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I have an older PowerPC iMac G4 running 10.4 Tiger for which I want to develop an application. I do have a much never Intel Mac Pro currently running 10.8 (and I still have 10.6 and 10.7 installation DVDs) which I could use as the machine to write the code.

I've never done anything with XCode (C# developer by trade), so I'm looking for the path of least resistance/configuration requirement:

  • Run XCode 2.5 on the PPC Mac running 10.4 - SLOW!
  • Run XCode 4/5 on my Intel Mac running 10.8 - Can I compile for 10.4/PPC without spending a week setting compiler parameters that I don't understand?
  • Install 10.6 on my Mac and run XCode 3.2.6 - a lot of extra setup work and an outdated XCode version
  • Use Xamarin Studio - doesn't do PPC?

The App eventually needs to run on PPC, Intel and iOS, although I'm fine with having separate projects and only a single shared code base.

Paul R
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Michael Stum
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1 Answers1

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If this were me, I'd buy an external drive, install a clean copy of MacOS 10.6 on that and then Xcode 3.2.6, which is the last version of Xcode that officially supports PPC development.

You then set your "MINIMUM_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET" for your project to 10.4. You'll also set the supported architectures to i386 & ppc.

The more interesting challenge will be to try to get the same project to build both iOS & Macintosh targets.

Michael Dautermann
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  • Thanks, downloading it right now. I wasn't aware that PPC was removed in 4.0, so that seems to be the right approach. As for iOS, I guess I have to setup a 4.0 project in parallel – Michael Stum Aug 02 '13 at 03:44
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    Yeah, I did have PPC apps building with Xcode 4 for a little while [(here's one way to do it)](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5333490/how-can-we-restore-ppc-ppc64-as-well-as-full-10-4-10-5-sdk-support-to-xcode-4) but had to give up when Apple got rid of the "`/Developer`" directory in favor of everything hidden & buried within the Xcode application package. – Michael Dautermann Aug 02 '13 at 03:57
  • It was a bit finicky to create a universal binary, but it works like a charm! (for reference, the Project Settings > Architecture needs to be changed from Intel to "ppc i386". 10.4 doesn't support 64-Bit. ppc = G3+, ppc7400 = G4+, ppc970 = G5) – Michael Stum Aug 02 '13 at 07:26