What to do with a Powermac 9600/200MP

[TekTherapy]

I’ve got a Power Mac 9600/200MP in my collection that I’ve never really used for anything. It’s been sitting on a shelf for about 5–6 years now, apart from the occasional yearly clean-out.

The machine still works flawlessly, and with the hardware I have lying around I could easily upgrade it with a SATA card and flash a PCI Radeon 9200 (or something similar) to give it a bit of a boost.

What I’m wondering is: does anyone have ideas on how I could still use this machine productively?
I’m open to pretty much anything that comes to mind.

Power draw isn’t an issue — I generate more than enough electricity with the solar setup on my roof.

For context: I already have a Quicksilver G4 set up as my PPC OS X gaming rig, an eMac (1.25 GHz overclocked to 1.5 GHz) for CRT emulation and retro gaming, and a Cube for classic Mac OS gaming.

Thanks!

 

[chelseayr]

well..rather than games..how about the few things that did actually try use the second cpu? so basically graphic rendering (and even certain versions of photoshop does count too as far as I recall) you could try have some fun with

in fact since you can easily revert to the 'historically correct' documentation download for whatever non-new app version you download you could see if the macos version (rather than later osx) of povray could recognize dual cpus too?

 

[Byrd]

I like to set my Macs up for a unique purpose - eg. pro audio, pro video, PC/Mac hybrid, server ...

Reckon yours 9600 MP could be a killer 2D/Photoshop/DTP machine, even better if you source something like a Wacom tablet, TwinTurbo graphics card. Maybe have a G3 card on hand for games?

 

[herd]

I wonder if any versions of linux or bsd could effectively use both CPUs. That would be neat to see.

 

[chelseayr]

byrd won't a g3 basically neuter it from a 9600mp into just being a 9600 otherwise?
and..herd it appears that '200dp' is mentioned in the netbsd/macppc list although whatever actually support it has is not noted tho

 

[TekTherapy]

well..rather than games..how about the few things that did actually try use the second cpu? so basically graphic rendering (and even certain versions of photoshop does count too as far as I recall) you could try have some fun with

in fact since you can easily revert to the 'historically correct' documentation download for whatever non-new app version you download you could see if the macos version (rather than later osx) of povray could recognize dual cpus too?

Hi chelseayr!

Thanks for your reply — I really should look into some apps that actually make use of the dual CPUs.
OS X doesn’t see the second CPU anyway (even with XPostFacto), so if I run Mac OS on it, it’ll basically have to be “Classic” only.

 

[TekTherapy]

I like to set my Macs up for a unique purpose - eg. pro audio, pro video, PC/Mac hybrid, server ...

Reckon yours 9600 MP could be a killer 2D/Photoshop/DTP machine, even better if you source something like a Wacom tablet, TwinTurbo graphics card. Maybe have a G3 card on hand for games?

Hi Byrd!


Thanks for your message.. that’s actually what I originally had in mind: using it for something more dedicated.


I’ve got a TwinTurbo and even some faster PCI cards I could throw in. I do have several G3 Upgrade cards as well, but that would kind of defeat the purpose, since I really want to use the dual-CPU setup for something “productive”.

For games I’m already covered with my eMac and Quicksilver setups.

 

[TekTherapy]

I wonder if any versions of linux or bsd could effectively use both CPUs. That would be neat to see.

Hi Herd!

That’s exactly what I wanted to dig into more. OpenBSD/NetBSD still have great PPC support, and I can definitely imagine getting both CPUs running under one of those. That’s probably going to be a “winter project” for me to play around with.

I’ve also been looking into T2 SDE, which provides a package manager / distro for a lot of older platforms and even has a PPC prebuilt ISO for 603 and up. But I assume that if I really want proper dual-CPU support, I’ll have to build it from scratch myself – which, to be fair, is something T2 SDE actually makes possible.

 

[cheesestraws]

Play with BeOS on it? Not perhaps entirely productive, but rather cool

 

[TekTherapy]

Play with BeOS on it? Not perhaps entirely productive, but rather cool

Totally forgot about Beos PPC... love the idea! I found a thread on the Haiku discussion forums where somebody tried to create a crosscompiler to port modern apps to beos ppc.. This would be something, need to look this up further.

 

[cheesestraws]

Totally forgot about Beos PPC... love the idea! I found a thread on the Haiku discussion forums where somebody tried to create a crosscompiler to port modern apps to beos ppc.. This would be something, need to look this up further.

The 9600 MP is on the supported list, so it ought to be relatively straightforward. The only thing to remember is that the bootloader stops working in later MacOS versions - I can't remember when the cutoff is (maybe it stops at 8.6?), but if you try to boot into the installer and it just blackscreens, try starting it from an older System.

 

[TekTherapy]

I probably wouldn’t go any higher than 8.6 anyway – that’s the sweet spot for those machines in my opinion.

Hopefully I’ll find some time in the next few days to test a few things. I’ve got a minor surgery coming up in 7 days and won’t be allowed to lift anything heavy for a while, so that might actually be a good moment to play around with it.

 

[cheesestraws]

Good luck, hope your surgery goes well. That does indeed sound like a good time to play with software projects!

 

[ArmorAlley]

If I remember correctly, Adobe was the only company to make use of the multi-processors in their software. You could put them to work with Premiere and digitise VCR tapes.
You could turn your 9600 MP into a server for your older Macs.
Personally, it would make a great machine for Civilization or Civilization II and make use of a 1920 x 1080 display.

 

[herd]

I’ve also been looking into T2 SDE...

I've installed T2 on a G3, dual G4 and an AMD K6. The latest kernel also has zram, which can help a lot on older hardware that typically has less RAM. I'm no linux expert but it looks like there is a lot of potential there. In the past few years some of their developers have become fed up with apple and are putting more effort into T2 again, so I hope we'll see some nice improvements.

I don't know if it would work on your 9600, but I see they even have pre-built images for 68k.

 

[TekTherapy]

I've installed T2 on a G3, dual G4 and an AMD K6. The latest kernel also has zram, which can help a lot on older hardware that typically has less RAM. I'm no linux expert but it looks like there is a lot of potential there. In the past few years some of their developers have become fed up with apple and are putting more effort into T2 again, so I hope we'll see some nice improvements.

I don't know if it would work on your 9600, but I see they even have pre-built images for 68k.

Awesome!! That just gives me hope i'll probably get it running at least. If the second CPU will work.. let's see
How's the performance on the Dual G4s?

 

[Unknown_K]

As far as I know Photoshop was one of the few apps that used the second processor for some tasks.