It's a Cold Dark Universe

What better way to remind us of the universe as a cold, uncaring vast expanse and the prevalent threat of sudden death than space sims. The tradition started with the '80s classic Elite has been carried on with many 21st century titles that focus varyingly on trading, mining, combat, or just flying around in the space sim version of lurking. Among these sims are many freeware titles, and now that I've recently done a run down of first-person-shooters still available on PowerPC, I figured I'd do the same for space simulators.



We should start with Oolite since it's the most directly inspired by the original Elite. Like Elite, Oolite is open-ended, meaning what you do in the universe is entirely up to you. Wanna be a pirate? Go for it. Out of the box, the graphics are somewhat rudimentary, but you can change this by installing among tons of expansion packs -- ships, skins, HUDS, sound packs, and more. The stable release requires Tiger and is a universal binary, but their development release seems to require Intel and Leopard, so it looks like PowerPC development for OS X is dead unless someone wants to take the source code and run with it. Debian users can install the development release from their testing repositories, but given the state of PowerPC graphics drivers on Linux...ugh.



Similar to Oolite but perhaps more elaborate is Vega Strike. Their OS X download is a version behind the latest release and seems stuck there. I think they're looking for packagers. One weakness compared to the others on this list is its startup time, which is disconcertingly leisurely. It's also more demanding in the graphics department, though you can tone it down in the settings to play fluidly on almost any configuration at the expense of prettiness. Like Oolite, this is open-ended, too, though the universe here seems a bit more populated. Unlike Oolite, it's so complex it's hard to get into and start playing right away. Thankfully it comes with an extensive PDF manual. The more you're into this genre, the more you'll enjoy this.



Finally there's Babylon 5: I've Found Her. If you think Babylon 5 refers to the TV show, you are correct! IFH is a fan-made game from a couple of Russian developers, probably the best fan-made game you'll come across. Unlike Oolite and Vega Strike, IFH is mission-oriented rather than open-ended. It puts you in the cockpit of a starfury and is mostly focused on shoot 'em up style action, though there is some exploring as well. Fan-contributed missions can be downloaded from the FTP link in this thread (the unpacked files have to be manually installed into the app package -- ooo, fun). There's also a Simulator mode for quick dogfighting action. For training purposes, of course. Not to satisfy any blood lust. That would be unseemly.

Another option is FreeSpace Open, which requires the purchase of the original FreeSpace 2, and you also need a Windows system to extract FreeSpace 2's data files. Instructions for installing this on OS X are at the FreeSpace Wiki, though from the look of Youtube clips, FreeSpace Open might be too graphics intensive for all but the fastest G5s.

New GUI App for Youtube-dl

(UPDATE: Newer versions of PPC Media Center look somewhat different than the screenshot below and have additional features. The download link at the bottom has been updated to the latest version.)

I ought to complain more often. Just a few weeks ago I wrote a post about Vevo branded videos on Youtube breaking third party downloaders. Youtube-dl was the only one that worked, and it being command line, was slightly inconvenient. Well, lo and behold, good fortune knocked on my door (sent me email) and Adam A. left me a cool new Applescript app called PPC Media Center (download link at bottom). It's a simple and elegant GUI frontend for youtube-dl, and I can report on good authority that it's awesome.



Basically it works by copying a video link to the clipboard, launching the app, and pasting the URL in the text field. You can also assign a hotkey (with a tool like Spark) and use it to launch PPCMC QuickLaunch.app which makes the URL pasting automatic. More on that in the documentation. Either way, you'll see three buttons, all of which are fairly descriptive. From my testing on Youtube, the download and streaming buttons will give you choices of quality and then you're on your way. Streaming opens in Quicktime (Perian plug-in recommended), and the download button opens a Terminal window to show your progress. The "Check for Updates" button did just that and asked my administrative password to update youtube-dl in my /usr/local/bin.

All that and a cool icon.

Another cool thing, this being Applescript, is you can edit the script inside the app package with Script Editor.app. There's a little about adding site quality profiles in the documentation, and I wonder if it's super complicated to change the player from Quicktime to VLC or Mplayer. As the documentation notes, if you do make changes use the "Save" and not "Save As" command to avoid damaging the app bundle, and keep a backup copy of the original.

Download PPC Media Center here:

(1/20/2020: Final update - universal binary. Consult the Read Me for all the updated features.)

http://www.mediafire.com/file/1ukk0tw6sj129m0/PPCMediaCenter.zip/file

One more note, you may notice on the right I've added a new link to my blogroll. It's Mac OS 9 Lives, and it has a special focus on audio workstations and music producing which was always a strength of the classic Mac OS and still is. They also have an active forum section, so go check them out!

Tor Browser Bundle for PowerPC

A little birdie left a comment saying there was an unofficial Tor Browser Bundle for Tiger and Leopard at sourceforge.net/projects/osxpowerpcpackages. Given that I wrote a long torturous post about how to use Tor without the bundle since Tor officially dropped PowerPC, I naturally wanted to check this out.

So I downloaded it and it turns out it's no joke. It really is the Tor Browser Bundle for PowerPC. From the ReadMe:

The packages in this directory are UNOFFICIAL builds of the Tor Browser Bundle for Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5), PowerPC architecture. Optimized builds are available for the different PowerPC versions, namely, the G3, G4 (7450) and G5.

The bundle is based on the official Tor Browser Bundle with changes to make it work on older Mac OS X versions and the PowerPC architecture. Most notably, Qt is downgraded to the last Mac OS X 10.4 compatible version (4.7.4) and Firefox is patched with suitable parts from the TenFourFox changeset.

Note that the 2.3.25-15 bundle version is already outdated. More current version based on Tor Browser Bundle 3.5 is in the works.

As said, it's a bit outdated so it's more proof of concept, but everything works. It all comes in one app bundle, and inside it are Vidalia and Firefox, with Firefox having its own profile in TorBrowser.app/Library/Application Support/, so you can run this side-by-side with TenFourFox with no problems.

It also sets your user agent to the default Tor user agent, has private browsing enabled, and sets network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to "true," so all your bases are covered. It comes with two add-ons, HTTPS Everywhere and NoScript. NoScript is set to allow scripts by default, so you want to click the "Forbid Scripts" option.

Basically all you need to do is start the application, watch Vidalia establish a connection until Firefox opens to a page announcing you're browsing anonymously. Easy like it's supposed to be.

I'm also intrigued by the account name on that Sourceforge page. It's called "OS X PowerPC Packages" with the description, "A repository providing binaries of open source packages built for OS X Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5) PowerPC." So maybe there'll be more in the future.

Vevo Videos on Youtube

For a few months now you may have noticed Vevo titles on Youtube aren't working with Mactubes and a number of Greasemonkey scripts. If you like watching music videos, this puts a serious crimp on things as most "official" video releases are Vevo vids. Right now, the only third party tool I know of that can get around this is youtube-dl. So install* it if you don't have it, or update your copy with:

youtube-dl -U

With the newer version you can either download the videos or retrieve the links and stream them through a player like Mplayer (see Some Cross Platform Flash Alternatives). Both methods work.

*On the download page, if you don't have curl or wget, you can just click the download link at the top and then move it to your /usr/local/bin before running the chmod command. It can also be installed with Tigerbrew or Macports.

First Person Shooter Party Fun Time!

As I'm not one to manage my time well in general, I never have enough time to enjoy the finer things in life — like the mass carnage of first person shooter games. But I do manage to download things and try them out once in a while, which is what I did recently with Open Arena and a few other open source first person shooters. So why not a roundup? This is a blog, that's kind of what we do here. So here's the story on some open source FPS games for your PowerPC Macs.

Open Arena

Heavily based on Quake III Arena, Open Arena is, well, Quake III Arena. That about covers it. Okay, there are slight differences. The game characters and maps are different, but the concept and game play are pretty much identical.



On my aluminum Powerbook (1.5 GHz, Tiger), this performs really well in a 640 x 480 resolution. In tweaking the settings (not just in Open Arena but in everything reviewed here), I found that screen resolution and the number of opponents are by far the biggest factors in getting good frame rates. So adjust accordingly. The game is a 460 MB download, and there's also a single player mod called OARemix available at Mod DB. OARemix is a separate game folder where you copy the OpenArena.app into it and play with all new maps (the one on the oil rig is really good).

If you're having trouble getting sound, turn OpenAL off in the Sound settings, and if your mod doesn't have that setting (like True Combat mentioned below), switch to the console with Shift + ESC and enter /s_useopenal 0, then restart the sound with /snd_restart.

Also, reader Peter S. compiled OpenArena for G3s (altivec disabled) available at this link.

(ADDENDUM: There's a Quake III mod that also works on Open Arena called True Combat. The physics and weapons are all about realism, and it's the best Quake III/Open Arena mod I've seen. Just download it and put the "truecombat" folder in your Open Arena folder, then start Open Arena and click "Mods." To do single player, choose "StartServer" under the Combat tab, and then you can choose your mission type and skill level. Further instructions are found on the True Combat features page.)

Sauerbraten

Cube 2: Sauerbraten is another title that's been in development forever and shows no signs of going away. It's much like Open Arena, though a major difference is the addition of a Campaign mode where you can progress from level to level.



This is slightly more resource hungry than Open Arena, and there's a wider disparity in frame rates from map to map. Most rendered well, but a few were very slow (You'll notice I resisted the temptation to type out a dozen w's at the end of slow. It always bugged me how much bandwidth that wasted.). When you download the DMG file, it installs as a simple app package. No need to hunt for binaries or change file permissions, so that's nice. Like Open Arena, the game play is very fast and challenging.

Nexuiz

Nexuiz, or Nexuiz Classic, stopped development with version 2.5.2 when one of its developers left to develop a new version of Nexuiz with IllFonic, and those left behind created an new open source fork called Xonotic. But Nexuiz Classic is still available for download at Sourceforge.



Although Nexuiz comes with a nice in-game tutorial, I had real difficulty getting good frame rates out of this. I could really only play it with one bot, and even then it was iffy. So I didn't explore this one as much as the other two. Xonotic may be an alternative for Leopard users. I know they don't support Tiger, but Leopard PPC, I'm not sure (that linked post was from 2010).

There are other games out there, too. There's Aleph One, which is an open source update of Marathon. There's also Tremulous, which I haven't tried. Those alien spiders were a bit too creepy. Maybe later. Also, Alien Arena advertises OS X support, but OS X (and Linux) users must compile from source, and I found no references on the net of anyone succeeding. Maybe later.

The only one of these games I tried on Linux PPC was Open Arena. I got good frame rates, but the colors were all messed up. Apparently the Radeon driver doesn't agree with my ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. I'll be on pins and needles for bug fixes.

New PowerPC Blog!

So I was cruising around the internets, and in my habitual browsing I came across powerpc-liberation.blogspot.ca, a spiffy new blog about our beloved computing platform. It's surprisingly in-depth and comprehensive for such a young blog, with posts about Debian 7, all kinds of content on video playback, an amusing post about scrolling vs. page up/page down...

Wait. That sounds suspiciously like Zen's blog at http://powerpcliberation.blogspot.ca/. In fact, it is his blog, lifted word for word except for the "-" between powerpc and liberation. With ads, too! Well, well, it seems we have a copycat among us. As soon as I got over the hurt that my blog wasn't copied, I got righteously indignant. This is about as blatant a case of theft as there is.

So Zen wrote about this on his blog, and I'm just passing on the warning. To all the PowerPC bloggers out there, it's probably a good idea to google your blog every now and then to see if someone out there is ripping off your content.

The really disappointing thing is the imposter didn't have the guts to copy Zen's last post ripping him a new one. As long as you're gonna steal word-for-word...

Scratch Another Off the List...

Even Bar Refaeli is parting with her PowerPC:



Must we all be forsaken?

Shhh... Go ahead. You throttle that CPU.

Lately I got sucked into looking at methods to throttle CPUs on PowerPC. It started out as a good idea, but my compulsion for completeness made it take on a life of its own and I probably spent way more time reading about it than necessary. But I've come out the other side, and now I'm reading a 580 page book about the Crimean War! Totally useful knowledge. I know how to pick 'em. Anyway, the point of all this is I am now here to share the fruits of my labor and tell you exactly why Orthodox religion and rampant Russophobia in Western Europe led to... I mean, tell you all the ways you can throttle your Mac's CPU.

Throttling CPUs often gets confused with the nice/renice commands, but they aren't quite the same. Nice/renice only prioritizes processes eating your CPU, but all your idle CPU will still be used. CPU throttling actually limits the amount of CPU a process can use. For example, if you throttle Handbrake to 50% CPU, Handbrake won't rise above 50% usage even if there are no other processes running. The practical use for this is mostly for laptops. Let's say you're doing some compiling or video encoding, something CPU intensive that takes a long time, but your laptop easily overheats or you just don't want to hear the fan going. You can limit the heat by throttling the CPU. Sure, it'll take longer, but your laptop won't give you Toasted Skin Syndrome.

For our PowerPC Macs I found a few ways of doing this, all from the command line. First, on Linux there's a program called cpulimit which has you enter a process name or PID number and the percentage of maximum CPU you want to set it to. A typical command would look like this:

cpulimit -e iceweasel -l 50

The "-e" is used when you enter the name of the program (iceweasel). You use "-p" when entering the PID instead, and you can also use -P to enter the absolute path (/usr/bin/iceweasel). The "-l" is for limit, and the 50 is the max percentage of CPU allowed. To exit, just use the standard ctrl-C.

For OS X, I found a couple of ways that work in Tiger. First, there's cpulimitrob. This is a script that someone left on Mac OS X Hints and does essentially what cpulimit does. It uses SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to pause and restart, thereby limiting total CPU time. After you download it and give it the customary chmod kiss (755), you change directories to its current location with the cd command and fire it up as root:

~ dan$ cd Development

~/Development dan$ sudo ./cpulimitrob.sh
Password:
Which process ID (PID)?
297
Sleep time in seconds?
.5
Run time in seconds (e.g 0.5 or 1 ?)?
.5
.................

and the dots continue on and on until you exit with ctrl-C. It mostly works well. The only hitch I found was when testing with TenFourFox, where the browser froze whenever I exited cpulimitrob in the middle of a page loading.

The other tool I found for Tiger didn't have any such problems and appears to exit more gracefully. It's called cputhrottle. However, the binary available for download isn't compiled for PowerPC, and to compile requires Boost 1.33.1. So being the completist that I am, I installed Boost with Tigerbrew (about 3-4 hours to configure and make) and then compiled cputhrottle from source. Using cputhrottle is almost the same as cpulimit, though like cpulimitrob, you need to run it with the sudo command:

~ dan$ cd Development/cputhrottle

~/Development/cputhrottle dan$ sudo ./cputhrottle 1309 50

The 1309 is the PID which you can get from top or Activity Monitor, and the 50 is the max CPU percentage. And again, killing the limit is as simple as ctrl-C.

In case you don't want to compile Boost and cputhrottle, I uploaded the binary I made to my Mediafire folder. It should work on Tiger, though I'm not enough of a compiling expert to say definitively whether it'll work on Leopard. You may also need to run "chmod +x cputhrottle" to make it executable.

Finally, if you just want to prioritize your processes so web browsing or somesuch isn't super slow while something else hogs the CPU, you don't have to use nice/renice from the command line. There's a very old GUI application for OS X called ProcessWizard that still works. In Linux, you can do the same with Gnome System Monitor.

Let's Play...

...let's link to other people's PowerPC Youtube channels! These are (more or less) PowerPC centric, though I don't vouch for the quality of each and every vid.

The iBookGuy - Not just iBooks!

The PowerPC Hub - Actually a mix of MacIntel, iOS and PowerPC.

Lmull3's Geekery Emporium - Macs and Mac clones.

ItsMyNaturalColour - The dude with the white hair.

BBISHOPPCM's World - Some really old vintage stuff.

gavinstubbs09 - A few PowerPC videos here.