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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

#61

Post by fredoralive »

65a wrote: post #5

StarMax series (and the 4400) seemed to be about as close to CHRP as we got. My off-brand StarMax clone (PowerCity) had a PS/2 and an ISA port. Ran BeOS well, and had a quirk that I could hear a tight loop on the speaker.

AFAIK most StarMax systems that were released (a prototype exists of a CHRP StarMax model) are based on the Tanzania / LPX-40 design, which is mostly a traditional PCI PowerMac[1], albeit with oddities like support for PC style floppy drives. PS/2 is handled by the CudaLite microcontroller which presents it to the OS as ADB devices for example. I've not heard of a version with ISA slots, although I assume you could just have a PCI to ISA bridge chip, even if MacOS presumably wouldn't do anything with it.

[1] https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/apple_hardware_d...

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#62

Post by zozbot234 »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #46
swiftcoder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

How does preemption work on a processor that barely has interrupts and has no way to recover state after a page fault, in an OS that has to fit into a couple dozen kilobytes of ROM?

The Amiga had preemptive multithreading with multiple task priorities on the original MC68000. Preemption is distinct from memory protection or paging.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#63

Post by a4isms »

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…

Back when Java was the NextBigLanguage, we built Java development tools at KL Group/Sitraka (now a part of Quest). For version 2 of the suite of tools, we were getting rid of the nerdy configuration text file and planned on shipping a configuration wizard (yes, we called them wizards while fondling the onions we tied to our belts).

I was the Program Manager, and as usual we were very tightly constrained for time, and in the era of golden master DVDs that had to be ready to distribute at JavaOne in the Moscone Centre... Hard decisions had to be made. The team decided to work on more important features, and drop the configuration wizard from 2.0. Then I did what everyone knows is a no good, very bad, terrible thing. And although I got away with it that time, it's still a no good very bad, terrible thing:

I took my work computer home for the weekend and fired up a HyperCard "compiler" called Runtime Revolution that could make executables for Windows and Unix. Come Monday morning, we had a shippable configuration wizard. Leadership blew its top, because one of their values was, "We're a Java shop, which means we use Java to write Java tools." And after I left the company, they rewrote the configuration wizard in Java Swing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)

To this day I consider firing up Electron and a complete React framework for simple tools to be a "Turing Tarpit," a place where absolutely anything you imagine is possible, but nothing of interest (in the domain of simple tools) is easy.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#64

Post by jjuran »

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…

Rhapsody DR2 is not a solution for classic Mac OS on x86. Lunduke writes:

"Unfortunately [the Blue Box] was only available on PowerPC versions of Rhapsody"

Another option is Advanced Mac Substitute. It doesn't run everything, but what it does run it runs really well. One of my goals is that you can use a 68K Mac application (e.g. MacPaint) as part of your personal computing workflow, if you wish.

https://www.v68k.org/ams/

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#65

Post by theodric »

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…

I enjoyed how quick it was on my G4 iMac (Mac OS X 10.1/10.2 was a total dog) but it was never stable enough for my liking. Forced to choose between fast and unstable (OS9) or slow and steady (OS X), I chose to install Yellow Dog Linux instead (reject the premise).

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#66

Post by spockz »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #49
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.

Oh, gotta be super snappy on a Mac mini G4! Yeah, when a coworker and I showed my wife the first OS X preview, she was alarmed at how long it took to shut down (I mean System 7 shut down like you just kicked the cord out). "You'll have to find something else to like about it," was my coworker's response. And to be sure, there was/is a lot to like about OS X. But, probably because of the lack of a kernel, etc., System…

There are plenty of ways to multi threaded code these days. From actors to coroutines on the programmatic interface level to using green threads directly in go or Java. There is very little reason to resort using locks, mutexes, or semaphores outside of frameworks designed to make multi threading easier or very specific high performance code. (Where in the latter case it could be argued that multi threaded probably adds unreasonable latency and context switching.)

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#67

Post by spockz »

apatheticonion wrote: post #42
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.

I don't understand why it takes 5 seconds for Chrome to open on my MBP while it's near instant on my Linux and Windows PC. Why is eveything so slow on new MacOS?

Do you by chance still run an intel version of chrome on an apple silicon device?

Our work laptops have antivirus and other verification turned on which impose a 4-16x penalty on IO.

The cpu, memory, and ssd are blazing fast. Unfortunately they are hamstrung by bad software configuration.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#68

Post by theodric »

apatheticonion wrote: post #42
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.

I don't understand why it takes 5 seconds for Chrome to open on my MBP while it's near instant on my Linux and Windows PC. Why is eveything so slow on new MacOS?

It's always been that way. Even when I had a maxed out current-gen Mac Pro in 2008, it still launched and ran faster in Windows than MacOS.

I have seen people suggesting that it's because of app signature checks choking on Internet slowness, but 1. those are cached, so the second run should be faster, and in non-networked instances the speed is unchanged, and 2. I don't believe those were even implemented back in 2002 when I got my iMac G4, and it was likewise far quicker in Linux than in OS X.

At the time (2002), I joked that it was because the computer was running two operating systems at once: NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#69

Post by chongli »

apatheticonion wrote: post #42
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.

I don't understand why it takes 5 seconds for Chrome to open on my MBP while it's near instant on my Linux and Windows PC. Why is eveything so slow on new MacOS?

It’s not everything, it’s just Chrome. Chrome is 1.6GB including all its dependencies. It’s going to be slow to start on any system if those dependencies aren’t preloaded.

Most Mac software I use (I don’t use Chrome) starts quickly because the dependencies (shared libraries) are already loaded. Chrome seems to have its own little universe of dependencies which aren’t shared and so have to be loaded on startup. This is the same reason Office 365 apps are so slow.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#70

Post by chongli »

elliotnunn wrote: post #38
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.

Why not C89? Try to make it as portable as possible. The software is intended for preservation of old computers and their software. Would make sense for the software to be as portable as possible.

Who knows, maybe someone would want to run it on vintage Mac hardware?

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