Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Episode 3 of This Old Mac, the ongoing saga of my experiments with my Mac Pro 1,1 as a guy who never really owned an Intel Mac until now.
Well since the last episode I have upgraded the firmware of the Mac Pro 1,1 and it now reports itself as a Mac Pro 2,1 which apparently is handy if you upgrade the processors. At the moment it has 2 Woodcrest Xeon 5150 processors but people recommend the later Clovertown X5355 Xeon Processors which of course takes the Mac Pro from a Quad Core to an Octo core as the X5355 processor is a Quad core. So a potential update in the future may be on the cards.
Getting the firmware to upgrade was supposed to be easy as there is a Netkas tool for doing so, but as usual when I attempted to use it, it failed to do as it was told. So I literally had to remove its Package contents move it to the Ramdisk it created , modify the script using TextEdit, then execute it via Terminal and finally the firmware upgraded correctly.
I also managed to install El Capitan on the Mac Pro. I have been thinking about doing it since I got the machine but finally got around to it. First I had to find a version of El Capitan that could be converted by the Piker Alpha tool Pikify which took 3 different downloads as the one from Apple wouldn't convert.
However I did find one. Then I hit a snag as Pikify wouldn't work under Snow Leopard for some reason. So I then had to install OS X Lion on Onion in order to get Pikify to run. It did and I managed to install El Capitan on Carrot.
So now the Mac Pro has Snow Leopard, Lion and El Capitan on it. Apparently El Capitan can be updated to version 10.11.6 but you need to then recover the Piker Alpha boot.efi using the terminal so as of yet I have not yet done that.
since I still have the Snow Leopard partition. I have been installing a few games on the machine I have just added Zoo Tycoon 1 and 2 and I also have been playing with Rollercosater Tycoon 3 which I installed before but have finally got around to trying.
All three are of course PPC Univeral binary games but due to Snow Leopard having Rosetta the games are still playable. Ok to get Zoo Tycoon 2 working you have to fool it a bit by running a blank Toast image called Zoo Tycoon 2 but it works in the end.
I'm not much of a games player so I am probably not the most objective guy to review them, but so far they are all not bad.
Well that's enough for this episode so until next time... take care.
