71–80 of 116 posts
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I like System 6: the most complete version of the “real” classic Mac OS before System 7 started to be more “modern.” Dead simple, not a lot of new abstractions and metaphors layered on.
I kind of wish there was a version of System 6 without MultiFinder. Classic Mac OS clearly wasn’t built with multi-tasking in mind.
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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 woul…
The animations were there, but they were frame-based with the number of frames carefully calculated to show UI state changes that were relevant. For example, when you would open a folder, there would be an animation showing a window rect animating from the folder icon into the window shape, but it would be very subtle - I remember it being 1 or 2 intermediate frames at most. It was enough to show how you get from "th…
Done exactly this myself to conceal ugly inconsistent lags - I don’t think it is that uncommon an idea.
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…
For some reason european science was full of old school Mac users.
I don't think I'll start pre-installing System 7 since most of my customers are using Mac OS 9 (and the domain is os9.shop!), but you could certainly get a machine from me with Mac OS 9 and install System 7 yourself if you so desire.
My customers have included a lot of real businesses running legacy software who want the fastest, least intrusive, and least energy intensive Mac OS 9 desktop machine they can buy. I've sold to dentists, veterinarians, museums, and auto repair stores. You'd be amazed how many people are running Classic Mac software in 2025.
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W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.
Win98 was head and shoulders above System 9, from a stability perspective. It had protected memory, actual preemptive multitasking, a somewhat functional driver system built on top of an actual HAL, functional networking, etc, etc. To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8-9 were so bad .
Maybe not on a Pentium, but once you hit 192MB of RAM and some 500 MHz P3/AMD k7, NT based OSes were tons better.
You only realized that upon opening a dozen of IE windows. W98, even SE, will sweat. 2k will fly.
On single tasks, such as near realtime multimedia ones, w98 would be better, such as emulators/games or video players with single thread decoders. On multiprocessing/threading, w98 crawled against W2K even under p4's and 256MB of RAM.
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Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.
System 6 had menu blinks, zoom animations (with rect XORs no less), and button blinks when you used keyboard completion. Mac was the original "wasteful animation" OS.
If you had no X11 acceleration (xvesa for instance), that mode was magnitudes faster than watching your whole browser window repaint on a resize lasting more than 3 seconds on a Pentium.
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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?
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 j…
The powercity models were interesting, because they came out after Apple revoked Motorola's clone license. A German company, ComJet, bought up the boards and sold unlicensed clones cheap. Case was slightly different, but otherwise they corresponded to StarMax models (fairly certain they were identical but may have been last revision boards).
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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…
Edit, ah, both are similar.
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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?
Space constraints were certainly limiting on the earlier models, but later ones were plenty capable. Apple itself shipped a fully multitasking, memory protected OS for various 68k Mac models.
By the late 80s, the only reason the Macintosh system was still single-tasking with no protected memory was compatibility with existing apps, and massive technical debt.