[G4] G5 question

[Richard Klein]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Tony Sheeley <t_sheeley at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Wow!! I was hoping, but didn't really 'expect' to get any G5 answers.  You
> guys are great.
>
> "If the G5 is like the G4 it uses OpenFirmware"
>
> I wouldn't know anything about this, I'm still fumbling my way around on the
> G4.  I'll google OpenFirmware and find out.  Thanks.

I looked at the Wikipedia entry for OpenFirmware, and it looks like
all the PowerPC Macs use it.  They didn't switch to something else
(EFI) until they switched to Intel processors:
"On a PowerPC-based Macintosh, the Open Firmware interface can be
accessed by pressing the keys Cmd-Option-O-F at startup.[2] This
functionality is generally only used by developers or troubleshooting
I.T. personnel; for common users, the Mac OS X operating system
provides a high level graphical user interface to change commonly used
Open Firmware settings. For instance, it is possible to specify the
boot disk or partition without directly using the Open Firmware
interface. Other Open Firmware settings can be changed using the nvram
command while the system software is running."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openfirmware#Access

I'm not having any luck finding an OpenFirmware command summary, but
this was interesting:
"...freakily enough, a couple years ago some people went and wrote a
complete Pong game in Forth that ran inside of Open Firmware on power
macs, and as a result won an award from the MacHack conference. Yes,
that's right; if you have a PCI macintosh sitting around, you can play
Pong on it even if you have no hard or disk drives!"
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Open+Firmware


> "Can you bring it into an Apple store and ask them to plug in some RAM for a
> second just to make sure it works before you spend money?"
>
> I don't know. Can I?  I didn't think any shop would stick they memory etc
> into a machine with no known state, no warranty.  I'll ask.

I don't know the answer to that.  I like to think that they have an
unloved computer sitting in a corner that they can pull parts from to
test other computers, but maybe not.

-- 
Rich