Ultimate Retro Gaming: PowerMac G5 to Minecraft Server!

A few weeks ago i posted a video about how to play minecraft on your powerpc mac where i set up a g4 optimized version of minecraft 125 on my heavily upgraded apple g4 cube that’s about 21 years old and honestly i got pretty playable performance out of it

And the response to that video was really awesome you guys had a lot of great suggestions to push this thing even further so check out that video right here if you haven’t seen it but the main suggestion was to set up a minecraft server which will take the

Load of world generation off of this cube and put it onto another machine and that’s gonna dramatically help the frame rate and playability of the game on the cube so today let’s do just that but we’re not going to use just any computer for our server so stay tuned today’s macintosh shenanigans are

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Absolute gems like this amazing entire apple one clone so if you have any pcb needs i hope you’ll give pcbway.com a try so the last time we were hacking around the cube at the end i showed off a mac mini and i thought it could make a pretty good minecraft server

With the hopes that you all could hop on with me and this would be strong enough to handle all of us playing together well as you might know this year i’m taking part in the mac yak power pc challenge where for an entire week we’re going to try and use nothing but power

Pc computers and this mac mini it’s intel core 2 duo and while that might make a great server i want to do something more in line with our challenge which is why we’re ditching the mini and we’re replacing it with this right hang on a second

This is my dual 2 gigahertz power mac g5 which i think will make a pretty good power pc server for our power pc minecrafting with eight gigs of ram and a fairly fast ssd it should make just as good of a minecraft 125 server as that intel mac mini would albeit with

Maybe just a tiny bit more power draw now i’ve already installed wiknix’s ubuntu 1604 remix for powerpc and i did that to hopefully get access to much more recent versions of java but this is actually the wrong distribution to run this server on and we’ll get into why that is in a bit

But for now we have openjdk8 running on here versus the maximum of java 6 on leopard and this version of lebantu is actually quite special and i’ll link to it below but basically the inexorable wiknix who is behind much of the fun modern vintage apps that we love such as

10.5 tube in the arctic fox browser he’s packaged up versions of ubuntu tweaked to run especially well on powerpc machines with all kinds of software that runs well in these machines as well as fan modules and the battery indicator and firmware for wi-fi and track pad stuff and tons of really great

Stuff that make ubuntu run super well on power pc and if you have a power pc mac that you want a reasonably modern linux on without a lot of hassle i definitely recommend checking out the 1604 and 1204 lubuntu remixes from wiknix so instead of your standard just

Minecraft server i decided to go with the bucket server which actually goes all the way back to kind of the beginning of minecraft and this is the version four one two five and i did that so i would have some other options like some plugins for a

Little bit of extra security since this is such an old version of minecraft and i’m going to open it up to the internet and i’ve also taken a special start.sh shell script file and this is actually from a minecraft install guide meant for raspberry pi where he’s actually running paper mc but

He wrote all this stuff to kind of tone down the server to work really well within the confines of a four gigabyte raspberry pi so i’m using a lot of those same optimizations here on this server to try to get the best possible performance out of it

So i just took out all the stuff for paper mc and left the bucket mc stuff in here and yeah i’ll link to this guide below because it’s very helpful to run a server on low end hardware and then the way that script works is we need to run it from the start.sh

Script but we need to actually install a program called screen first and what screen does is it kind of lets you run this in the background on a screen and you can view that screen from another machine after you log in you can have a logged in user and the user on the

Machine here view the screen at the same time so basically that makes remote administration of the running server much easier alright so screen is installed so let’s launch the server let’s have to make that executable and now start so the server is booting up now and i can do screen dash

R to jump into it and i can watch the server do its stuff here and i can also leave this up and go to my laptop ssh into this g5 and watch the server from there as well so pretty cool let me show you real quick why this is not

The right version of linux to be running on this machine to run the server so this mac has eight gigs of ram which we can see right here we’re using 363 megs out of 7 900 megs which is 8 gigs of ram but although this is a 64-bit

Kernel the user space and file system are 32-bit and unfortunately that means we can only run a 32-bit version of java so if we were to try to run the server with more than 3.5 gigs of ram like say we want to run with seven gigs of ram which would be ideal

Unfortunately we get the specified size exceeds the maximum representable size could not create the java virtual machine and that’s because the 32-bit version of java can only address 3.5 gigs of ram so we’re gonna have to get a full 64-bit version of linux on here

Such as debian or void in order to take full advantage of this power mac g5 but fortunately those optimizations that we have for technically for the raspberry pi come in real handy here because it’s optimized for just four gigs of memory hey look we’ve already got somebody logged in

All right let’s take a look at just how much of a difference this makes running minecraft on the g4 cube alright so here we are in minecraft and i have already set up the server and here we are and hey look we have fox 198 already on the server here because

Actually i already gave out this server to a couple of people from the mac yak and action retro discords to come try out so if we take a look around here we’ve already set up some fun stuff so here’s my little house with my apple logo on top of it

And i set up a happy mac with a little bit demonic eyes and yeah if we take a look at the frame rate right now we’re getting 20 21 dipping down a bit to 18. well yeah my experience so far we’ve been getting in the 20s i think because it’s nighttime

It’s going a wee bit slower well what happened to your midsection skeleton friend but yeah this is perfectly playable i have been playing around in the server building random stuff and well the server has been a little bit finicky and a little bit moody it has crashed a couple times

But for the most part it works so i think i definitely need to get a 64-bit version of linux on here like hopefully debian and that will let me dedicate all eight gigs well seven gigs to be safe to minecraft and then we’ll be able to hopefully have

A lot of you all on here so actually in the description of this video below i’m going to put a link to the server and originally i was going to say only join if you have a powerpc mac but i’m going to expand it i’m going to say

If you have any vintage machine that you can get minecraft 125 running on come join the server and i want to see just how much this power mac g5 can put up with but honestly on this 21 year old apple g4 cube this is really pretty good i am pretty

Happy with this oh look here’s my sheep prison sheep jail these are the bad sheep so like i said in the description below i’m gonna put the link to this server and just come on in and join it’s on creative build whatever you want and we’ll see how much fun we can have

With this thing so let’s try the server out in a couple of other g4 max and see just how much of a difference it makes first up we have my beloved 12-inch powerbook g4 which has a 1.5 gigahertz processor 1.5 gigs of ram and a geforce 5200 with 64 megs of vram

All right we have our server still up here and one thing that this power book has going for it is that the screen resolution is going to be much lower so it’s actually running at i think 800 by 600 here and that’s really going to give it a leg

Up and wow yeah this is incredibly smooth still loading in some stuff hey look at this pretty sweet rainbow pathway you know our friend is still in here yeah there we go we’re fully loaded in now and this is buttery smooth let’s take a look at our frames per second

Yeah so the lowest it’s hitting is in the 30s but when we’re idling it was going up to the 70s i saw like 71 for a second so yeah 50s oh yeah and i actually upped the render distance a tiny bit let’s put it all the

Way down like we had it on the cube and see how high our frame rate gets now yeah so we’re idling in the 60s with the lowest possible draw distance and absolutely buttery smooth but since we can do it we’ll add just that tiny bit of extra

Render distance just to see some extra trees in the distance and this tower and we can really admire fox’s house with these super smooth frame rates all right let’s try a different mac okay so here’s my titanium powerbook g4 a machine near and dear to my heart because one very similar to this

Was my daily driver for a number of years now this one has an 867 megahertz g4 processor so just above the bare minimum 800 megahertz that supposedly is required to run minecraft and it only has 512 megs of ram because i took the ram out and put it in another machine

And well this will make a good test it also only has a 32 megabyte ati video card so yeah i’m not expecting minecraft to run that well on here okay now i really don’t have high hopes for this because the screen resolution is so much bigger and no actually it’s not that bad

Well surprisingly this feels smoother than the cube did very surprisingly let’s see what our frame rate is yeah 25 frames per second well some dips but you know what this is uh maybe about as good as the cube no you know i’d say this is just a bit worse than the cube but

Honestly this is perfectly playable yeah we’re getting in the teens and twenties but a playable teens and twenties i’d say this is only about fifteen percent worse than the cube i mean it is a somewhat more modern machine being from the very last run of the titanium power book

But the processor is slower and it has much less ram so i’m really surprised that it’s running as well as it is yeah i’m getting between 18 and like 25 and dips down into the single digits but all in all hey what are you looking at get out of here

That guy was looking at me funny i’m gonna have to put him into sheep jail yeah all in all this is very impressive all right let’s try one more g4 powerbook okay so here’s a machine that should never in a million years be able to even dream about playing minecraft this

Is my powerbook g3 pismo that i’ve upgraded to a g4 500 megahertz it’s also got one gig of ram but an absolutely minuscule eight megs of vram in its ati rage graphics card let’s connect this to the server and see if it has any chance of a playable frame rate

All right that’s already not looking so good we’ve launched into minecraft but the background of the splash screen is basically a slideshow but let’s pop into the server and see how it goes all right so we’re logging in and that’s a bit slow looks like we have some friends on the

Server that’s good well i can chat at least all right we’re slowly getting in man we are still loading in and there goes a flying octopus that’s normal all right so we’re just about at a slideshow but hey did you ever think you were gonna see minecraft

On a powerbook pismo hey look somebody uh outlined my little happy mac and put a sign there let’s see if we can go over there and see what the sign says welcome to macintosh oh hey there’s something ppcm yeah it looks like we have some friends adding some cool stuff that we’re never

Going to see trying to use this pismo but just out of curiosity let’s see what our frame rate says one okay so we’re getting between one and three fps wow it says 0fps i’ve never seen it say 0fps okay so as cool as it might be to see minecraft running on a

Powerbook pismo from 1997 i’m gonna go ahead and say even with this 500 megahertz g4 upgrade it’s not really playable but yeah definitely cool okay so i had the server running on ubuntu for a couple of days and it was never stable always laggy and when you looked at the system

Utilization in h-top it was basically running maxed out cpu 100 of the time so i decided to switch to my favorite power pc linux distro and i put adelie linux 64-bit on here and now it runs like a dream so i have the server running it’s been

Running for a couple of hours and i’ve had up to six people in here and there’s practically no lag whatsoever so right now we’re in the server running on screen so if i do control a d i can get out of there and we can pop into h top

And look at this utilization that’s crazy so before cpu 1 was just maxed at 100 and then cpu 2 was running like system stuff and it was down in the 20s but now look at this incredibly low cpu usage and the reason is we’re now running fully 64-bit

So we’ve got 64-bit java and if we do java version we can see open jdk 64-bit server so this is open jdk 8 fully 64-bit and we can see we’re running on kernel 5.4 so extremely recent and what’s even more interesting is i haven’t even installed addly yet i’m

Literally running this off of the live dvd because i just wanted to test and see how good it was and it is far far beyond my expectation so i am running the minecraft server now very very stable with seven gigs of ram dedicated to it and

Yeah it flies so if you’re going to set up any kind of server on your power mac g5 i’d recommend adelie linux and if you want to see how to install it because it’s not as straightforward as ubuntu actually way back in the beginning of

The channel i did an install video on my imac g3 of adelie linux and i’ll link that right here but by the time this video goes out i’ll have this installed on the g5 and it should be even faster than it is right now which is pulling resources off of the

Dvd all the time so yeah thank you adelie linux so if you enjoyed this video i’d appreciate a thumbs up and if you’d like to see more macintosh shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and i’ll see you next time and a special thanks to chris justin sorta eclectic

And spike who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping make these shenanigans possible You