7 ms·
Heck, I'd be happy with a board that had the power/emulation of a 68040 so we can run MacOS 7.6 and some of old apps from back in the day.
by vondur 1y ago
Heck, I'd be happy with a board that had the power/emulation of a 68040 so we can run MacOS 7.6 and some of old apps from back in the day.
- bigfatkitten 1y ago68040 CPUs are easy to find. Motorola was shipping them in ASTRO mobile radio infrastructure equipment well into the 2000s, and a lot of that gear is getting scrapped now.
- rbanffy 1y agoA small ARM board can do the job easily, but that won’t be very close to the actual experience. Playing with the C64 Maxi made me understand how important the physicality of the system is to the experience. It’s nice to have a physical 68000, but that level of fidelity is not really necessary for a user to understand what a Mac was about. A keyboard with a locking Caps Lock key is.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoA big problem with emulation that has yet to be overcome entirely is the added latency. Any of my newer machines can emulate a 68k Mac at full speed and I can hook up my Apple Extended Keyboard II to help replicate the physical portions of the experience, and yet using a real old Mac feels notably different simply because it doesn’t suffer from the latency papercuts brought by USB and modern operating system. That’s one of the things that jumps out at me when I pull out my old PowerBook G3 and boot it into OS 9 on occasion: it feels incredibly responsive relative to modern counterparts, especially with an SSD removing the wait times that normally came with a spinning disk, despite it being only a tiny fraction as powerful.
- rbanffy 1y agoYou can mitigate the latencies by making the CPU faster, pushing more work to the GPU, using an analog VGA output, or trimming down the OS so that as little as possible preempts the emulator.