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System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

macos9lives.com

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Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#91

Post by Y-bar »

tdeck wrote: post #36
Y-bar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. It feels like I have traded, on an average week, three hard crashes (enough to need a reboot) and five small bugs back then, with zero hard crashes and ninety minor bugs (some requiring restarting the app) today. Sometimes I feel like I would like to go back because many of the smaller bugs drive me mad in a way that never happened back then.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#92

Post by anthk »

deaddodo wrote: post #89
anthk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahem, w98 BSOD if you sneezed hard near it. Installing a driver? BSOD. IE page fault? BSOD. 128k stack limit reached? either grind to a halt or a BSOD. And so on...

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#93

Post by zahlman »

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.

I commented on the GitHub issue rather than here, if you're interested. I'd like to help make this work.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#94

Post by zahlman »

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…

That's a bit reductive. We're talking about something only relevant to retrocomputing (MacOS 9 is unsupported as of early 2002 per Wikipedia) where they could scarcely find evidence of anyone using it at all. And taking these things out of the standard library means that core devs can wash their hands of it. (It also means that a large majority of users can avoid downloading and storing things that will always be useless to them; but nobody seems to care about that sort of thing any more, much to my chagrin.)

https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/83534

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#95

Post by WoodenChair »

ayaros wrote: post #87
fzzzy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can find a 9 image for it at macos9lives.com

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#96

Post by lostlogin »

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…

> Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS

It still irritates me that command + N does a new window, not a new folder. I wouldn’t even have used that shortcut much, as I was a kid and it’s been 25 years.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#97

Post by prewett »

julik wrote: post #48
Y-bar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm think that ObjC's dynamic dispatch is reasonably fast. I remember reading something about being able to do millions of dynamic dispatch calls per second (so less 1 us per) a long time ago (2018-ish?), but I can't think how to find it. The best I could come up with is [1], which benchmarks it as 2.8 times faster than a Python call, and something like 20% slower than Swift's static calling. In the Aqua time-frame I think that it would not have been slow enough to need animations to cover for it.

[1] https://forums.swift.org/t/performance-of-swift/26911

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#98

Post by trollbridge »

Slight nitpick: this isn't "natively booting" System 7, nor is any other PowerPC Mac. This is simply an emulator, no different than using vMac, qemu, etc. - it just happens to be an emulator that Apple has been shipping with PowerPC Macs since it introduced the Power Mac 6100, which "natively" booted System 7.1.2.

Nonetheless, this is an impressive accomplishment.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#99

Post by trollbridge »

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…

Seems more of a curiousity than something practical - in particular, the System 7 "native" on the Mac mini G4 is missing a lot of drivers. There aren't that many situations where software runs well on System 7 tha doesn't on Mac OS 9.2.2, and for the rare case that it does, emulation in something like vMac is sufficient.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#100

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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?

The better question is why is Chrome so much slower and more of battery drainer than Safari on a Mac
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