OK, time to be neighborly and delve a bit into the details of what exactly the browsing problems were.
In the meantime he’s been using his daughter’s old PC laptop to get by, but he really misses having one machine for everything – web browsing on one and working on the other is getting a bit tedious. He informed me that was the down the road plan, but it just isn’t in the budget quite yet.
I'm off to work while you folks have the day off, but I can at least watch developments there.When my neighbor asked me what he could do to fix his problems with browsing the internet on his G4 Mirrored Drive Door, my immediate response was to upgrade that machine to a Mac mini. The folks at Mac68k would be the ones to ask.
No shipping version of any Mac OS can address higher than 512MB DIMMs, but that doesn't necessarily mean the addressing hardware in non-existant, it may be addressable as Silicon Disk VRAM per the Compact Virtual route. Old World memory sizes Apple supported and higher capacity SIMMs that became avaiable eith the development of higher density packages were distinctly d1fferent in many cases. Supported DIMM sizes may or may not be addressable as VRAM with a similar System Hack, dunno. I'd posted info on Connectix' Compact Virtual that disappeared. Wicked smart creative folks in that world of development there that's probably directly applicable to the Universal 9.2.2 Installer, much easier than burning physical ROMs to fit on custom ROM SIMMs and Conversion Boards. They're the folks to ask questions about loading that half Meg of FLASH with something useful before the OS loads. My focus has been on the NuBus Architecture, but the folks involved in that pursuit and the pre-Slot Manager 68000 Architecture have been hard at work filling unused ROM mapped address capacity with things useful in hardware ROM. The "ROM" available at the top of the 4MB address space in New World Macs G4 Macintosh - what is located at Real Address 0x80000000 ? Second: while searching, I found parallel discussion from five years ago, much good information on first page re 3/4 DIMM configurations and even why(?), haven't followed it further as yet: When i remember right, that funny MacOS 8 for x86 could also only use 1.0 gb.įirst: I'm looking for Developer Notes on the 4 DIMM g4s. this is another example of limitation by design. there are windows laptops, too, where you can only use 1.5 gb of RAM.Īfaik you can not even use bigger dimms with a G4 for OSX, because the slots will always only see the first 512 mb. but i could imagine that the limit has something to do with the PCI slots.
In theory it should be possible for the OS itself to use more than 1.5 gb: MacOS and the apple hardware is fully 32 bit since around Mac OS 7 times. In windows for example, the adress room has to be shared with the graphics card, the onboard controllers, and even the ROM. as you might know, in a 32 bit windows app you´ll only be able to half of that, because the adress space is shared between the RAM adresses and other things. In a 32 bit OSX one process can use 4 GB, because that is about what you get with a 32 bit adress space. Please post your experiences of application limits/issues here.īut his question is eligible: somehow it does not make sense that it is available as ROM, because you have no chance to get something non-OS9 onto a memory chip while MacOS9 is running.Ībout the reason, that is probably more difficult than one might think.
Until, the Mac OS 9.4 Update is released (that may take a while), we are stuck with a 1.5GB physical memory limit in OS 9.2.2 as far as the OS is concerned. Also, the idea of trying to load the RAM disk into the unused area between (1.5 GB to 2 GB) and reclaiming some of the wasted RAM above 1.5 GB was a bust.
Built-in Memory (or Physical Memory) is 1.99 GB and finder shows Memory used per application and the System itself using 811.9 MB instead of 68.1MB !!! (this is obviously the overhead of the RAM disk and the wasted 512MB) Mactron would have a nervous breakdown if he saw his System use 811.9 MB (he gets upset if he wastes 1 MB), Now the largest unused Block (of available memory) decreases down to 1.18 GB (the worst number yet).Īgain, we can conclude that although the numbers are not 100%, a RAM disk will decrease the available memory and proportionately add itself into the Mac OS category as far as Memory used. Now for test 2: We create the maximum RAM disk allowed (and tell it to re-create on Boot up) of 256 MB and re-start