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> then I look at that 9" screen and go "Um, nah." System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 wi

by retrac 3y ago

> then I look at that 9" screen and go "Um, nah." System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 with its 9" screen and 68000 @ 8 MHz. It can run System 7. And then there's 200 MHz PPC machines with PCI and Ethernet and 64 MB of RAM and all that, which can also run System 7. It's a lot more flexible than CP/M, that's for sure. It's surprising how far it stretches to the current day, without snapping. For example, the last time I played around with it in emulation, it was quite happy to drive my dual 1920 x 1080 displays in 32 bit colour. Sure, it'd be hard to find a '90s era card that could actually output that in a real Mac back then, but the OS has no problem with such resolutions, or multiple displays.

catiopatio 3y ago
I actually have a small stack of Radeon 7000 64MB PCI cards in my basement, capable of driving two displays at (at least) 1920x1080 (up to 2048x1536, I believe). I used them in Power Macintosh 9600s running (IIRC) System 7.6. ATI never released a 64MB Mac version of the card — I bought the PC version, desoldered and replaced the flash chip with one large enough for the Mac-compatible firmware, and reflashed them.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
> System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 with its 9" screen and 68000 @ 8 MHz. It can run System 7. And then there's 200 MHz PPC machines with PCI and Ethernet and 64 MB of RAM and all that, which can also run System 7. System 7.5/7.6 have similar flexibility. It’d run on a lot of 68k Macs, and it’ll just as happily run on that 200Mhz PPC Mac you mentioned after it’s had a 400Mhz+ G3/G4 upgrade card installed (System 7 might able to do this too but I’m not certain). Of course this CPUs are bottlenecked by the bus speeds of that hardware, but the gap between the power available and power required without virtualization/emulation is kind of wild.
shagie 3y ago
> but the OS has no problem with such resolutions, or multiple displays I don't recall the resolution, but there was a weekend where I was able to play around in a lab with several Mac IIfx machines. I was able to get one machine with a full set of video cards and arrange the monitors in 5 of 8 faces octagon and play a flight simulator where it could map different monitors to different viewing angles. So I had the front view, front angles, and shoulder views. It handled it with no apparent problems. One of the machines that my father used was a IIfx that had a 32 bit color primary monitor, and then a 2 page 16 gray scale (that thing was monstrous) and a 1 page 16 gray scale monitor to either side. https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-two-page-monochrome-display/ https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-two-page-monochrome-dis...

by retrac 3y ago

catiopatio 3y ago

I actually have a small stack of Radeon 7000 64MB PCI cards in my basement, capable of driving two displays at (at least) 1920x1080 (up to 2048x1536, I believe). I used them in Power Macintosh 9600s running (IIRC) System 7.6. ATI never released a 64MB Mac version of the card — I bought the PC version, desoldered and replaced the flash chip with one large enough for the Mac-compatible firmware, and reflashed them.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

> System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 with its 9" screen and 68000 @ 8 MHz. It can run System 7. And then there's 200 MHz PPC machines with PCI and Ethernet and 64 MB of RAM and all that, which can also run System 7. System 7.5/7.6 have similar flexibility. It’d run on a lot of 68k Macs, and it’ll just as happily run on that 200Mhz PPC Mac you mentioned after it’s had a 400Mhz+ G3/G4 upgrade card installed (System 7 might able to do this too but I’m not certain). Of course this CPUs are bottlenecked by the bus speeds of that hardware, but the gap between the power available and power required without virtualization/emulation is kind of wild.

shagie 3y ago

> but the OS has no problem with such resolutions, or multiple displays I don't recall the resolution, but there was a weekend where I was able to play around in a lab with several Mac IIfx machines. I was able to get one machine with a full set of video cards and arrange the monitors in 5 of 8 faces octagon and play a flight simulator where it could map different monitors to different viewing angles. So I had the front view, front angles, and shoulder views. It handled it with no apparent problems. One of the machines that my father used was a IIfx that had a 32 bit color primary monitor, and then a 2 page 16 gray scale (that thing was monstrous) and a 1 page 16 gray scale monitor to either side. https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-two-page-monochrome-display/ https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-two-page-monochrome-dis...