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Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

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Re: Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

#22

Post by morsch »

kalleboo wrote: post #19
conradev wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that it is an A5 processor that is tuned for battery life, at the cost of performance. It all depends on the performance of the emulator, because OS 7 is not compiled for ARM.

> A5 processor that is tuned for battery life, at the cost of performance It probably also has quite severe temperature scaling.

I wonder why? After all, it's directly attached to a huge heatsink with a sophisticated liquid cooling setup that ensures it will stay at a comfortable 37C -- it will even do evaporative cooling when necessary, going so far as to replenish the liquid reservoir on its own.

Re: Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

#23

Post by kelnos »

morsch wrote: post #22
kalleboo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A5 processor that is tuned for battery life, at the cost of performance It probably also has quite severe temperature scaling.

I wonder why? After all, it's directly attached to a huge heatsink with a sophisticated liquid cooling setup that ensures it will stay at a comfortable 37C -- it will even do evaporative cooling when necessary, going so far as to replenish the liquid reservoir on its own.

That sounds... uncomfortable. Seriously.

Re: Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

#24

Post by TillE »

big_youth wrote: post #9
liquidise wrote: post #2

Over the weekend i saw an HN article about an x86 compiler written to compile using only MOV commands, after it was proven that x86 MOV is Turing Complete. I was sure this would be the most impressive waste of technology efforts i would see for a long time. I was wrong. It lasted 3 days.

What you call useless other people call brilliant. I was at RECon this past weekend and one of the coolest talks was about compiling malware using only MOV. Good luck reversing that. https://recon.cx/2015/schedule/events/55.html

You still have to make system/library calls to do anything evil. You can obfuscate the logic, sure, but it's still easy to tell where important things are happening.

Re: Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

#26

Post by pilif »

plashchynski wrote: post #25

It's just a screen sharing, no?

not necessarily. The video description says it's watchOS 2 which allow native apps to run on the watch. Also the current WatchKit remote UI thing would not allow the kind of access to the screen that is seen in this video.

Re: Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

#27

Post by durin42 »

iiiggglll wrote: post #14
mburns wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS System 7.5.x shipped on ~100MHz PowerPC chips with ~24MB of RAM, a bit higher in the later models. So the Watch most certainly has more processing power. The real problem is emulating PPC -> ARM, which is a very slow process, and why the boot time is so long in the video.

Not to mention the classic MacOS of that era had considerable amounts of code still written in 68k assembly, so a lot of what you're seeing is actually being emulated as 68k -> PPC -> ARM.

I think I saw "mini vmac" come up, so I believe this is emulating a 68000 directly, not with an extra layer in the middle.

Re: Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

#30

Post by Tloewald »

sanoli wrote: post #29

My second favorite computer to write (my main job), to this day, is still a Powerbook 1400c running System 7. It uses a G3 upgrae so it's very fast/responsive, as that OS would run just fine on even a 040 processor.

I'd have to say my favorite computer ever was the Power Mac G4 867MHz running 8.6 (or was it 9.1?). Basically Mac OS 8-9 just ran obscenely fast on PowerPCs as it was essentially in maintenance mode while they built OSX, so we got years of little more than stability patches and cosmetic changes without bloat while Apple's hardware was overtaking Wintel (temporarily). Heck you could run the entire OS and applications off RAM Disk and still have plenty of RAM left over.

Aside: the 1400 was a great model (especially after the 5300 debacle) and had an upgradeable CPU daughtercard (ah back when the engineers were running the asylum). The big problem with it was lack of space for RAM, so when you did upgrade the CPU you had a kind of fast but cramped machine.

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