Hi PowerPC users, I am the guy who ported the kx audio driver to PowerPC macs, and i have decided to get into another project, porting the Envy24HT audio driver to PowerPC macs!
Why this? Mostly because i love putting all sorts of crazy pci cards in my macs and also because i already own some of the supported hardware and so i thought it will be cool to use some of them on PowerPC macs as upgrade paths.
I didn't have to start from scratch luckily since there were an abbandonware open source driver for hackintoshes, so all i had to do is basically port it to PowerPC macs.
A very early port has been actually been very straight forward and it just required minor code modifications to handle the big endian nature of the platform and to let the driver compile and load on old Xcode and OS X versions.
Then the project then moved (with the current version 2.0 development) to actually improve the driver by adding support for more sound cards and by improving the support for already supported ones, but also by still supporting both intel and powerpc and the latest versions of modern macOS too.
That said here you can find the github repo with the source code, and a very old driver release (which has been made obsolete by the new one i am working on) and were future releases will be published: https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/Envy24HT
The release plan of the upcoming version 2 of the driver is to relase 2 builds of it: A PowerPC + intel 32bits and an intel 64 bits one (an universal build including PowerPC + intel 32bit + intel 64bit isn't possible since the latest macOS versions dropped support for pre-snow-leopard kernel api versions, so in order to keep the compatibility good i am splitting it in 2 builds).
For now the major additions have been a rework of memory management and a general improvement of 64 bit oses support and the adding of support for the ESI/Audiotrak Prodiy 7.1 HiFi sound card and the ESI MAYA44 PCI (the white one) (which is still in development at the moment of writing) and overall improvement of some areas of the driver implementation, like the way volume controls are implemented (still work in progress at the moment of writing).
Here are some supported sound cards as the moment of writing:
Some sound cards that can be maybe supported in the future:
So while i am working on it i live you with this screenshot of the ESI/Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 HiFi i own running on my g4 mdd with leopard, which, seems to be working well for now.
Why this? Mostly because i love putting all sorts of crazy pci cards in my macs and also because i already own some of the supported hardware and so i thought it will be cool to use some of them on PowerPC macs as upgrade paths.
I didn't have to start from scratch luckily since there were an abbandonware open source driver for hackintoshes, so all i had to do is basically port it to PowerPC macs.
A very early port has been actually been very straight forward and it just required minor code modifications to handle the big endian nature of the platform and to let the driver compile and load on old Xcode and OS X versions.
Then the project then moved (with the current version 2.0 development) to actually improve the driver by adding support for more sound cards and by improving the support for already supported ones, but also by still supporting both intel and powerpc and the latest versions of modern macOS too.
That said here you can find the github repo with the source code, and a very old driver release (which has been made obsolete by the new one i am working on) and were future releases will be published: https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/Envy24HT
The release plan of the upcoming version 2 of the driver is to relase 2 builds of it: A PowerPC + intel 32bits and an intel 64 bits one (an universal build including PowerPC + intel 32bit + intel 64bit isn't possible since the latest macOS versions dropped support for pre-snow-leopard kernel api versions, so in order to keep the compatibility good i am splitting it in 2 builds).
For now the major additions have been a rework of memory management and a general improvement of 64 bit oses support and the adding of support for the ESI/Audiotrak Prodiy 7.1 HiFi sound card and the ESI MAYA44 PCI (the white one) (which is still in development at the moment of writing) and overall improvement of some areas of the driver implementation, like the way volume controls are implemented (still work in progress at the moment of writing).
Here are some supported sound cards as the moment of writing:
- Terratec Aureon 5.1 Sky (best support)
- Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space (best support)
- Terratec Phase22 (best support)
- Terratec Phase28 (best support)
- M-Audio Revolution 5.1
- M-Audio Revolution 7.1
- M-Audio Audiophile 192
- ESI Juli@
- ESI Prodigy Hi-Fi 7.1 (driver v2.0+ only)
- ESI MAYA44 PCI (driver v2.0+ only)
- Audiotrack Prodigy 7.1 (non HiFi variant) (best support)
- Audiotrack Prodigy HD2 (missing volume controls)
Some sound cards that can be maybe supported in the future:
- Hercules Fortissimo 4 and similars
- Onkyo SE 200/ SE 150
So while i am working on it i live you with this screenshot of the ESI/Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 HiFi i own running on my g4 mdd with leopard, which, seems to be working well for now.
Last edited: