If you are, like me, the happy owner of an Old World Mac, you are stuck "officially" with OS 9.1 (or OS 9.2 with the help of OS9Helper, see previous pinned topic). What if you want to run, for instance, Panther, on that machine? Obviously you couldn't do so: the Mac OS X installer would abort, and tell you this is Mac is not supported.

Here comes a great tool: XPostFacto.

It's designed to help you setup any MacOS X, MacOS X Server or Darwin system on those unsupported Macs.

Based on your type of processor, different options are available. If you own a PPC 601 machine, no Mac OS X would run. If you own a 603 or 604 type of CPU, the latest OS X that can run on those is 10.1.

As for 10.2 or 10.3, they do require at least a G3 processor. XPostFacto can't change that limitation. So if you have a quite old Mac, you have to, at least, use a processor upgrade card. Such cards come from manufacturers such as Sonnet or Powerlogix.

If you own of the earlier G3s, such as a Beige G3 or a Wallstreet powerbook, Apple prevents you from using 10.3 (Panther). Previous OS X releases are supported though. But you can use XPostFacto on these machines as well to get Panther running.

What exactly does XPostFacto do? It is used to copy a small number of files (BootX, needed extensions...) to your newly-formatted volume and reboot the Mac from that volume to launch the OS X setup from the original CD (so yes, you do need OS X CDs, of course). It not only prevents the setup wizard from checking your motherboard ROM (to reject any unsupported systems), it also enables support for legacy hardware that Apple buried deep inside OS X (such as ADB keyboards and mice, integrated video cards, etc.).

Based on your hardware, a number of things might or might not work with OS X.

For example, my configuration is as follows:
- Powermac 8600/200, upgraded with a G3 processor card @ 275 Mhz,
- 192 MB RAM
- ATTO UltraWide SCSI card, 2 * 9 GB UW 7200RPM SCSI drives, 2GB stock SCSI HDD
- Macally USB2/Firewire card
- stock integrated video
- stock 12X SCSI CD-ROM
- Yamaha 8824S SCSI burner

One thing that will never work with OS X is the floppy drive (Apple ceased to use floppies since 1999). No driver exists (except for a third-party, buggy one). Another limitation is the global sound volume setting which would not work with OS X (volume can only be changed through applications such as iTunes). Video In and Out ports would not work either. Other than that, all works well: I'm typing this from Panther, and those few issues are not that important either.

Other Macs and hardware can encounter other problems. Make sure to refer to XPostFacto's known compatibility problems page.

XPostFacto can only run from OS9. So if you want to use OS X, you must have OS9 first.

Below is how I used XpostFacto to setup Panther on my Mac. Panther itself officially requires 128 MB of RAM, a G3 processor and USB ports. I had all of that. However, USB ports are not mandatory. If you don't have built-in USB or any PCI extension card, that shouldn't be a problem.

Setting up Panther was quite easy (first trial was succesful):
- using OS 9 "Drive Setup", I initalized one of my 9GB HDDs, using the "Mac Extended" file format. Panther can not be installed on Mac Standard formatted volumes.
- insert Panther Disc 1 in your CD-ROM drive
- running XPostFacto, select the destination volume on which Panther should be installed, and click on the "Options" button. You can then select a few optional parameters that would help you boot with Panther. One of them was mandatory for me: the "Use old NDRVs" one. This forces Panther to use older drivers for the built-in video card. Otherwise it wouldn't detect it.
- Hit the "Install from CD" button. XPostFacto will then setup your destination volume, copy a few files to it, and reboot the computer.
- If all goes well, Panther should boot and launch its installation wizard. Proceed the same way you would do for a supported Mac, just make sure to select the exact same destination volume as in XpostFacto.
- ...et voilà.

If you want to reboot to OS9, simply run XpostFacto from Panther and choose the "Restart in OS 9" option. The same thing can be done from within OS9 to restart in Panther.

I can't stress out enough the importance of going through the whole "read-me" page before trying it out. You would probably learn a few important things regarding your hardware, possible issues and how to correct them.

Now a few things to consider:
- RAM really is important to OS X. 128 MB is a bare minimum, 192 MB, as I have, is not enough (yet). 256 MB is the minimum I would recommend.
- any built-in video, using the old NDRV driver, is slow as hell. I ordered a Radeon 7000 PCI card which should come in a few days to get fully-accelerated effects (inlcuding Quartz). You should do the same. Quartz Extreme is only available for AGP cards, however a piece of software called "PCI Extreme" would enable Quartz Extreme as well for 32 MB PCI video cards such as mine.
- any G3/G4 upgrade processor card would require a piece of software to enable the L2 cache. That was already true with Mac OS Classic, it still is for OS X. Two are recommend, and they should work for any upgrade card, no matter the manufaturer: Sonnet Cache Enabler and Powerlogix CPU Director. The latter has a control panel utility to fine-tune the cache settings. Depending on your card, one might produce better results than the other. For my Newertech G3 card, CPU Director definitely gives the best results.

Hope this helps. Before trying it out though, don't forget to backup your important data, you never know what might happen.

Links:

XPostFacto's Compatibility Page
Download XPostFacto 3.0b12
XPostFacto's "read-me" page
Powerlogix CPU Director 1.5f6 (cache enabler)
SonnetCache 1.3 (cache enabler)

So how fast does it run?

well, until I get my Radeon 7000, it's usable, but the lack of video acceleration not only slows the whole thing down but makes every GUI effect extremely sloppy. However it's better than I would have thought. I ran XBench last night and got a result of 19 for the CPU test, which puts me at the same level than a G3/300 Powerbook for example. My G3 is originally only 220 Mhz, overclocked at 275. I get however much better disk access results than iMac G3s (my drives are 7200RPM UltraWide with 2MB cache, so it really helps for the swap). I also used XBench to compare results between both cache enablers (Sonnetcache, CPU Director). Sonnetcache was quickly dropped as it would give me worse results than with no cache at all (weird, don't know why).

Overall I'd say once the Radeon is setup, I could use that thing on a daily basis...if I forget games, DVD playback (I lack the DVD player anyway) and Divx movies (i'm not sure MplayerOSX will play efficiently on that CPU, still have to try with the Radeon).

Got the Radeon 7000 PCI tonight, flashed it...runs like a charm. Including Quartz Extreme, thanks to PCI Extreme.

Has anyone managed to get this to run on the G3 All-in-one (the precursor to the iMac)? I was never able to, but I believe it should be able to be done.

What kind of errors do you get, and what process did you follow?

My problem was that it just hung on the Apple logo screen -- now that I think about it I may have forgotten to enable legacy video drivers. I had a post here back in October, perhaps, about this topic and everyone told me pretty much what I knew already. I haven't tired since then, but if I find the OS X CD then I can try again...

Well you do need to enable legacy video drivers ("Use old NDRVs") as your built-in video is not officially supported with Panther. If it doesn't help, try booting using the "Verbose" mode in XpostFacto, it will help you track down what went wrong.

Now that I think about it, I did do that and it hung about halfway through the process. I think I sold the OS X Cds with my iBook, so I'll just have to wait until a later time.

EDIT: NOTE: still have my snow iBook (even though its really my sister's)... and lastly, I did manage to install Jaguar successfully on a different G3 AIO and have since been able to install Panther on a G3 AIO and have installed Tiger on a first gen iMac (233 MHz)

Hey Kouby, how did you overclcok your g3 board? I have a maxpowr g3 220/110 and no matter how I set the dip switches it stays at 220/110. I'm using OSX 10.4.10, also booted into 9.2.2 natively (with known working cache enabler tool from manufacturer of board), all speed tests show no differences between settings in dip switches that I've read should up my speed in various ways.

Cheers,
Don

Hi there

Wow this is like a really old thread
I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly how I overclocked my card, it was originally a 220/110 just like yours, I remember simply changing a DIP switch (there were 4 DIP, I switched only one randomly) and I was surprised to see the Mac not only still booting, but System Profiler then reported 275 Mhz instead of 220. Not that it showed any significant improvement in any area anyway...
I don't own this Mac anymore, I've switched to iMac