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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

#81

Post by fabioborellini »

anthk wrote: post #75
deaddodo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

98's multitasking and memory 'protection' were a joke. In the same mid high machine for the era, 2k and xp were miles ahead of w98 on mid-high load. 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…

Well, Win NT is an actual operating system, and Win 98 and Classic macOS are just horribly overgrown home computer shells in an environment they should never have been exposed to.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#82

Post by mechagodzilla »

WoodenChair wrote: post #74

Very related but self promotional—I have a hobby business selling restored Mac mini G4s. I clean all of them internally, upgrade them with 128 GB SSDs, max them out at 1 GB of RAM, put a new clock battery in, and pre-install the Mac OS 9 Lives hacked version of Mac OS 9 that runs on them. You can buy one from me here: https://os9.shop I don't think I'll start pre-installing System 7 since most of my customers are usi…

Did you have to do anything special to get the SSD to play nice with OS9? I tried adding one to a 300MHz G3 iMac and it took forever to initialize on boot and would randomly stall a lot.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#83

Post by hmstx »

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.

> Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware.

Apple worked on this themselves - and then they canned it.

https://lowendmac.com/2014/star-trek-apples-first-mac-os-on-...

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#84

Post by WoodenChair »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #82
WoodenChair wrote: post #74

Very related but self promotional—I have a hobby business selling restored Mac mini G4s. I clean all of them internally, upgrade them with 128 GB SSDs, max them out at 1 GB of RAM, put a new clock battery in, and pre-install the Mac OS 9 Lives hacked version of Mac OS 9 that runs on them. You can buy one from me here: https://os9.shop I don't think I'll start pre-installing System 7 since most of my customers are usi…

Did you have to do anything special to get the SSD to play nice with OS9? I tried adding one to a 300MHz G3 iMac and it took forever to initialize on boot and would randomly stall a lot.

I use a mSATA to IDE adapter that I buy in bulk. This is the Amazon available equivalent of it: https://amzn.to/48qEaOm

I use only 128 GB mSATA cards from reputable brands.

I always do the following:

- Boot from the Mac OS 9 Lives 9.2.2 image (v9 of the image) by CD

- Wipe the SSD using Disk Utilities 2.1

- Restore from the CD

I will say this fails perhaps 1 out of 20 times. Hard to say how often this is an actual hardware failure versus some kind of incompatibility with the mSATA SSD since I do use a range of brands. I am always using the same adapters.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#85

Post by dep_b »

julik wrote: post #45
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…

I'd rather say the zenith was 8.1 which was not very widely used. 8.5 did add some nice gimmicks like the app switcher palette but for some reason it felt way slower than 8.1.

8.1 was peak MacOS Classic for me as well. 8.5 was like Windows 98. Just added stuff that made it slower.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#86

Post by ben1040 »

mosura wrote: post #73
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…

And scientists. For some reason european science was full of old school Mac users.

Much of the early part of the Human Genome Project was done using gel based DNA sequencing machines that were controlled by Classic Macs.

The rest of our shop was Solaris on SPARC/x86 and we had our own custom tool chain that crunched the data, but the sequencer itself was run by a Mac.

From 1999 or so forward the next generation of machines were Windows.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#87

Post by ayaros »

fzzzy wrote: post #44
ayaros wrote: post #13

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 u…

9 has been possible on that board for years now. No internal speaker but the headphone jack works.

When did that happen? Do you have a link to the exact CD image you used?

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#88

Post by apple4ever »

WoodenChair wrote: post #74

Very related but self promotional—I have a hobby business selling restored Mac mini G4s. I clean all of them internally, upgrade them with 128 GB SSDs, max them out at 1 GB of RAM, put a new clock battery in, and pre-install the Mac OS 9 Lives hacked version of Mac OS 9 that runs on them. You can buy one from me here: https://os9.shop I don't think I'll start pre-installing System 7 since most of my customers are usi…

Wow this is neat!!! Put on my list to order sometime soon!

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#89

Post by deaddodo »

anthk wrote: post #75
deaddodo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

98's multitasking and memory 'protection' were a joke. In the same mid high machine for the era, 2k and xp were miles ahead of w98 on mid-high load. 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…

And yet, OS 8 and OS 9 couldn't even match that joke.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#90

Post by marmarama »

chongli wrote: post #69
apatheticonion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

It's not just Chrome, it's everything, though apps that have a large number of dependencies (including Chrome and the myriad Electron apps most of us use these days) are for sure more noticeable.

My M4 MacBook Pro loads a wide range of apps - including many that have no Chromium code at all in them - noticeably slower than exactly the same app on a 4 year old Ryzen laptop running Linux, despite being approximately twice as fast at running single-threaded code, having a faster SSD, and maybe 5x the memory bandwidth.

Once they're loaded they're fine, so it's not a big deal for the day to day, but if you swap between systems regularly it does give macOS the impression of being slow and lumbering.

Disabling Gatekeeper helps but even then it's still slower. Is it APFS, the macOS I/O system, the dynamic linker, the virtual memory system, or something else? I dunno. One of these days it'll bother me enough to run some tests.

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