Hi all!

For 2/3 months I’m looking for a Peg G4 but some days ago I received an offer for a Peg II G3...
I have some doubts about the G3 processor. I’d like to have the Peg to work with the MOS, but, also Linux and MacOS... Is the G3 fast enough for these OS?

Luca

P.S.:
Probably this is not a new topic, but I tried to search it in the site, but couldn’t find anything!

A G3 is just fine. The fan of the G4 makes noise and is a problem in
reliability. Speed of MorphOS is just the same, I cannot see any
difference.
Speed in Linux is somewhat slower, and MacOS is the same as Linux.
(MacOS graphics is very slow on the G4, too..)
You don't have altivec, which could be nice, if any software would use
it ... is there any ???

BTW; I own PEG1 (G3), 2* Peg2 (G4).

.. make sure, it's really a PEG2, because Peg1 is a lot more freaky to
set up on Linux..

For Linux and MorphOS is the G3 sufficient. But there is a remarkable speed-difference between G3 and G4 under MacOSX. And of cause, there are apps under MorphOS which are faster on a G4 than on an G3 (3D-games, MAME, E-UAE). But they are good on a G3, too.

With mos g3 is great, with linux there is a slowdown, but you wont know this if you never tried the g4 OSX will run on it ok as well.

@judas

MOL is NOT slow on a G4, don't know what your idea of slow is but i think the emu is great and surprisingly fast.

the G3 will be slow for linux, especially if you got less than 1Gb of RAM. Same about OSX, but it's already slow on a G4.

Well the G3 has also significantly slower Ram Speed, and it is imho easily possible to reach limits soon
under all Systems, Linux as well as MorphOS not to speak of Mac OS. Just take for example Emulator stuff,
even Snes9x, while for the avarage Snes Game usable with the G3, it reach its limits when games using transparency
for example, dont even think about games like seiken densetsu 3 which uses most time hires graphics (ok even a G4 reaches
a limit here). Or think about Mame, even UAE (dont even think about emulating an AGA Amiga) runs Better with a G4.
Mplayer also benefits of course from a faster CPU. Otoh MorphOS itself works of course fine also on the G3.
Linux also works, but the G4 is here even more usefull as some apps uses Altivec here.

Mac OS is definetly no fun with a G3, personally i find it also not that fast with a G4. Your choice but I d say go for
a G4 if possible.

Magnetic: I dont know whats your definiton of "surprisingly fast" but Mol definitly is not. I mean it is usable for some
things, but it is indeed noticeable slower than "the real thing" a big showstopper is the missing 2D/3D Hardware Acceleration
in MOL. So as Judas said, graphics is *indeed* very slow on the emulated/virtualized Mac.

Bladerunner

You are wrong. I've been using MOL since peg 1 days with OSX, I also have two real world macs running osx here. The emulation is good and fast - yes it DOES have 2d acceleration, just not 3d (read the MOL ml please) Also please don't give authorative advice, when you are clearly not?

magnetic

Magnetic:
Quote:
Well so had I, but at least on the G3 I deleted it immediatelly, it was simply just wasted space. Also that doesn`t make the emulaton faster ;) It would be slow
even when I had discovered MOL yesterday the first time :)
Quote:
As I said *imho* it isn`t. (Well it is good, but not fast ;) )
Quote:
No it does not. It works nevertheless, but definetly not as fast as it can ;)

Thank you all!
Is morphos (in a pegII G3) too slow for example with MAME or to see photos or divx/dvd?
Linux is a bit slow: just a bit or too slow (or completly inutilizable)?
(...same question for macOS)

Quote:

Well that depends ;) Mame is a Arcade Emulator which emulates hardware from the late 70s up to now. And Mame is not exactly a resourcefriendly program ;)
Games like lets say Metal Slug are perfect playable but Rampage2000 (was this the name? The remake on the N64 Arcade Board) is not (ok, it is a problem on the G4 too, but here at least playable). But the more the merrier is definetly true for mame.

Quote: Well no, Photos are of coure no problem at all, divx will work too, dvd does most likely framedrop on a G3.
However Mos itself is of course fast too.

Quote:
It is usable and you can of course allways increase performance with lightweight windowmanager and so on. As allways in the end it depends what you like to do with it.

Quote:
Well, as you can see, opinions differ here a bit ;) I d´say it is no fun on a G3, while Magnetic says it is quite usable ;)

However in the End you may cover most stuff with MorphOS and Linux, so lack of Mac OS will be just a little loss.

@ bladerunner

Sigh, MOL most certainly does have 2 d acceleration.. please read the MOL docs before you post things like this...

@diehardware

For most all MAME games g3 is sufficient. For linux its fine (its LINUX not Windoze) you can also play divx Very nicely as well as mpegs, it will play dvd if you enable frameskip, but g4 is much nicer!

Now, so you know - i have owned

Peg 1 no april *betatester
Peg1 april 2 g3
Peg2 g3
2 Peg2 g4

so i know about speeds

@diehardware :

For MorphOS and Linux, the G3 is fine (a little bit slow with Linux but not horribly slow !!).
For Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 for example, I have tested it on a Pegasos 2 G3 and some Pegasos 2 G4, there is a lot of speed difference but, as Magnetic says, it's usable on a G3.

If it can help you, great ;)
Faranheit

Magnetic:
Well, come back if you finaly understood the concept of how Mol does its Videooutput
(a hint, look into your emulated/virtualized Mac and tell us wich videocard is detected.
If it is a radeon I stand corrected, but it is most likely "yonk" the wrapped mol gfx card.
And you cant hardly call mmu accelerated framebuffer real accelerated 2D Hardware)

Oh and please dont play this stupid "mine is longer then yours game" because in the end you will
loose anyway. I had a peg 1 until last year too, so I know about its weakness, I saw the Peg2 G3 in Action
and know about it too.

But if you really are in that "I am more competent then you game" you probably shouldnt give advice on
General Emulator stuff, belive me, I have a bit more knowledge on that topic, as for mame for example
you are again wrong, as there *are* many games which *wont* run fluently on a G3!

But in the end it is probably all just a Point of view thing, personally I find it not acceptable to
have frameskips while I watch a DVD, you say it is perfectly ok. Btw, while I agree that Divx plays fine in
General, dont even bother playing divx whith a size of lets say 720x576 (Pal) as those will also most likely
framedrop on a G3

@magnetic:
Well, I agree with Bladerunner that OSX is way too slow on a G3, and I've used it on a Peg1 and now on a Peg2 G3, too.
On G4 it's ok, but nevertheless it falls way behind a real G4 Mac, even 2D-wise.

Linux is good on G3 (I'm using Gentoo with GNOME 2.14), and MorphOS works like a charm (also most Games and Emus like MAME or UAE)

[ Edited by analogkid on 2006/7/11 11:17 ]

If you buy a PEG, MorphOS should be your reason to buy it. Getting Linux is much simpler and cheaper on the 386-family. MOL is a nice toy, but if you want MacOS in first place, buy a Mac.

.. all this is true, so I bought 3 PEGs ... some special magic comes with PEG/MorphOS... decide on you own

Bladerunner

OMG. I'm not trying to say these things. The only reason i'm posting on this thread is that you are being misleading. The way you are acting, a Peg2 g3 is useless for everything. Totally wrong. I've already stated my points.

@ Judas

Ummm. Linux on peg is pretty good, especially latest Ubuntu "dapper" release. WIth Ubuntu, Mac OSX, and MOS you DONT need ANY OTHER COMPUTER.


And MOL and OSX is FAR from a "toy" we have 2 real osx macs here and I use my peg to run Photoshop 7, LIghtwave 7, Toast Titanium, old games, and more. The 2d speed is fine - its about as fast as a g3 800mhz (my gf has one a laptop)

magnetic

Hi,

The Pegasos II G4 is the best Pegasos model !

Gunne

You are king of the obvious!

mag

magnetic,

Thank You !

Magnetic:
But you did behave that way; Just because I "only" had two pegs so far,
One Peg 1 (which i still miss btw, it simply had a cute layout ;)
Who is gonna shout girly eh? ;) )and now a Peg2, doesnt make
me less competent.

And I am not missleading, If you had read my postings carefully,
you would have noticed that I basicly said that:

Mos runs fine but some applications gains from faster CPU and Memory of the G4,
Namely Emulator and Videostuff, they *will* not run that good on a G3

That Linux runs acceptable (btw I was as masochist as Analogkid back the Peg1 days
and did a Gentoo Stage 1 Installation, I was probably a bit more, I used KDE :D)
But will definetly profit more then Mos from the G4, especially since some apps
support the Altivec Engine,

That MacOS via MOL on a G4 is allready very slow but unusable on the G3 and I stand
to what I said.

So this hardly means that the G3 is "useless for everything"
It just means that it is useless for one out of three possible Operating Systems
which where asked here.

And I simply try to be realistic, would you prefer diehardware buying the G3 in good
belive and then come back beeing angry against you, because you told him that OS X runs
fast enough on such a setup?

So my final word on this topic, as advice for diehardware:
If this G3 is cheap and you just want to sneak in a bit, go for it,
as MorphOS is indeed very fast anyway.
If you need more power later on, you may be able to order a G4 Card
from Genesi (Not sure though whether they are still available)

But if you can afford it, better go for a G4, you wont regret it ;)

Hi,
linux on PPC is much less stable that on 386. I have several programms, which suddenly crash on PPC. This is no special prob of a linux dist, it's a bug in certain libraries .. eg. Qt.
There are no commercial apps for Linux PPC (eg.Eagle, vmware..)
I'm currently trying to replace a PIII with a PEG, so I know what I'm speaking of ...
( The PIII ran SUSE9 and had an uptime of 2,5 years, no sudden stops of some apps ..)
Let's be realistic. Linux is optimized for 386 and only runs absolutely stable on 386. .. but I is quite useable on a Peg for no MTBF-hungry apps.

Quote:

ROTFL. How about telling this to IBM, they run Linux on Blue Gene/L, which is PowerPC based, and it's currently the fastest supercomputer on Earth. Or go, tell this to SGI, they run 1024 processor single kernel systems on Linux (Itanium). Or go, tell this to the gadzillion router/switch/PDA manufacturers who run Linux on their ARM/MIPS/PowerPC/who-knows-what based architectures, and it's rock solid.

To make it simple: if you have stability problems with Linux on your PowerPC, it's a problem of your machine or your specific Linux setup, not a generic Linux problem usually. For example, Linus Torvalds used (and maybe he still uses) a dual-G5 to do his part of Linux developments. Probably because Linux is unstable on in it, LOL.

My own highly-hacked, highly-expanded PowerMac 9600 (Sonnet G3/500, 512MB, reflashed PC Radeon7000 PCI, PCI IDE card, PCI USB card, PCI sound card, PCI network card, three harddisks, CD-ROM, CD/RW, etc) server runs for months without being restarted, also rock solid with desktop software running (i'm typing this on it, into Firefox), and Linux supports every single chip on the mainboard, which is practically undocumented to the public by it's manufacturer. And this with a Debian testing distribution, which really supposed to have bugs in it. Go figure.

I really like the G3 because it is fanless. I can chase my dream of a totally silent system that way (still have to figure out something for power supply fan).

G3 works A-OK for MorphOS, although I would say that playing DVDs does get choppy. I had hoped that mPlayer would be optimized some more and that this would improve performance. Maybe that'll still happen. Should we start a bounty to optimize and improve mPlayer?

Anyhow, G3s are also very power-efficient, so I like this too.

Oversimplified most apps will run about twice as fast on the G4 as on the G3.

The big problem of the G3 is the limited memory throughput.
The memory throughput of the G3 is the the range of a 68K CPU.

On Linux and MacOS were applications tend to be much bigger than on MorphOS, this memory limitation is slowing the G3 down a lot.

On MOS the difference is not so visible as most apps are small and as the G4 memory throughput is limited by MOS atm anyway.

The G3 has a memory throughput similar to a K6 or 68040.
Linux will run on the G3 in comaparable speed. If you want to use Linux a lot then better get a G4.

Cheers
Gunnar

Quote:

That's not true (I suppose you're referring to the lack of AltiVec support), the memory throughput is limited by hardware (and AltiVec does not change that, although you can have seemingly better results using it (with streaming in particular) due to larger read/write ops (though the bus is limited to 64bit anyway) and more efficient cache usage (with some effort you can still make it quite efficient without AltiVec), but as usual it all boils down to how well you tune the code for the specific task at hand), MorphOS has no influence over that (apart from setting default cache-modes for various areas of memory (each with their own up- and downsides))...


- CISC