3 ms·
Exploring the Apple Pippin ROM(s), part 7: A lot to digest
- scarface74 7y agoOn a mostly unrelated note. The Pippen was a badly designed and underpowered even by 1996 standards. MacOS itself wasn’t completely PPC native and had a large amount of 68K code in it. To make matters worse, the 603 had a smaller slower cache than the older 601 and that made Apple’s built in 68K emulator perform even worse than the 601. The 601-66Mhz processor in my PowerMac 6100/60 was already slower running 68K programs than my older LCII with a 68030-40Mhz accelerator card. Add on top of that the increased memory requirements of the PPC based Macs, the horrible memory management of Classic MacOS and the amount of memory in the Pippen. Mac users knew that this thing was a turd. I remember conversations on Usenet about it.
- leshokunin 7y agoFunnily enough, I remember the gaming press being cautiously optimistic about the Pippin. It was touted as a multimedia console hybrid. Back then, something being Multimedia was a big marketing buzzword (think a bit like cloud or blockchain). The general feeling I recall is similar to when Windows CE came to the Dreamcast, or when the original Xbox launched.
- tinus_hn 7y agoPretty scary how the encryption is completely cracked. Even though it uses key sizes known to be insecure I don’t think it is well known an attack is this easy.