnLinux are not emulators. In the same way that WINE Is Not an Emulator for running Windows software under Linux on x86 hardware, both of those programs pass all the PowerPC instructions straight to the CPU. So they end up emulating only a very small fraction of the system, and thus run at something like 90% of native speeds.

Whether you can run OS 8 successfully in either of those environments *shrug*. But if you decide to download one and give it a go, please report back here, because I'm sure there are others who would love to know.

Of course, to run MOL you'll need a working Linux OS running, and MOM will require a working OS X. And possibly plenty of RAM.

 

[Ryaneric77]

Are you sure MacOnMac is not an emulator. It says it is on it's own site. http://maconmac.bastix.net By the way the site is down. I used the Internet Wayback Machine to view it. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php It lets you view webpages in a previous state even if they are no longer up. Anyway, are you saying that there is some way to get MacOnMac to run an OS natively. I would love to know if there is. Thanks

 

[Rodus]

Do you have access to an old G3/Sawtooth that you could stick the drive in, install System 8 and then stick the drive back in the Quicksilver?

 

[Ryaneric77]

No I don't. I just have the QuickSilver, a G5 and a Performa 630 CD which has 8.1 on it. I have a friend who I believe has an 8.6.1 borg disc. He has an iMac G3, plus another iMac G3 DV 1998 slot load that I gave to him because the screen died. If I could somehow use one of those, I'd definitely give it a go. Do you know if any of these options would work

 

[Bunsen]

You can call them emulators, or you can call them virtual machines, or you can call them compatibility environments. The point is that they run PPC code on PPCs, so the don't have to emulate an entire CPU architecture in software. This is also the reason why the project has stalled, as moving it to the Intel Macs would be a huge task.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Mac is a port of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Linux

 

[Bunsen]

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1365772&forum_id=479959

RE: MoM Abandoned?By: Ronald (paulusdebos) - 2006-05-04 21:47

At first I was very exited about MOM, but as soon as Apple made it clear that future Macs would not be build around PPC processors, it was clear to me that there is no future for MOM anymore, because MOM (like Mac-On-Linux from which it is derived) will work on PPC processors. That is what MOM made special, it will run natively on PPC.

http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FAQ

Is Mac-On-Linux an emulator?
No, it's really a virtual machine with some custom drivers to improve performance, similar to vmware.

What's the performance like?

It runs at almost native speed for CPU/Altivec with similar disk performance. The video driver [has] no hardware acceleration and / is about 50% slower than native /

Can I run MOL on OSX?

Not at this time, but most of the MOM patches have been integrated back into the source. An OSX port is likely for the future.

And as the project has been abandoned, "the future" means when someone else decides to take it on.

 

[Bunsen]

http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Features#Apple_Guest_OSes

Apple Guest OSes 

OS Version________Boots_______Limitations

MacOS 7.5.2 - 8.6____Untested______Requires MacOS Boot ROM

MacOS 8.6 - 9.2.2____Yes__________ None

So ... first, catch your Linux ...

Amazing what you can find with a few minutes of Googling, isn't it? :

 

[ealex79]

I installed Mac OS 8.6 on my Sawtooth first with MOM, as long as it worked, it worked good, alas after a while opening any window in the guest OS would stall the VM.

 

[Bunsen]

/me thinks about 7.6.1 on a dual 533 G4 ...

 

[Ryaneric77]

I copied the ROM image from my 68k Performa. Does anyone know how to get the QuickSliver machine running off that, or if that's even what I need to do. Thanks to everyone who has responded. I'm really glad I found this Forum. [] ]'>

 

[MrMacPlus]

My assumption would be that you can't use a 68k ROM with a PPC emulator... good luck, as you'll need somebody to rip a ROM image from an older PPC mac, maybe a 8100? Or even better for your case, a Beige G3!

 

[ealex79]

For 8.6 and later MOM/MOL doesn't need a ROM image.

 

[Ryaneric77]

Does anyone know what would happen if I was to copy the Mac OS ROM file from the 8.6 CD while started up in 10.3.9 to the OS 9 system folder over the ROM version 9.0.1. Would that enable me to boot from 8.6? I also can't find any good documentation on how to use MOM. Could anybody give me some pointers on how to use it? Thanks in advance.