3 ms·

Macintosh System 7 Ported To x86 With LLM Help in 3 days

35 points by zdw 1y ago

WorldPeas 1y ago
is there a blogpost about the process/what tools were used to do so?
johndoe0815 1y ago
This is _not_ a port of the (leaked) System 7 sources from 68k/PPC to x86. It rather seems to be reverse engineered from the 68k binaries. From the project's README.md: "This is a reimplementation project for educational and preservation purposes." See https://zenodo.org/records/17196870 https://zenodo.org/records/17196870 for the related paper: "we reconstructed a bootable prototype of Apple System 7.1 directly from 68k binaries in three days" "We present an AI-assisted reverse engineering framework that achieves dramatic speedups—on the order of hundreds of times faster than traditional manual methods—by orchestrating specialized agents for evidence curation, struct recovery, and code drafting. Using this approach, we recreated a bootable prototype of Apple System 7.1 from binary analysis in just 3 days."
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  This is one of my hopes for Large LANGUAGE Models is that they aid in JIT emulation of the "languages" of OSes and assembly between architectures. The amount of software preservation that could occur by having LLMs port binaries to new architectures (and maybe do reverse engineering of the source code) is something that is well short of AGI, but would be tremendously useful. Alas I don't think any LLM vendor will pay much attention to this, there is too much money in Javascript/HTML primarily and the other mainstream langs secondarily. But LLMs should in theory be able to navigate the edge cases of doing things in different OSes / Windowing toolkits / etc better than straight decompiler/recompilers would be able to. This is related to a big potential area for LLMs: porting legacy enterprise code to newer systems, just like this guy did.
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    One of the things that LLMs seem to do quite well in natural language is "now do this text in the style of $famousAuthor". That seems related.
reanimus 1y ago
Worth mentioning this isn't a port of the entire system, more a reimplementation that lacks MANY features of the real System 7
rootsudo 1y ago
You know this makes me wonder about porting windows xp or such to ARM for double the fun nowadays.
lsy 1y ago
Impressive that this was done in 3 days at all, but to anyone who is familiar at all with System 7's appearance, the screenshot is almost comically "off" and gives away that this is not a straight port so much as some kind of clean-room reimplementation. The attached paper is more reserved, calling this a "bootable prototype".
- wmil 1y ago
  It's likely that they didn't have the rights to use the original fonts or icons.
  - reverius42 1y ago
    And yet they advertise: "Chicago Bitmap Font: Pixel-perfect rendering of the classic Mac font"
    - chuckadams 1y ago
      It's a bitmap font, so someone took some screenshots and used those. Typefaces can't be copyrighted.
hulitu 1y ago
> Macintosh System 7 Ported To x86 With LLM Help in 3 days > Future Development Dropdown menu implementation Window dragging and resizing File system integration Application launching Dialog boxes Resource Manager with full .rsrc support Sound Manager AppleTalk networking ... ported. In 3 days. Don't tell this to your employer. "Project is ready for production but i still have to implement half of it"
musicale 1y ago
This might not be as terrible as I expected it to be. I think the high quality of Apple's Inside Macintosh documentation would help quite a bit in reimplementing it.
musicale 1y ago
It may be worth noting that Apple themselves also ported System 7 to x86. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

35 points by zdw 1y ago

is there a blogpost about the process/what tools were used to do so?

This is _not_ a port of the (leaked) System 7 sources from 68k/PPC to x86. It rather seems to be reverse engineered from the 68k binaries. From the project's README.md: "This is a reimplementation project for educational and preservation purposes." See https://zenodo.org/records/17196870 https://zenodo.org/records/17196870 for the related paper: "we reconstructed a bootable prototype of Apple System 7.1 directly from 68k binaries in three days" "We present an AI-assisted reverse engineering framework that achieves dramatic speedups—on the order of hundreds of times faster than traditional manual methods—by orchestrating specialized agents for evidence curation, struct recovery, and code drafting. Using this approach, we recreated a bootable prototype of Apple System 7.1 from binary analysis in just 3 days."

AtlasBarfed 1y ago
This is one of my hopes for Large LANGUAGE Models is that they aid in JIT emulation of the "languages" of OSes and assembly between architectures. The amount of software preservation that could occur by having LLMs port binaries to new architectures (and maybe do reverse engineering of the source code) is something that is well short of AGI, but would be tremendously useful. Alas I don't think any LLM vendor will pay much attention to this, there is too much money in Javascript/HTML primarily and the other mainstream langs secondarily. But LLMs should in theory be able to navigate the edge cases of doing things in different OSes / Windowing toolkits / etc better than straight decompiler/recompilers would be able to. This is related to a big potential area for LLMs: porting legacy enterprise code to newer systems, just like this guy did.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  One of the things that LLMs seem to do quite well in natural language is "now do this text in the style of $famousAuthor". That seems related.

reanimus 1y ago

Worth mentioning this isn't a port of the entire system, more a reimplementation that lacks MANY features of the real System 7

rootsudo 1y ago

You know this makes me wonder about porting windows xp or such to ARM for double the fun nowadays.

lsy 1y ago

Impressive that this was done in 3 days at all, but to anyone who is familiar at all with System 7's appearance, the screenshot is almost comically "off" and gives away that this is not a straight port so much as some kind of clean-room reimplementation. The attached paper is more reserved, calling this a "bootable prototype".

wmil 1y ago
It's likely that they didn't have the rights to use the original fonts or icons.
- reverius42 1y ago
  And yet they advertise: "Chicago Bitmap Font: Pixel-perfect rendering of the classic Mac font"
  - chuckadams 1y ago
    It's a bitmap font, so someone took some screenshots and used those. Typefaces can't be copyrighted.

hulitu 1y ago

> Macintosh System 7 Ported To x86 With LLM Help in 3 days > Future Development Dropdown menu implementation Window dragging and resizing File system integration Application launching Dialog boxes Resource Manager with full .rsrc support Sound Manager AppleTalk networking ... ported. In 3 days. Don't tell this to your employer. "Project is ready for production but i still have to implement half of it"

musicale 1y ago

This might not be as terrible as I expected it to be. I think the high quality of Apple's Inside Macintosh documentation would help quite a bit in reimplementing it.

musicale 1y ago

It may be worth noting that Apple themselves also ported System 7 to x86. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project