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System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

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Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#11

Post by k310 »

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2.

I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry.

It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff.

Hypercard scripters did cool things that most users don't do today. And without those monster data centers.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#12

Post by im_down_w_otp »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #9
mrcwinn wrote: post #3

One of my early Macs was a Performa 638CD with no dedicated FPU. I had upgraded to a Performa 6400 (which felt like an absolute dog despite its size) but finally had an opportunity to move to the PowerComputing PowerTower Pro 225. What a beast! I hate to say it, but it was probably my favorite Mac I'd ever owned before the first iMac.

I have a PowerCenter Pro 210 in my basement right now! It's not quite as nice as the newer architecture in the PowerTower Pro machines, but it runs MacOS 7.6.1 wonderfully. It is more than enough for classic Mac games of that era - and a joy to use.

The later PowerCenter Pro’s could run with a 60 MHz FSB whereas the PowerTower Pro’s were usually 45-50 MHz FSB. There are a variety of tasks where my PowerCenter Pro 240 outruns my PowerTower Pro 250 for precisely that reason.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#13

Post by ayaros »

I have an iMac G4 1.25 GHz. Originally, it was a 1GHz, but I swapped out the motherboard for a later model. For a while I've been wondering if I would had been better off with an earlier motherboard capable of booting OS 9 natively. Compared with using OS X's classic mode, this would omit the overhead of running a whole other OS and leave me with more resources to run OS 9 apps and games. I don't get a whole lot of use out of the earlier OS X software that I have on there...

Maybe in the future I won't have to make that choice! I'd much rather dual boot OS 9 off a different partition, but that hasn't been supported on the 1-1.25GHz models (Thanks Steve...) and no one has gotten it working properly. Maybe now it will be possible! A man can dream...

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#15

Post by geerlingguy »

k310 wrote: post #11

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most…

Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#16

Post by dented42 »

k310 wrote: post #11

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most…

HyperCard is one of my all time favourite memories of Mac OS.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#17

Post by inferiorhuman »

geerlingguy wrote: post #15
k310 wrote: post #11

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most…

Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.

MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would.

There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm concerned System 7 was probably the zenith.

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