I have to go back...
That was the final conclusion I reached researching myriad ways of hooking up Firewire based Standard Definition NTSC and PAL video capture hardware.
It certainly wasn't arrived at easily.
I fought and tried many ways of trying this gear out with modern Post-Intel Mac mini PCs.. even contemplated virtual machines running QEMU for a time.
But in the end, I started hunting eBay and found (just enough) parts and pieces to assemble a gosh darn it honest to gawd PowerPC (PPC) Mac mini.
As it arrived it had some vintage of OS X 10.4 but that was not old enough.
So I looked far and wide to find a real set of mac mini initial installation CD/DVD roms for OS X 10.3.7
Simply Amazing.. this is the year 2019 mid December..
It wasn't without peril.
I first replaced the HDD with a (PATA) SSD, that's an IDE interface for those playing at home.
I thought about using an M.2 NVMe drive.. but nothing would translate it to IDE and still fit in the original case. Then I found a M.2 mSATA carrier which might work.. but it was using TLC chips meaning it would only last 1-2 years max.. so I search for SLC.. and couldn't find any.
Finally I settled on MLC (it was good enough for most laptops) and found a few brand new PATA MLC drives.. on Amazon no less.
On first boot.. I got nothing.. no drive detected from the OS X installer.
I didn't know the drive had to be pre-formatted with a partition.. And I didn't know you had to pre-format it (before) starting the installer or it would show up with a great big Red ! (bang) on the drive icon.
Finally I powered down, pressed the power button while pressing 'C' and got into the Installer menu to Disk Utility (before) running the Installer.. and selected 'Erase as Mac Journaled file system' without the options to write zeros to wipe the drive.. as an SSD.. why burn a write cycle?
It finished erasing the SSD and re-pre-formatting it for Mac. I exited the Disk Utility and bounced into the Installer.. it detected the properly formatted drive (no.. Red ! bang) and continued the installation.
The old Super Drive rattles like a train running down a railroad track.. and its slow as Christmas at installing.. but its chugging along and looks like its going to complete. I feel positively dental.. this is like installing Windows XP.. only Apple style.
