And now for something completely different: The G5 that went to the dark side of the X-Force

My favourite console of all time is still the ahead-of-its-time Sega Dreamcast, but a close second on my list is the PowerPC-based Microsoft Xbox 360. Besides being our favourite architecture, it plays a number of great games (I still think BioShock Infinite is one of the best games ever written, and it could have been even better) and many original Xbox titles, and it's even on topic here as Microsoft shipped Power Mac G5s as development systems to early Xbox 360 developers (the X360 being powered by the Xenon CPU, designed by IBM and using three of the PowerPC PPE cores that also appeared in the Cell processor). There was a famous Anandtech article I remember where at E3 2005 they discovered the "consoles" were props, and what people were playing were actually Power Mac G5 machines hidden in the back of the enclosures. In the community these are referred to as Alphas (or Alpha XeDK systems).

A few of these boxes leaked out into the wider community and recently one of them posted how he made his G5 development system work, with lots of cool pictures. It's possible to turn one of the early 2GHz G5 machines into one of these, using a compatible graphics card (he used a flashed ATI Radeon X800 XT, but it seems easier to just use the native Mac version) and a compatible Intel network card, and a proper selection of ATA devices. There's even a term for these; they call them FrankenXenons. (A reassurance: you won't need to modify your Mac substantially to run this, and you don't need to flash the G5's firmware. On the other hand, this also means that an Alpha can be recreated or even faked with off-the-shelf hardware, and you probably shouldn't drop a lot of coin trying to get a "genuine" one unless you can verify its provenance.)

Note that this probably won't make your Mac into an Xbox 360, or at least not sufficiently to replace a proper console. Many things don't run, particularly later games, and even though it has an original Xbox emulator some of those games still glitch. But at least some early games will run and the recovery image includes a few demo applications to play with.

Eventually the Alphas were replaced with actual pre-production console hardware, called Beta, which have a strange history as Microsoft actually rounded them up, intentionally fouled them to prevent reuse, and shipped them overseas for destruction. Naturally some folks saved a few, as is what usually happens when someone realizes a prototype with potential future value is in their possession, but they have a reputation for being difficult machines.

Even as an Xbox 360 fan, I don't feel highly compelled to seek out the proper hardware to turn an otherwise perfectly useful G5 into a doorstop that runs a few early games rather badly. It certainly doesn't argue much in support for the power of the dark Microsoft side of the (X-)force, and my slim 360 is much more convenient. But as a historical artifact it's cool that you can do so, if you want to.

TenFourFox FPR13b1 available (now with WebP and AppleScript)

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 13 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). I took a different tack on this release because I still don't have good solutions for the missing JavaScript features currently affecting Citibank, Github and a few other sites, so I've chosen to push out some side projects I've been working on in order not to make this a wasted release. Those features are support for WebP images and support for AppleScript automation.

WebP images are an up-and-coming format based on the WebM VP8 codec, another way Google will consume the Web from the inside out, but they do have image size advantages and Firefox now supports them in Firefox 65. Google has two demonstration WebP galleries you can use to view some samples, and there are colour-managed examples in the Skia test suite. TenFourFox's WebP support currently can display lossy, lossless, transparent and colour-managed images, and will properly use any embedded colour profile. However, it is not currently AltiVec-accelerated (we do have some AltiVec VP8 code, so this should be possible at some point), and it does not yet support animated WebP images, which will appear blank. For this reason we don't pass an Accept: header indicating we accept WebP images like mainline Firefox and certain other browsers, though we will naturally try to display it if we get one. If you encounter issues related to WebP, you can try setting image.webp.enabled to false, but I'm planning to ship this support in FPR13 final, so it defaults to true.

The other support is for AppleScript. One of the few advantages of being at feature parity instead of source parity is that we can feel free to implement features mainline Firefox doesn't want or consider a current priority, and one long-standing request going back to the pre-Firefox days is AppleScript support. In fairness, this is hard to achieve in Firefox, and getting harder because of its cross-platform asynchronous nature. Many of the assumptions AppleScript makes about an application and its internal object model are routinely violated for performance reasons in Firefox, and Firefox is not primarily written in Objective-C, so there need to be bridges written to regular C++ and JavaScript, proxy objects designed, etc. Since there was never any agreement on how this internal plumbing should look, only some speculative work was ever completed, and Firefox to this day only supports the basic AppleScript suite and some limited automation through GUI scripting methods.

However, one thing that would certainly be handy for those non-daily drivers who might have a Power Mac sitting around doing nothing is to automate some tasks with it, like a kiosk or a display, or to assist with certain rote tasks. For that, AppleScript would certainly be the most painless way of doing so, so here is a first cut of AppleScript support for TenFourFox. Essentially I took that 8-year-old speculative patch, modified it to work with Firefox 45 and 10.4 (some of the dictionary actually comes from the dearly departed Camino, which had rich AppleScript support of its own), and greatly expanded its feature set to yield TenFourFox's AppleScript module. With FPR13 beta, open the AppleScript Script Editor.app, switch to the Event Log tab, and try this script (substitute your TenFourFox application name for TenFourFoxG5):

tell application "TenFourFoxG5"
  repeat with w in every browser window
    repeat with t in every tab of w
      repeat while (t is busy)
        delay 1
      end repeat
      get name of t
      get URL of t
    end repeat
  end repeat
end tell

This will iterate through every open browser window and every tab within that window, check an important synchronization property to make sure that the tab is not busy (being opened or being manipulated), and then report the name (title) and URL (location) of what's loaded in the Event Log. If you're an AppleScript jockey, you can well imagine what you can do with that information.

Tabs also have other useful properties, like plaintext and HTML to get the text or HTML contents respectively of a tab.

You might also want to create scripts for the Script menu (assuming you have that enabled) that act on text you have highlighted. TenFourFox can do that too:

tell application "TenFourFoxG5"
  repeat while (current tab of front browser window is busy)
    delay 1
  end repeat
  display dialog ("" & selected of current tab of front browser window)
end tell

If you put this script into the Script menu, then highlight some text and select this script. A dialogue box will appear with the text you have selected. (Similarly, paste it into the Script Editor and run it to see.)

You can also turn TenFourFox into an automated kiosk. Here's a script that opens a new window, makes it full screen, and then updates the display with what the New York state traffic cameras see on the Long Island Expressway every 15 seconds. It uses a second synchronization property called opening to determine when it's safe to manipulate the new window. (To stop it, Alt-Tab to the Script Editor, click Stop, then return to TenFourFox and close the fullscreen window with Cmd-W.)

tell application "TenFourFoxG5"
  activate
  make new browser window
  repeat while (opening)
    delay 1
  end repeat
  tell front browser window
    set fullscreen to true
    set URL to "https://511ny.org/map/Cctv/428834--20"
    repeat
      delay 15
      reload current tab
    end repeat
  end tell
end tell

TenFourFox can also be automated with GUI scripting as well, which can be used to manipulate the pulldown menus and even deliver clicks and keyboard events on web pages and the browser chrome. The complete dictionary, like any scriptable app, can be viewed from the Script Editor's Open Dictionary... option. Do note there are a few gotchas and a few things that don't work as expected, and you cannot currently control foxboxes with AppleScript even if they use FPR13; you can read all about the current state of AppleScript support and get many more examples of scripting on the TenFourFox Github AppleScript wiki entry. It's not a perfect mapping of Firefox/TenFourFox onto AppleScript, but it's much better than mainline Firefox which can barely be script-controlled at all. Please consider this support to be a work in progress and there may be more bugs and features yet to add(ress). Post your comments as usual.

Like I say, I'm still concerned over the deficiencies accumulating in the browser that I don't know what to do with and don't have an easy means to patch into the browser core. That said, keep in mind that even if we did try to get a port of 52 off the ground to address these problems -- the functionality of which wouldn't guaranteed and has several major changes which would badly compromise TenFourFox's platform base -- we'd just have different deficiencies once Fx60 becomes the typical minimum, so it only delays the inevitable, and the Rust requirement for 54+ makes any later wholesale port impossible. Nevertheless, in the meantime these new features, although admittedly incomplete, at least give some additional functionality to the browser, and that's not worth nothing.

FPR13 will go final with Firefox 66 on March 19.

So long, Opportunity rover

It's time to say goodbye to another PowerPC in space, this time the Opportunity rover, also known as the Mars Exploration Rover B (or MER-1). Finally declared at end of mission today after 5,352 Mars solar days when NASA couldn't re-establish contact, it had been apparently knocked off-line by a dust storm and was unable to restart. Originally intended for a 90 Mars solar day mission, its mission became almost 60 times longer than anticipated and it traveled nearly 30 miles on the surface in total. Spirit, or MER-2, its sister unit, had previously reached end of mission in 2010.

Both Opportunity and Spirit were powered by the 20MHz BAE RAD6000, a radiation-hardened version of the original IBM POWER1 RISC Single Chip CPU and the indirect ancestor of the PowerPC 601. Many PowerPC-based spacecraft are still in operation, both with the original RAD6000 and its successor the RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of the G3.

Meanwhile, the Curiosity rover, which is running a pair of RAD750s (one main and one backup, plus two SPARC accessory CPUs), is still in operation at 2,319 Mars solar days and ticking. There is also the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter, which is still circling the planet with its own RAD6000 and is expected to continue operations until 2025. Curiosity's design is likely to be reused for the Mars 2020 rover, meaning possibly even more PowerPC design will be exploring the cosmos in the very near future.