MacPro 1,1 experiments :-)

Want to talk about music hardware or software that doesn't include Reason?
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bitley
Posts: 1673
Joined: 03 Jul 2015
Location: sweden
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16 Nov 2019

Hi guys!

A few weeks ago I took a peek at Facebook's marketplace and whoops what's that. It looked like a regular old G5 although in great shape and the asking price was unbelievable – $50. So I said I was interested as I would have bought nearly any model in this alu tower shape for that kind of money. The guy said he'd bought it for his son to play games on but the kid didn't like it so it'd been sitting in the basement for two years. He didn't know anything about Mac but took a nearly impossible to read picture of the machine description. Turns out it was a Mac Pro 1,1 (the first model as introduced by Steve Jobs himself). I went over there and got it. Actually gave him a few bucks extra as well since he was nice enough to sell it to me late at night. He said the messages kept popping up about it all the time so I was in luck.

Since this I've upgraded it to 32 Gb of ram and I've mounted my old drives, such as a nice SSD for startup etc. I got the modified El Capitan installer – made specifically for this machine to come around the infamous 32 bit EFI issue on this one. At first I'd not gotten the extra RAM and I was moving around the memory sockets in order to try making the machine more stable as it crashed quite regularly. Now with the 32 Gb seated, it actually runs smoothly and has been stable since I turned it on about two hours ago. Reason 11 is now successfully installed and updated – next step will be to actually try using it.

Things needed to be fixed;
1. Looking for a driver for the Roland ED PC-300 ideally, as it's a spare keyboard I have that could be dedicated to this machine – I saw someone has made a mod on a Casio driver on github but it was for xcode and not compiled to an installer. I'd prefer that...
2. Looking for the best price / performance graphics card and thinking about the possibility of running Sims 4 on it as well – if you've got any suggestions let me know. Good info on this page; https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/gp ... p.2174600/

This is an additional machine to my regular setups in this Mac-crowded home but it's fantastic now if it will run Reason 11 nicely – I didn't really need an extra mac but I was bored and it's kind of fun setting up & tweaking old computers from time to time. I used to consider PCs as well but I stopped doing that, the last half modern PC I have runs Windows 10 and I think the user experience is so sad and terrible that I want to put Linux on that one.

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bitley
Posts: 1673
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16 Nov 2019

Hehe, R11 runs smoothly indeed. 64 samples buffer size & 3 ms of input latency on the built in sound card, not too shabby

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bitley
Posts: 1673
Joined: 03 Jul 2015
Location: sweden
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16 Nov 2019

Found online assistance and a driver which works with RolandED PC-300 (which was only supported by Roland up to 10.5)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/27 ... 7669880022

Great stuff :-) Perhaps helps someone else some day.

kinkujin
Posts: 206
Joined: 01 Mar 2018

20 Nov 2019

Congrats. I have a 2,1 and a 3,1 that I can't get rid of. Too bad you're in Sweden. :-)

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bitley
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20 Nov 2019

Use them, awesome workstations!

dhruan
Posts: 311
Joined: 16 Jan 2015
Location: Helsinki, Finland
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21 Nov 2019

Heeeeey... that is cool, have a 3,1 but with only 4GB of memory... sourcing more has shown to be a problem so I haven't bothered to go forward with flashing and hacking it so it could run later OSs... :/
soundcloud.com/armsgrade

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bitley
Posts: 1673
Joined: 03 Jul 2015
Location: sweden
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21 Nov 2019

Ok, I found memory on Ebay, search there. Which are the latest OSes your machines support?

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