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Swift on Mac OS 9
- kingnight 7y agoI recently have been getting into making a lot of small swift apps for personal use AND now have MacOS 7 and 8 running on my iPad since they’ve added mouse pointer support. Excited to dig into this article!
- Cyberdog 7y agoOkay, I'll bite: How are you running Classic Mac OS on an iPad?
- asveikau 7y agoI don't know if this is the way, but ~20 years ago I was curious about running emulators for 68k Macs on PCs.. there was vMac which emulated black&white Mac Plus, and basilisk II which emulated a macII. They could both run system 7. That was true circa 1998. I imagine the hardware needs are not that high.
- fzzzy 7y agoMini vMac can now also emulate a mac II and do color and higher resolutions. Basilisk II can do an 040 now as well.
- kingnight 7y agoThese two projects: https://github.com/zydeco/minivmac4ios https://github.com/zydeco/minivmac4ios https://github.com/zydeco/macemu/tree/ios/BasiliskII/src/iOS https://github.com/zydeco/macemu/tree/ios/BasiliskII/src/iOS The first is more stable, and recently got the pointer support added, but doesn’t go up to MacOS 8 AFAIK. I copied a bit of the stuff from that to the MacEmu one to get the pointer working ok. Thank you Zydeco!
- mattkevan 7y agoAmazing. Would love to have classic Mac on the iPad. What a cool project.
- mattl 7y agoSystem 7, Mac OS after 7.6
- bound008 7y agoAwesome project and a great read! (Is it weird for anyone else to see such a nostalgic meme?)
- scarface74 7y agoThis is the coolest, awesome most useless thing I’ve read in awhile. I can’t wait to see where this goes.
- zozbot234 7y agoFar from being useless, this sort of work could ultimately make it easier to preserve existing Classic Mac OS-based apps and code, and run them on modern systems. Just as having FreeDOS around and even in active development makes it easier to support the DosBox platform.
- krallja 7y agoUh, how does making Swift compile new code to Mac OS 9 help with preserving old code?
- saagarjha 7y agoIt ensures that toolchains for the system continue to work on modern computers.
- scarface74 7y agoWhy? You can already run the original toolchains used to write classic software using emulators.
- mrpippy 7y agoIn addition, there is a modern GCC-based toolchain for classic MacOS: https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 https://github.com/autc04/Retro68
- krallja 7y agoNo, it does the opposite: it ensures that toolchains for the modern system work on retro systems. Which is a neat hack, but doesn’t help with preserving anything.
- rvz 7y agoYou'd have to go through a lot of hoops like LLVM, compiler, etc CPU support just to get a Mac OS app written in Swift visible on the screen on OS9. Very interesting technical read on CPU support, compiler support, no matter the usefulness. Impress me further if you can do that with BeOS.
- zozbot234 7y agoIt would be interesting to upstream the LLVM-related work. And I do wonder how much work would it take to support other PPC32-based platforms - not just Apple and BeOS but AmigaOne, GameCube/Wii, *NIX and WinNT 3.51/4.0 systems etc.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoAFAIK LLVM only picks up backends that are production-maintained.
- zozbot234 7y agoIBM is doing most of the work wrt. this backend to support their AIX systems. Support for other platforms mostly comes along for the ride. (For that matter, LLVM might well pick up a backend that has sufficient maintenance to keep up with internal code changes, regardless of "production" concerns. See RISC-V as an example - obviously it's not seeing a lot of production use, but LLVM does include it.)
- skissane 7y agoSee also the debate about adding m68k backend to LLVM. https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-March/140282.html https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-March/140282.... m68k seems to be mostly a hobbyist interest rather than a commercial interest at this point. The problem is, if the person whose hobby it is gets busy and then either the whole project is getting held up by that backend, or it just gets removed. At least in case of PPC and System z, IBM has a commercial interest in making LLVM work for them – and the former has some hobbyist/retrocomputing benefits as an unplanned side-effect. (System z, much less so – modern System z is 64-bit, whereas most of the mainframe hobbyist community focus is on the legacy pre-1980s 24-bit architecture.)
- saagarjha 7y agoCool! Is there a copy of the Swift BitPaint code anywhere? I couldn't see it. Just trying to gauge how much this could support.
- kccqzy 7y agohttps://belkadan.com/source/ppc-swift-project/tree/HEAD:/examples/BitPaint https://belkadan.com/source/ppc-swift-project/tree/HEAD:/exa...
- mkchoi212 7y agoNow, let’s run Swift on the original Macintosh.
- davidbalbert 7y agoIn response to: > Fun aside: I’ve always assumed this is why Core Foundation exists—to provide a common interface between Carbon and Cocoa. I don’t actually have a citation for this, though. This (very enjoyable) blog post from 2006 confirms it: https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/bridge.html https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/bridge.html. I believe ridiculous_fish was working at Apple at the time.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 7y agoOf course, while toll-free bridging is still around, its implementation details are somewhat different these days.
- holistio 7y agoThis is so wonderfully utterly useless. I love it.
- jacobush 7y agoI wonder if this was inspired by the person who compiled .NET for Windows 3.11?
- radley 7y agoOS X was released 19 years (+ 1 week) ago...
- jacobush 7y agoI suddenly felt the old Amiga fanboi inside of me pop up... :-) At one time, up to at least 1996 the fastest Mac for running Photoshop, was not a Macintosh at all, but an Amiga tricked out with a graphics card and a CPU upgraded from the standard 68020 or 68040 to Motorolas last entry in the 68k line, the 68060. (Roughly equivalent to a Pentium - a bit slower clock but slightly more powerful instructions.) How could this be? Photoshop 4 used 68k instructions, and the fastest 68k based Mac was the Quadra with the 68040 CPU. The first PowerMac was released in 1994, but it had to emulate the 68k to run Photoshop, which had a serious performance hit. Once Photoshop was released for the PowerPC, this anomaly ended. (And Photoshop on Windows must have been faster than both Amiga and Mac pretty much immediately, but if I recall correctly it wasn't as capable on Windows right then. Or maybe people used to working on Macs for magazines etc just weren't prepared to switch platforms on a whim.) So, Amiga was the original Hackintosh. :-) But the copyright situation was even thornier then - to start the emulator you'd have to copy ROM images from a real Mac, and the only legal way to do that was to buy a Mac. (Not that anybody did that, they just copied the ROM onto a floppy.) I think the preferred emulator was Shapeshiter. It worked remarkably well because most Macintosh programs did not use any direct hardware access but used the Apple provided official APIs. Another anomaly was that Amiga was dead as a commercial gaming target by then, and so did not receive a port of Doom - but you could run the Macintosh version of Doom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spHpv3NKQhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spHpv3NKQhI Earlier, there was even an older Mac emulator for the Amiga which tried to go the legal route by having a little hardware board you could put Mac ROMs into. (And then of course people copied the original ROMs and put them on EPROMs.) Edit: the same CPU upgrade almost happened to 68030 based Macs: https://lowendmac.com/2016/cpus-motorola-68060/ https://lowendmac.com/2016/cpus-motorola-68060/
- greendave 7y agoRemarkable. Today the fastest Mac is also a hackintosh, so some things have not changed so much. That said, the first PowerPC Macs shipped in March of 1994 and Photoshop 3.0 for Mac in November. While the application was not native, a number of the filters were, so depending on what you did, they could be faster. Photoshop 4.0 was indeed fully native (November 1996).
- laszlokorte 7y agoI would be happy already if the swift>3.x would run on my osx sierra machine
- jdub 7y agoThis article encouraged me to finally buy the iMac G4 I've always dreamed about.
- xattt 7y agoThis post is obviously written with sarcasm. However, I've been enamoured with the G4 Cube and 12" PowerBooks since they first came out and haven't been able to find a device that's been as aesthetically pleasing since. This may have something to do with those being as objects of desire from my youth.
- jdub 7y agoNo, I was absolutely serious! Bought one on ebay tonight. :-)
- lostgame 7y agoMine is one of my most treasured possessions and is in daily use.
- jdub 7y agoWhat are you running on it? Latest macOS or Linux…?
- jamesfmilne 7y agoThe big takeaway for me is the MPW emulator that lets you run the tools from MPW. Gonna give that a go!