BEOS on PowerMac 8600 Woes

Be, Inc.
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Greeting Folks! recently I got my hands on a PowerMac 8600/250 with a Sonnet Crescendo G4 450mhz and was excited to play around with MacOS 7.6 and BEOS on this particular machine and BEOS has given some weird issues to say the least, it installs fine (well with a little fuckery since it’s a Kansas board which be had some conflicting info about on the FAQ) but the audio in particular has been really weird, at first I was convinced it didn’t work and was doing research and found a article about a PM6500 having similar issues from a couple years ago and wondering if it was something like that because I had similar symptoms of no audio, but hearing popping noise noises if you muted and unmuted the output and also wav and mp3 files saying they can’t play in the built in media player, but after some reinstalls and such, I decided to play a midi file and low and behold I hear sound gloriously coming out of the speakers and this confuses the fuck out of me, but then I tried some other stuff and I figured out these things

-MIDI’s and 3D Mixes Do work with the built-in player, but MP3 and WAV’s do not and error that I need a add on

-however MP3 audio DOES work if I use the included clAMP

-CD audio doesn’t work through the player but interestingly, if you set your mic input to the CD and then restart the media services the period where the media service haven’t restarted you yet you can hear the CD audio coming out the internal Mac speaker

All of these versions of BEOS Pro I’ve tested so far exhibited this similar behavior:
-OG BE 4.5
-OG BE 5.0.3
-GOBE 5.0.3

If anyone’s curious about the other specs
It has 98 mb of ram, maxed out 4mb of vram and the og 4gb scsi drive

I don’t quite know what the cause of this could be, but it seems that it’s more of an issue of the OS processing audio internally rather than not being able to output to the hardware, if anyone has any suggestions please let me know

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The media kit is broken on nearly every CD image of R5 PPC going around and I haven’t quite figured out how yet; I now can’t get it working on my own 5400 - which worked before on my genuine R5 Pro disc, but it’s now scratched beyond use.

Same symptoms as yours, anything that does not use demuxers/decoders works; but anything that does fails.

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I vaguely remember that in that era the CD Player and Sound Card had to be physically connected to each other with a cable.

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In BeOS you had the option of playing the WAV files off the CDDA-FS mount, or using the CD player via the internal cable.

The former needs to use the media kit to decode, the latter does not.

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I’ve actually just had a thought here - when audio worked fine for me I had 24mb RAM. I now have 136. The other person I know having problems also has quite a lot of RAM for a PPC machine.

There may be something failing due to too much memory.

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So I have a very funny update for this, I decided to wipe my drive and redo my partitions right since I previously used a resizing tool but I guess doing that beos audio just works now lol, I also did try to install some of the beta stuff like bone but uhh the Mac does not like that because then the BeOS partition becomes unbootable lmao anyways I have things fully working now!

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None of the beta stuff exists for PPC, the scripts will just screw up the install.

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