PowerMac 8500 booting Mac OS X Leopard

Leopard retail booting on a PowerMac 8500, which has been upgraded with a G4 cpu.

This hack was the MacMod Competition Winner 2008.
http://web.archive.org/web/2010020402...

http://www.mactech.com/2008/09/23/leo...

It is possible to run Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 on any PowerMac that has been upgraded with sufficient memory and a G4-Processor Upgrade.

This includes:
PowerMac 8600
PowerMac 9500
PowerMac 9600
PowerMac (Tower/Desktop/AIO) Beige G3
PowerMac Yikes! G4

This work has been discussed on:
AppleFritter: http://www.applefritter.com/node/23084
AppleInsider: http://forums.appleinsider.com/showth...
LowendMac: http://lowendmac.com/mail/0801mb/0114... and http://lowendmac.com/mail/0801mb/0130... and http://lowendmac.com/mail/0807mb/0709... and http://lowendmac.com/mail/0807mb/0709...
Retromaccast: http://retromaccast.ning.com/profile/...
RetroMacCast Podcast: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/ep...
Xpostfacto: http://forum.macsales.com/viewtopic.p... and http://forum.macsales.com/viewtopic.p... and http://forum.macsales.com/viewtopic.p...
AppleDiscussions: https://discussions.apple.com/message... and https://discussions.apple.com/message... and
MacNN: http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/3... and http://forums.macnn.com/65/mac-deskto...

This work builds on from where Xpostfacto left off.

This hack is in addition to the well-document trick of getting Mac OS X 10.5 installed on any G4 which is not supported by apple. This can be read at: http://lowendmac.com/osx/leopard/open...

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Richard Tj]

Pretty clever given that the backside bus on the Powermac 8500 was all of 50mHz

[jimjamyahauk]

Many thanks. The 50Mhz bus is certainly a speed-limiting factor on the 8500 (compared to the 66 on the Beige G3 - which can be overclocked to 83.

[thetick532]

FAKE

[jimjamyahauk]

Not fake!

[thetick532]

ITS FROM LIKE 1995, THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE

[jimjamyahauk]

The PowerMac 8500 was indeed introduced in 1995. It was the first PowerMac to feature open firmware. It is this functionality that enables it to boot Mac OS X. Mac OS X is based upon NextStep which could run on 68K and PPC chips. Can provide much more details or you can read the full article - link provided in video description.

[Martin Nobez]

Can this work on Power Macintosh 7200?

[vintagestuffguy1998]

Which display are you using?

[no487]

You are sooooooooooooooooo crazy

[jimjamyahauk]

Sounds ok - you could prob get it for about $20 - as they're not really worth anything anymore!