Eight members endured the wet & windy weather and came to this meeting. Stuart talked on 'Teaching an old Mac new tricks'. His Mac Pro dates from 2010. Official Mac OS support ceased with Mojave. It has one-seventh the CPU power of a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, and it's slower in every way. You might think it's only good for running old software, and…you'd be wrong. It can, with a few software tricks, and judicious hardware upgrades, run even Ventura, work with 8K video (yes, 8K!) and close the performance gap on a new Mac considerably. No, it's not really an alternative to saving up for that new Mac, but it'll keep you going (or serve as backup, etc) for more than a while. Following that, the usual discussions followed- mostly of an audio-related nature, namely how to get a treasured recording on an old cassette tape into digital format, and a somewhat befuddling issue with microphones that didn't seem to like Macs very much.
Links: Greg Gant's comprehensive classic Mac Pro upgrade guide (he's done ones for the 6,1 'trashcan'& the current 7,1 as well), also on YouTube. If he doesn't tell you about it, he links to someone who does...
Martin Lo's AMD hardware acceleration mod for 4,1/5,1 running Mojave (if you don't want to try OpenCore, and/or are happy running Mojave and aren't bothered about newer OSs, highly recommended, this really, really helps video playback and encoding) here. His latest OpenCore package customised for 4,1 & 5,1 is in the same thread.
OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Enables installation of newer OSs on many older Macs, not just Mac Pro 4,1/5,1.
