Rage Develops More Bite Under Jaguar


Jaguar - OS X.2 - may have resolved the Rage/Rage Pro problem experienced by owners of early iMacs, Beige G3s, original colored iBooks, and the Wallstreet and Lombard PowerBook G3s.

The problem was the Apple did not support hardware acceleration in around 6 million Rage II/Rage Pro-equipped pieces of Mac hardware. A class action was initiated against Apple a few months' ago for dropping full support for Rage and DVD playback, among other issues in OS X.

However, James Denton, who developed a patch to permit support for the Lombard PowerBook's Rage Pro LT video card in OS X 10.1.5, has reported to xlr8yourmac that his new Jaguar patch resolves the Rage issue on all Mac hardware sporting these chipsets.

In 10.1.5, the hack worked by including the Lombard's display board number in the ATI Rage Pro kernel extension [using an editor, like Text Edit]. The same applies here, except that James has an AppleScript that applies the patch for you.

We welcome feedback if you've successfully applied the patch to your low-end Rage system.

Analysis: I don't have Jaguar to test this with, but James' first hack works just fine on my Lombard with 10.1.5. This could eke even more life out of older Mac beige/portable/iMac hardware, together with Jaguar's apparently snappier performance, even on lower-end G3 hardware.