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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

#31

Post by anthk »

cyrc wrote: post #29
anthk wrote: post #25

As an European, Classic Macs (and current ones) were just for arts/writting people. If you knew what CMYK was in order to print a newspaper, you were a Mac user. I emulated Mac OS 7 under XP times, and i was impressed that you could get far faster speeds emulating the M68k (and partially the PPC) compared to Intel X86 without any hardware accelerating chip (IntelVT) or kernel modules trapping X86 instructions running…

It was because of QuarkXPress and Photoshop. In the same way WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were dominant for business computers. Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware. There are so many Unix or Linux ABI compatible kernels like the recent Moss written in rust.

Ardi Executor. There's a recent fork at GitHub. You can run m68k binaries seamlessly. You don't need propietary MacOS parts, just the software.

But if you are some software preserver, having a libre option to run legacy media it's always good for historical reasons. I am a daily libre software user but I emulate ancient machines with propietary stuff just for curiosity. As it not a personal computing device I find it fine. It's just an historical toy and not my computing device. And, well, if you want to create libre engines for old Mac games (ScummVM, SDL ports...), for sure you need to at least emulate the old OSes and run the propietary game in order to compare the output and correctness.

Also, it already exists "Mac" for x86. It was Rhapsody DR2 and it could run Classic Mac software and NeXT one too. It was like a blend of these two. OSX it's like NeXT Step concept 2.0, with few traces of Mac Classic. Qemu will run it fine.

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/hands-on-with-1998s-rhapsody-...

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#32

Post by Y-bar »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #17
geerlingguy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#33

Post by cyrc »

anthk wrote: post #31
cyrc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was because of QuarkXPress and Photoshop. In the same way WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were dominant for business computers. Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware. There are so many Unix or Linux ABI compatible kernels like the recent Moss written in rust.

Ardi Executor. There's a recent fork at GitHub. You can run m68k binaries seamlessly. You don't need propietary MacOS parts, just the software. But if you are some software preserver, having a libre option to run legacy media it's always good for historical reasons. I am a daily libre software user but I emulate ancient machines with propietary stuff just for curiosity. As it not a personal computing device I find it…

It would be great if somebody tried to create an opensource version of Rhapsody DR2 that ran on X86 baremetal.

Would not even need to be binary compatible. Source compatible API would be enough.

Rhapsody DR2 is more like Classic Mac than any current MacOS.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#34

Post by Y-bar »

keyle wrote: post #19

That's impressive but early macOS were pretty awful UX; I think the UI thread was everything. I remember clicking and waiting.

I remember that yes, expensive operations could take a while, but the interface was much faster than my M1 Max Studio for the sole reson you actually do not have to wait for animations.

And not just for the reasons that animations were sparse, they also never blocked input, so for example if you could see where a new element would appear you could click there DURING the animation and start eg typing and no input would be lost meaning that apps you used every day and became accustomed to would just zip past at light speed because there were no do-wait do-wait pipeline.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#35

Post by swiftcoder »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #30
keyle wrote: post #19

That's impressive but early macOS were pretty awful UX; I think the UI thread was everything. I remember clicking and waiting.

> I think the UI thread was everything. How would you have done it?

Preemption is a very nice OS feature it turns out (particularly once multi-core rolled around). Still, I recall os 8 and 9 being generally snappier than windows 98 (and a lot snappier than early builds of OSX)

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#36

Post by tdeck »

Y-bar wrote: post #32
inferiorhuman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.

I remember it crashing a lot but maybe that's because I came of age around the OS 8/9 era. IIUC OS 9 had no memory protection so it's not exactly a surprise it was fragile.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#37

Post by kzrdude »

keyle wrote: post #19

That's impressive but early macOS were pretty awful UX; I think the UI thread was everything. I remember clicking and waiting.

My most durable memory is all the reboots due to programs crashing. Didn't help that a null pointer deref required a system reboot - or that teenage me was behind the keyboard on that front.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#38

Post by elliotnunn »

Kwpolska wrote: post #23

> In my case, first I tried using the latest Python 3.13.9 both from Windows 7 (bad idea due to resource fork loss) and macOS 10.14.6 Mojave, but neither worked: it seems like that version of Python was just too new. I then retried with Python 3.8.10 instead (which I chose thinking it might be more period-appropriate for the script's age) on Mojave, which worked flawlessly. Ah, classic Python. Removing features [0] a…

Max frustrating. If I were writing tbxi again it would be in Go.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#40

Post by Angostura »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #17
geerlingguy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

7.6.x was pretty cool
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