I think OS4 CAN be run on MAC MINI (USABLE)

[Jeff]

[EDIT] Post retracted due to legal concerns

[Leo24]

Hi guys,

I've played a little with those "Moana" files and managed to boot AOS4 with them. It was quite a pain in the ass but let’s start from the beginning: (Note: Not for Lamers !!!)
You definitely need one of the last Mac mini model with 1,5GHz with 64MB GFX memory or AOS4 won't kick. Blame the developer of Kickstart/ATIRadeon.chip for this limitation. The next hurdle is the loader L/slb (also L/slb_v2_mm) itself, it's a piece of hardcoded crap which refuses to load the Kickstart modules from anything else than the device cd:.
Type "setenv boota-device cd:" at the open firmware (OF) prompt. You only need to type this once as the environment variables will be automatically saved in the NVRAM forever. You can check it with "printenv" at OF. Man, I've spent hours trying to boot Moana from hd:, ud: USB-Stick and 2nd USB-DVD drive. No chance, so don't lose time trying that.
Next, boot Moana CD with "boot cd:\l\slb" or "boot cd:\\slb". SLB will load the config file Kickstart/Kicklayout and show its entries 1-6. Only entry 5 will load the right modules for ATA, USB and ATIgfx. By selecting 5 the loader will load all the modules defined in Kicklayout into memory. You may need to press ENTER several times until the console prints something like starting ExecSG.
Now it's the point of no return. If you press ENTER the screen goes black and after a while the AOS4 Boingball boot screen will appear. Or if you press ENTER and quickly press and hold left+right mouse botton, you will enter the early startup menu. YEAY!!! ...but, the only boot device available in AOS4 is CD0:, no external DVD drive or USB-Stick is accepted. Dammit!!! How do I eject the CD to replace it with the AOS4 CD? Long story short, I couldn't find an easy way. At OF prompt you can enter "eject cd:" but you can't do that after slb loaded all the modules.
To check if Moana really works, I replaced Mac mini internal drive with one with eject button and started over again. After inserting the AOS4 CD it will boot into workbench and automatically load an installer. Fine so Moana really works, but I want to use my Mac mini as is and not opened with a crappy DVD drive attached on it.
It would be cool to boot from HD and to have the DVD drive free for the AOS4 CD, wouldn't it? But as I told you before this is not possible, right?
WRONG!!!...sort of :-)
It's enough to make slb believe it's booting from a CD drive. And how we do that? I won't tell you!
....bah, just kidding. :-D  Here is the solution. First copy the directories Devs, Kickstart, L and Libs from the Moana CD to the root of your MacOS hard disk, ignore the other files in the root of the CD.
Eject the CD, go back to OF and enter “devalias”. This will print all devices from your Mac mini. Locate the entries hd: and cd:. Now make cd: to look like hd: with “devalias cd /pci@f4000000/ata-6@d/disk0” (your Mac mini setup it may differ from mine so change appropriately). Now boot Kickstart with “boot hd:\L\slb” and voila, with some luck you end up in AOS4. Unfortunately this method seems to fail often to load the USB stack. Not the best solutions but hey, it works. The SLB loader is really crap when not booting from a real CD.
So let’s do a combined Moana and AOS4 CD: OK, it’s getting late and I really don’t want to describe it step by step, but here some important infos: You will need to extract the ELF boot loader from the AOS4 CD boot block.  Burn it as El Torrito and no floppy or hard disk emulation. The CD itself should be ISO+Rock Ridge no {bleep}ty ISO+Joliet or HFS.

That’s all folks.

[amigadave]

Are you using the original AOS4 CD for an AmigaOne, or will the AOS4 CD for Classic Amiga's work?

If you are making a custom combined CD with both Moana files and AOS4 files, I would think that perhaps both versions of AOS4 would work?

[spihunter]

@Leo24,

Sweet man!

Thanks for all the effort so far.....Sounds like you went through a lot.

[klx300r]

Thanks Leo24..I knew it could be done :pint:  :destroy:

[amigadave]

klx300r wrote:
Thanks Leo24..I knew it could be done :pint:  :destroy:

It was only a matter of time!

Now if someone can only crack the problem that keeps Moana only working on one very specific model of Mac so that the rest of the PPC Macs can be used to run OS4.  That would really be something to celebrate.

From what Leo says, it sounds like the video driver is the next stumbling block to running it on other Mac models. (like the 1.42GHz Mac Mini I've got sitting here ) we need someone who knows PPC assembler to take a look at that ATIRADEON.CHIP file... maybe with machonist?

[tiffers]

@amigadave

Are you using the original AOS4 CD for an AmigaOne, or will the AOS4 CD for Classic Amiga's work?

I would have thought that due to using old pre-"bootable-cd-rom" kickstarts, and thus the inclusion of the boot floppy iwth OS4 classic, the cd-rom wouldn't be bootable? Much less using an ElTorito boot environment. That sounds a lot like the A1 version, which uses standard ElTorito aware bpoot routines.

tiffers

[motorollin]

Once you have booted in to Workbench, would it be possible to install OS4 to hard disk? Even if you had to boot from the OS4 CD to then boot from the installed copy of OS4?

[Sir_Lucas]

@Leo24

Wow, man that's smashing  :-o  Nice one !  :-D

[tiffers]

@motorollin

You'd think this would be the case. Essentially the moana cdrom is like a kickstart ROM. Once it's loaded, it looks for bootable media, such as (in the classic kickstart in a ROM sense) floppies or hard disks, and I guess now cdroms.

So I would guess that so long as you could install OS4 to hard disk, you'd just need to have the moana cdrom in the drive to boot.

The next question is, does OS4 provide functionality to eject the disk? Booting from a hybrid moana + OS4 install cd, would probably result in _alway_ booting into the install environment.

Leaving the moana cdrom in the drive permenantly kind of rules out using that drive. Does OS4 running on MacMini support other drives, such as USB DVD-ROM drives? In that case you could just leave the moana cdrom in the internal drive, and use an external drive.

These are all very pertinent questions. Of course without AOS4 install cd, a suitable macmini, moana files and the know how of making a hybrid cd image, I can't be any more help

tiffers.

[motorollin]

@tiffers
A better solution (if it worked) would be to have two partitions: one HFS to contain the Moana files, and one for OS4 in whichever filesystem OS4 uses. Then using Leo24's method you could get OF to automatically boot Moana from the HFS partition and then Kickstart 4.0 will boot OS4 from the Amiga partition. Though I have no idea whether that would work. As you say the alternative would either be to have the Moana CD in the drive when you boot and then eject it (if you can) or to have a separate external drive for CD/DVD usage and use the internal drive as a boot device with the Moana CD inserted permanently.

I wonder whether you could also add a second hard disk for Moana? So use one for Moana for OF to boot from and one for OS4 to run from? If you used a CF card you could probably fit it inside the Mac Mini case.

All of that, of course, relies on the installer actually working and Moana being able to boot from the hard drive.

[Leo24]

@tiffers: "unlock_eject macminiide.device 1" will do the trick. You will find it in the root directory of the Moana CD.

It's possible to install AOS4 on Mac's hard drive, but OF won't recognize the hd anymore, so you can't use the hd: boot trick afterward.

I also have trouble to get LAN working since I can't find the right device for it. Maybe it's not available. I found AOS4 to be very slow for a 1,5GHz computer. I suppose the drivers aren't optimal or in some kind of debug mode. AOS4 also crashes very often which really sucks. Sometimes only moving the mouse will freeze the OS.

Ok, my next steps will be to analyze slb and to do a better replacement for it which can load the modules from any device. My main goal is to be able to boot from an USB-Stick. But this whole Moana stuff is not my 1st prio project, so don't hold your breath for it.

[_ThEcRoW]

Is the 64 mb of vram really a requirement?. I know that os4 can boot on the A1 with a Voodoo3 16MB card, so booting off a 32MB radeon should work fine.
Leo, you said that the environmental variables are stored in the nvram forever so it itsn't neccesary to type setenv again?
Thanks in advance!!

[klx300r]

Leo24 wrote:
I found AOS4 to be very slow for a 1,5GHz computer. I suppose the drivers aren't optimal or in some kind of debug mode. AOS4 also crashes very often which really sucks. Sometimes only moving the mouse will freeze the OS.

Ok, my next steps will be to analyze slb and to do a better replacement for it which can load the modules from any device. My main goal is to be able to boot from an USB-Stick. But this whole Moana stuff is not my 1st prio project, so don't hold your breath for it.

damn it looks to be sooo unstable BUT one step at a time now...you broke the first BIG barrier Leo24 ;-)  :banana:

[klx300r]

pkillo wrote:
From what Leo says, it sounds like the video driver is the next stumbling block to running it on other Mac models. (like the 1.42GHz Mac Mini I've got sitting here ) we need someone who knows PPC assembler to take a look at that ATIRADEON.CHIP file... maybe with machonist?

why cant one just upgrade the video card in the mini :-?