8 ms·

System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

333 points by ibobev 11mo ago

gnerd00 11mo ago
yes, multiple Macs within arms reach right now! ++ BBEdit
mrcwinn 11mo ago
One of my early Macs was a Performa 638CD with no dedicated FPU. I had upgraded to a Performa 6400 (which felt like an absolute dog despite its size) but finally had an opportunity to move to the PowerComputing PowerTower Pro 225. What a beast! I hate to say it, but it was probably my favorite Mac I'd ever owned before the first iMac.
- kev009 11mo ago
  The Megahertz wars in the 1990s made it really difficult to understand relative performance across even the same ISA like this, and I think computers with the 603 CPU were a bit of a wrench in people's perception of the Mac. The 180 or 200MHz 603e with 16k L1 cache in that Performa 6400 wasn't slow by any stretch, but it probably didn't have L2 cache. Coupled with the gradual transition to PPC native code of the OS and apps, these machines were often a little mismatched to expectations and realities of the code. Meanwhile that PowerTower had a 604e with 32/32k L1 and 1MB L2 cache. That was a fast flier with a superscalar and out of order pipeline more comparable to the Pentium Pro and PII.
  - burnt-resistor 11mo ago
    Yup. Recall the far better cycle efficiency of the 100 MHz hyperSPARC. Consumers didn't grok cycle efficiency, pipeline depth, or branch prediction miss pipeline stall latency.
  - mrcwinn 11mo ago
    Oh believe me. I owned it. It felt slow even at the time.
- E39M5S62 11mo ago
  I have a PowerCenter Pro 210 in my basement right now! It's not quite as nice as the newer architecture in the PowerTower Pro machines, but it runs MacOS 7.6.1 wonderfully. It is more than enough for classic Mac games of that era - and a joy to use.
  - im_down_w_otp 11mo ago
    The later PowerCenter Pro’s could run with a 60 MHz FSB whereas the PowerTower Pro’s were usually 45-50 MHz FSB. There are a variety of tasks where my PowerCenter Pro 240 outruns my PowerTower Pro 250 for precisely that reason.
rogerrogerr 11mo ago
Misread as “Mac mini M4” and was going to be _very_ impressed.
- leoh 11mo ago
  Honestly this is still pretty insane.
- huflungdung 11mo ago
  [dead]
65a 11mo ago
StarMax series (and the 4400) seemed to be about as close to CHRP as we got. My off-brand StarMax clone (PowerCity) had a PS/2 and an ISA port. Ran BeOS well, and had a quirk that I could hear a tight loop on the speaker.
- winocm 11mo ago
  Kinda sorts. The systems that the "MacOS on CHRP" thing ran on had a very strange looking device tree, with some bizarre combination of PC and Mac peripherals. Apple Cobra Open Firmware CHRP 1.1 B3 built on 08/18/97 at 13:04:24 Copyright Apple Computer 1994,1996,1997 Copyright IBM Corporation 1996 All rights reserved. ok 0 > dev / ls ff82ec18: /cpus ff82ee08: /PowerPC,604e@0 ff82f600: /chosen ff82f750: /memory@0 ff82f8d8: /memory-controller@fec00000 ff82f9d8: /openprom ff82fab8: /rom@ff000000 ff82ff48: /boot-rom@fff00000 ff830060: /options ff830828: /aliases ff830c78: /packages ff830d00: /deblocker ff8314c8: /disk-label ff832090: /obp-tftp ff835db8: /mac-parts ff836578: /mac-files ff837de0: /fat-files ff839700: /iso-9660-files ff83a148: /bootinfo-loader ff83b7d0: /xcoff-loader ff83c060: /pe-loader ff83c7d0: /elf-loader ff83da18: /terminal-emulator ff83dab0: /rtas ff83dc70: /pci@80000000 ff83ff38: /isa@b ff8414e0: /nvram@i74 ff841ad0: /rtc@i70 ff842500: /parallel@i378 ff842988: /serial@i3f8 ff843020: /serial@i2f8 ff8436b8: /sound@i534 ff850288: /8042@i60 ff8515f8: /keyboard@0 ff854b88: /mouse@1 ff8554c0: /fdc@i3f0 ff858730: /disk@1 ff85bac0: /op-panel@i808 ff85bba0: /pwr-mgmt@i82a ff85bed8: /timer@i40 ff85c070: /interrupt-controller@i20 ff85c250: /dma-controller@i0 ff85c738: /pci-ide@b,1 ff85d028: /ide@0 ff85db78: /ide@1 ff85e6c8: /cdrom@0 ff862e60: /mac-io@d ff863468: /scsi@10000 ff865298: /disk ff8660c8: /tape ff8671b8: /adb@11000 ff867cb0: /keyboard@2 ff8685a0: /mouse@3 ff8687c0: /escc-legacy@12000 ff8689b8: /ch-a@12002 ff868b08: /ch-b@12000 ff868c58: /escc@13000 ff868e40: /ch-a@13020 ff869500: /ch-b@13000 ff869bc0: /via@16000 ff869cb0: /interrupt-controller@40000 ff869e70: /cirrus@e ff86e2c8: /pci1022,2000@f ok 0 > Refer to the "Macintosh Technology in the Common Hardware Reference Platform" book for more information, if you're curious about the Mac IO pieces. The Motorola Yellowknife board seems remarkably similar to this system, as well as the IBM Long Trail system (albeit with Long Trail using a VLSI Golden Gate versus a MPC106 memory controller). Both of them use W83C553 southbridges and PC87307 Super I/O controllers. The architecture is kind of weird, but the schematics on NXP's website can probably elucidate a bit more on the system's design.
k310 11mo ago
> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most users don't do today. And without those monster data centers.
- geerlingguy 11mo ago
  Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.
  - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
    MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would. There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm concerned System 7 was probably the zenith.
    - tarsinge 11mo ago
      To me it’s the opposite, System 7 crashed all the time and MacOS 9 was rock solid. System 7 was a mess until 7.6, at which point it was basically MacOS 8. And the UI was way more pleasing, the system 7 one had a 80s vibe to me.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - anthk 11mo ago
      W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.
ayaros 11mo ago
I have an iMac G4 1.25 GHz. Originally, it was a 1GHz, but I swapped out the motherboard for a later model. For a while I've been wondering if I would had been better off with an earlier motherboard capable of booting OS 9 natively. Compared with using OS X's classic mode, this would omit the overhead of running a whole other OS and leave me with more resources to run OS 9 apps and games. I don't get a whole lot of use out of the earlier OS X software that I have on there... Maybe in the future I won't have to make that choice! I'd much rather dual boot OS 9 off a different partition, but that hasn't been supported on the 1-1.25GHz models (Thanks Steve...) and no one has gotten it working properly. Maybe now it will be possible! A man can dream...
- fzzzy 11mo ago
  9 has been possible on that board for years now. No internal speaker but the headphone jack works.
  - ayaros 11mo ago
    When did that happen? Do you have a link to the exact CD image you used?
    - WoodenChair 11mo ago
      You can find a 9 image for it at macos9lives.com
nxobject 11mo ago
A fun "do-it-yourself" question for people who've always wanted to learn about the baroque architecture of the PowerPC Mac and the classic Mac OS: where is hardware support for specific models implemented?
- elliotnunn 11mo ago
  In concentrically encrusted layers
system7rocks 11mo ago
I’ve been waiting for this post. I run OS 9 on my lamp iMac G4 but now I want to try 7.6.1!
keyle 11mo ago
That's impressive but early macOS were pretty awful UX; I think the UI thread was everything. I remember clicking and waiting.
- virtue3 11mo ago
  more the fault of MB of ram and HDDs being quite slow to be honest.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
  > I think the UI thread was everything. How would you have done it?
  - swiftcoder 11mo ago
    Preemption is a very nice OS feature it turns out (particularly once multi-core rolled around). Still, I recall os 8 and 9 being generally snappier than windows 98 (and a lot snappier than early builds of OSX)
    - ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
      How does preemption work on a processor that barely has interrupts and has no way to recover state after a page fault, in an OS that has to fit into a couple dozen kilobytes of ROM?
      - cmrdporcupine 11mo ago
        There were plenty of preemptive multitasking systems for the original 68000, and regardless page fault recovery was fixed from the 010 onwards. And certainly was very not a problem on PowerPC which TFA is about. Also not sure how you can say the 68000 "barely has interrupts" I don't even know what you're on about. MacOS was broken because Jobs forced it to be that way after he was kicked off the Lisa team. Which had a preemptive multitasking operating system on the 68000.
      - zozbot234 11mo ago
Kwpolska 11mo ago
> In my case, first I tried using the latest Python 3.13.9 both from Windows 7 (bad idea due to resource fork loss) and macOS 10.14.6 Mojave, but neither worked: it seems like that version of Python was just too new. I then retried with Python 3.8.10 instead (which I chose thinking it might be more period-appropriate for the script's age) on Mojave, which worked flawlessly. Ah, classic Python. Removing features [0] and breaking perfectly working software just because the feature is old, ugly, and not widely used. [0] https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi/issues/1 https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi/issues/1
- elliotnunn 11mo ago
  Max frustrating. If I were writing tbxi again it would be in Go.
  - chongli 11mo ago
    Why not C89? Try to make it as portable as possible. The software is intended for preservation of old computers and their software. Would make sense for the software to be as portable as possible. Who knows, maybe someone would want to run it on vintage Mac hardware?
    - anthk 11mo ago
      It already exists. But, if any, Free Pascal with Lazarus for classic Mac ppc would be ideal. Put that MacSSL port available under fpc and now you can compete with the rest.
    - elliotnunn 11mo ago
      This is a good point. For a while, I was writing vintage Mac hacking tools in ANSI C [1]. The answer is that it's too hard. I want to see the Happy Mac on as much exotic hardware as possible, but my day job keeps me very busy, and I want to enjoy my hobby without tedium and toil. I prefer to use a language that is "easier to write, easier to read, easier to understand, easier to maintain" [2]. [1] https://github.com/elliotnunn/mac-rom/blob/master/Tools/ToolSource/Vectorize.c https://github.com/elliotnunn/mac-rom/blob/master/Tools/Tool... [2] https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
anthk 11mo ago
As an European, Classic Macs (and current ones) were just for arts/writting people. If you knew what CMYK was in order to print a newspaper, you were a Mac user. I emulated Mac OS 7 under XP times, and i was impressed that you could get far faster speeds emulating the M68k (and partially the PPC) compared to Intel X86 without any hardware accelerating chip (IntelVT) or kernel modules trapping X86 instructions running it at native speeds. I mean, PPC and M68k chips where much easier to emulate than X86 on itself. On software, Classic Mac users can just resort to IRC and Gopher clients and visit the public https://bitlbee.org https://bitlbee.org IRC servers in order to connect 'modern' accounts and being proxied to a Mac IRC client. And for Gopher, you have gopher://hngopher.com, gopher://magical.fish and the like. Sadly you don't have an easy TLS library as Amiga users have (AmiSSL) where even modern web can work on it (and IRC over TLS, Gemini...). Altough... if Amiga m68k emulators run fast with the Rosetta like tech for PPC... you would just fire up Workbench and then AmiSSL. Crude, but it would work. If not, here in the Apple subdir you can get, maybe, some TLS enabled browsers: gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn and gopher://happymacs.ddns.net/1Vintage-Mac-Software-Archive MacSSL: https://github.com/demoniccode12/MacSSL https://github.com/demoniccode12/MacSSL Usenet will work fine without any TLS, and there's tons of content out there.
- cyrc 11mo ago
  It was because of QuarkXPress and Photoshop. In the same way WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were dominant for business computers. Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware. There are so many Unix or Linux ABI compatible kernels like the recent Moss written in rust.
  - anthk 11mo ago
    Ardi Executor. There's a recent fork at GitHub. You can run m68k binaries seamlessly. You don't need propietary MacOS parts, just the software. But if you are some software preserver, having a libre option to run legacy media it's always good for historical reasons. I am a daily libre software user but I emulate ancient machines with propietary stuff just for curiosity. As it not a personal computing device I find it fine. It's just an historical toy and not my computing device. And, well, if you want to create libre engines for old Mac games (ScummVM, SDL ports...), for sure you need to at least emulate the old OSes and run the propietary game in order to compare the output and correctness. Also, it already exists "Mac" for x86. It was Rhapsody DR2 and it could run Classic Mac software and NeXT one too. It was like a blend of these two. OSX it's like NeXT Step concept 2.0, with few traces of Mac Classic. Qemu will run it fine. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/hands-on-with-1998s-rhapsody-dr2 https://lunduke.substack.com/p/hands-on-with-1998s-rhapsody-...
pjmlp 11mo ago
This is really cool, the kind of content great to see here.
WoodenChair 11mo ago
Very related but self promotional—I have a hobby business selling restored Mac mini G4s. I clean all of them internally, upgrade them with 128 GB SSDs, max them out at 1 GB of RAM, put a new clock battery in, and pre-install the Mac OS 9 Lives hacked version of Mac OS 9 that runs on them. You can buy one from me here: https://os9.shop https://os9.shop I don't think I'll start pre-installing System 7 since most of my customers are using Mac OS 9 (and the domain is os9.shop!), but you could certainly get a machine from me with Mac OS 9 and install System 7 yourself if you so desire. My customers have included a lot of real businesses running legacy software who want the fastest, least intrusive, and least energy intensive Mac OS 9 desktop machine they can buy. I've sold to dentists, veterinarians, museums, and auto repair stores. You'd be amazed how many people are running Classic Mac software in 2025.
- mechagodzilla 11mo ago
  Did you have to do anything special to get the SSD to play nice with OS9? I tried adding one to a 300MHz G3 iMac and it took forever to initialize on boot and would randomly stall a lot.
  - WoodenChair 11mo ago
    I use a mSATA to IDE adapter that I buy in bulk. This is the Amazon available equivalent of it: https://amzn.to/48qEaOm https://amzn.to/48qEaOm I use only 128 GB mSATA cards from reputable brands. I always do the following: - Boot from the Mac OS 9 Lives 9.2.2 image (v9 of the image) by CD - Wipe the SSD using Disk Utilities 2.1 - Restore from the CD I will say this fails perhaps 1 out of 20 times. Hard to say how often this is an actual hardware failure versus some kind of incompatibility with the mSATA SSD since I do use a range of brands. I am always using the same adapters.
- apple4ever 11mo ago
  Wow this is neat!!! Put on my list to order sometime soon!
- trollbridge 11mo ago
  Seems more of a curiousity than something practical - in particular, the System 7 "native" on the Mac mini G4 is missing a lot of drivers. There aren't that many situations where software runs well on System 7 tha doesn't on Mac OS 9.2.2, and for the rare case that it does, emulation in something like vMac is sufficient.
trollbridge 11mo ago
Slight nitpick: this isn't "natively booting" System 7, nor is any other PowerPC Mac. This is simply an emulator, no different than using vMac, qemu, etc. - it just happens to be an emulator that Apple has been shipping with PowerPC Macs since it introduced the Power Mac 6100, which "natively" booted System 7.1.2. Nonetheless, this is an impressive accomplishment.

333 points by ibobev 11mo ago

yes, multiple Macs within arms reach right now! ++ BBEdit

One of my early Macs was a Performa 638CD with no dedicated FPU. I had upgraded to a Performa 6400 (which felt like an absolute dog despite its size) but finally had an opportunity to move to the PowerComputing PowerTower Pro 225. What a beast! I hate to say it, but it was probably my favorite Mac I'd ever owned before the first iMac.

kev009 11mo ago
The Megahertz wars in the 1990s made it really difficult to understand relative performance across even the same ISA like this, and I think computers with the 603 CPU were a bit of a wrench in people's perception of the Mac. The 180 or 200MHz 603e with 16k L1 cache in that Performa 6400 wasn't slow by any stretch, but it probably didn't have L2 cache. Coupled with the gradual transition to PPC native code of the OS and apps, these machines were often a little mismatched to expectations and realities of the code. Meanwhile that PowerTower had a 604e with 32/32k L1 and 1MB L2 cache. That was a fast flier with a superscalar and out of order pipeline more comparable to the Pentium Pro and PII.
- burnt-resistor 11mo ago
  Yup. Recall the far better cycle efficiency of the 100 MHz hyperSPARC. Consumers didn't grok cycle efficiency, pipeline depth, or branch prediction miss pipeline stall latency.
- mrcwinn 11mo ago
  Oh believe me. I owned it. It felt slow even at the time.
E39M5S62 11mo ago
I have a PowerCenter Pro 210 in my basement right now! It's not quite as nice as the newer architecture in the PowerTower Pro machines, but it runs MacOS 7.6.1 wonderfully. It is more than enough for classic Mac games of that era - and a joy to use.
- im_down_w_otp 11mo ago
  The later PowerCenter Pro’s could run with a 60 MHz FSB whereas the PowerTower Pro’s were usually 45-50 MHz FSB. There are a variety of tasks where my PowerCenter Pro 240 outruns my PowerTower Pro 250 for precisely that reason.

rogerrogerr 11mo ago

Misread as “Mac mini M4” and was going to be _very_ impressed.

leoh 11mo ago
Honestly this is still pretty insane.
huflungdung 11mo ago
[dead]

65a 11mo ago

StarMax series (and the 4400) seemed to be about as close to CHRP as we got. My off-brand StarMax clone (PowerCity) had a PS/2 and an ISA port. Ran BeOS well, and had a quirk that I could hear a tight loop on the speaker.

winocm 11mo ago
Kinda sorts. The systems that the "MacOS on CHRP" thing ran on had a very strange looking device tree, with some bizarre combination of PC and Mac peripherals. Apple Cobra Open Firmware CHRP 1.1 B3 built on 08/18/97 at 13:04:24 Copyright Apple Computer 1994,1996,1997 Copyright IBM Corporation 1996 All rights reserved. ok 0 > dev / ls ff82ec18: /cpus ff82ee08: /PowerPC,604e@0 ff82f600: /chosen ff82f750: /memory@0 ff82f8d8: /memory-controller@fec00000 ff82f9d8: /openprom ff82fab8: /rom@ff000000 ff82ff48: /boot-rom@fff00000 ff830060: /options ff830828: /aliases ff830c78: /packages ff830d00: /deblocker ff8314c8: /disk-label ff832090: /obp-tftp ff835db8: /mac-parts ff836578: /mac-files ff837de0: /fat-files ff839700: /iso-9660-files ff83a148: /bootinfo-loader ff83b7d0: /xcoff-loader ff83c060: /pe-loader ff83c7d0: /elf-loader ff83da18: /terminal-emulator ff83dab0: /rtas ff83dc70: /pci@80000000 ff83ff38: /isa@b ff8414e0: /nvram@i74 ff841ad0: /rtc@i70 ff842500: /parallel@i378 ff842988: /serial@i3f8 ff843020: /serial@i2f8 ff8436b8: /sound@i534 ff850288: /8042@i60 ff8515f8: /keyboard@0 ff854b88: /mouse@1 ff8554c0: /fdc@i3f0 ff858730: /disk@1 ff85bac0: /op-panel@i808 ff85bba0: /pwr-mgmt@i82a ff85bed8: /timer@i40 ff85c070: /interrupt-controller@i20 ff85c250: /dma-controller@i0 ff85c738: /pci-ide@b,1 ff85d028: /ide@0 ff85db78: /ide@1 ff85e6c8: /cdrom@0 ff862e60: /mac-io@d ff863468: /scsi@10000 ff865298: /disk ff8660c8: /tape ff8671b8: /adb@11000 ff867cb0: /keyboard@2 ff8685a0: /mouse@3 ff8687c0: /escc-legacy@12000 ff8689b8: /ch-a@12002 ff868b08: /ch-b@12000 ff868c58: /escc@13000 ff868e40: /ch-a@13020 ff869500: /ch-b@13000 ff869bc0: /via@16000 ff869cb0: /interrupt-controller@40000 ff869e70: /cirrus@e ff86e2c8: /pci1022,2000@f ok 0 > Refer to the "Macintosh Technology in the Common Hardware Reference Platform" book for more information, if you're curious about the Mac IO pieces. The Motorola Yellowknife board seems remarkably similar to this system, as well as the IBM Long Trail system (albeit with Long Trail using a VLSI Golden Gate versus a MPC106 memory controller). Both of them use W83C553 southbridges and PC87307 Super I/O controllers. The architecture is kind of weird, but the schematics on NXP's website can probably elucidate a bit more on the system's design.

k310 11mo ago

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most users don't do today. And without those monster data centers.

geerlingguy 11mo ago
Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.
- inferiorhuman 11mo ago
  MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would. There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm concerned System 7 was probably the zenith.
  - tarsinge 11mo ago
    To me it’s the opposite, System 7 crashed all the time and MacOS 9 was rock solid. System 7 was a mess until 7.6, at which point it was basically MacOS 8. And the UI was way more pleasing, the system 7 one had a 80s vibe to me.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - anthk 11mo ago
    W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.

ayaros 11mo ago

I have an iMac G4 1.25 GHz. Originally, it was a 1GHz, but I swapped out the motherboard for a later model. For a while I've been wondering if I would had been better off with an earlier motherboard capable of booting OS 9 natively. Compared with using OS X's classic mode, this would omit the overhead of running a whole other OS and leave me with more resources to run OS 9 apps and games. I don't get a whole lot of use out of the earlier OS X software that I have on there... Maybe in the future I won't have to make that choice! I'd much rather dual boot OS 9 off a different partition, but that hasn't been supported on the 1-1.25GHz models (Thanks Steve...) and no one has gotten it working properly. Maybe now it will be possible! A man can dream...

fzzzy 11mo ago
9 has been possible on that board for years now. No internal speaker but the headphone jack works.
- ayaros 11mo ago
  When did that happen? Do you have a link to the exact CD image you used?
  - WoodenChair 11mo ago
    You can find a 9 image for it at macos9lives.com

nxobject 11mo ago

A fun "do-it-yourself" question for people who've always wanted to learn about the baroque architecture of the PowerPC Mac and the classic Mac OS: where is hardware support for specific models implemented?

elliotnunn 11mo ago
In concentrically encrusted layers

system7rocks 11mo ago

I’ve been waiting for this post. I run OS 9 on my lamp iMac G4 but now I want to try 7.6.1!

keyle 11mo ago

That's impressive but early macOS were pretty awful UX; I think the UI thread was everything. I remember clicking and waiting.

virtue3 11mo ago
more the fault of MB of ram and HDDs being quite slow to be honest.
ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
> I think the UI thread was everything. How would you have done it?
- swiftcoder 11mo ago
  Preemption is a very nice OS feature it turns out (particularly once multi-core rolled around). Still, I recall os 8 and 9 being generally snappier than windows 98 (and a lot snappier than early builds of OSX)
  - ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
    How does preemption work on a processor that barely has interrupts and has no way to recover state after a page fault, in an OS that has to fit into a couple dozen kilobytes of ROM?
    - cmrdporcupine 11mo ago
      There were plenty of preemptive multitasking systems for the original 68000, and regardless page fault recovery was fixed from the 010 onwards. And certainly was very not a problem on PowerPC which TFA is about. Also not sure how you can say the 68000 "barely has interrupts" I don't even know what you're on about. MacOS was broken because Jobs forced it to be that way after he was kicked off the Lisa team. Which had a preemptive multitasking operating system on the 68000.
    - zozbot234 11mo ago

Kwpolska 11mo ago

> In my case, first I tried using the latest Python 3.13.9 both from Windows 7 (bad idea due to resource fork loss) and macOS 10.14.6 Mojave, but neither worked: it seems like that version of Python was just too new. I then retried with Python 3.8.10 instead (which I chose thinking it might be more period-appropriate for the script's age) on Mojave, which worked flawlessly. Ah, classic Python. Removing features [0] and breaking perfectly working software just because the feature is old, ugly, and not widely used. [0] https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi/issues/1 https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi/issues/1

elliotnunn 11mo ago
Max frustrating. If I were writing tbxi again it would be in Go.
- chongli 11mo ago
  Why not C89? Try to make it as portable as possible. The software is intended for preservation of old computers and their software. Would make sense for the software to be as portable as possible. Who knows, maybe someone would want to run it on vintage Mac hardware?
  - anthk 11mo ago
    It already exists. But, if any, Free Pascal with Lazarus for classic Mac ppc would be ideal. Put that MacSSL port available under fpc and now you can compete with the rest.
  - elliotnunn 11mo ago
    This is a good point. For a while, I was writing vintage Mac hacking tools in ANSI C [1]. The answer is that it's too hard. I want to see the Happy Mac on as much exotic hardware as possible, but my day job keeps me very busy, and I want to enjoy my hobby without tedium and toil. I prefer to use a language that is "easier to write, easier to read, easier to understand, easier to maintain" [2]. [1] https://github.com/elliotnunn/mac-rom/blob/master/Tools/ToolSource/Vectorize.c https://github.com/elliotnunn/mac-rom/blob/master/Tools/Tool... [2] https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

anthk 11mo ago

As an European, Classic Macs (and current ones) were just for arts/writting people. If you knew what CMYK was in order to print a newspaper, you were a Mac user. I emulated Mac OS 7 under XP times, and i was impressed that you could get far faster speeds emulating the M68k (and partially the PPC) compared to Intel X86 without any hardware accelerating chip (IntelVT) or kernel modules trapping X86 instructions running it at native speeds. I mean, PPC and M68k chips where much easier to emulate than X86 on itself. On software, Classic Mac users can just resort to IRC and Gopher clients and visit the public https://bitlbee.org https://bitlbee.org IRC servers in order to connect 'modern' accounts and being proxied to a Mac IRC client. And for Gopher, you have gopher://hngopher.com, gopher://magical.fish and the like. Sadly you don't have an easy TLS library as Amiga users have (AmiSSL) where even modern web can work on it (and IRC over TLS, Gemini...). Altough... if Amiga m68k emulators run fast with the Rosetta like tech for PPC... you would just fire up Workbench and then AmiSSL. Crude, but it would work. If not, here in the Apple subdir you can get, maybe, some TLS enabled browsers: gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn and gopher://happymacs.ddns.net/1Vintage-Mac-Software-Archive MacSSL: https://github.com/demoniccode12/MacSSL https://github.com/demoniccode12/MacSSL Usenet will work fine without any TLS, and there's tons of content out there.

cyrc 11mo ago
It was because of QuarkXPress and Photoshop. In the same way WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were dominant for business computers. Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware. There are so many Unix or Linux ABI compatible kernels like the recent Moss written in rust.
- anthk 11mo ago
  Ardi Executor. There's a recent fork at GitHub. You can run m68k binaries seamlessly. You don't need propietary MacOS parts, just the software. But if you are some software preserver, having a libre option to run legacy media it's always good for historical reasons. I am a daily libre software user but I emulate ancient machines with propietary stuff just for curiosity. As it not a personal computing device I find it fine. It's just an historical toy and not my computing device. And, well, if you want to create libre engines for old Mac games (ScummVM, SDL ports...), for sure you need to at least emulate the old OSes and run the propietary game in order to compare the output and correctness. Also, it already exists "Mac" for x86. It was Rhapsody DR2 and it could run Classic Mac software and NeXT one too. It was like a blend of these two. OSX it's like NeXT Step concept 2.0, with few traces of Mac Classic. Qemu will run it fine. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/hands-on-with-1998s-rhapsody-dr2 https://lunduke.substack.com/p/hands-on-with-1998s-rhapsody-...

pjmlp 11mo ago

This is really cool, the kind of content great to see here.

WoodenChair 11mo ago

Very related but self promotional—I have a hobby business selling restored Mac mini G4s. I clean all of them internally, upgrade them with 128 GB SSDs, max them out at 1 GB of RAM, put a new clock battery in, and pre-install the Mac OS 9 Lives hacked version of Mac OS 9 that runs on them. You can buy one from me here: https://os9.shop https://os9.shop I don't think I'll start pre-installing System 7 since most of my customers are using Mac OS 9 (and the domain is os9.shop!), but you could certainly get a machine from me with Mac OS 9 and install System 7 yourself if you so desire. My customers have included a lot of real businesses running legacy software who want the fastest, least intrusive, and least energy intensive Mac OS 9 desktop machine they can buy. I've sold to dentists, veterinarians, museums, and auto repair stores. You'd be amazed how many people are running Classic Mac software in 2025.

mechagodzilla 11mo ago
Did you have to do anything special to get the SSD to play nice with OS9? I tried adding one to a 300MHz G3 iMac and it took forever to initialize on boot and would randomly stall a lot.
- WoodenChair 11mo ago
  I use a mSATA to IDE adapter that I buy in bulk. This is the Amazon available equivalent of it: https://amzn.to/48qEaOm https://amzn.to/48qEaOm I use only 128 GB mSATA cards from reputable brands. I always do the following: - Boot from the Mac OS 9 Lives 9.2.2 image (v9 of the image) by CD - Wipe the SSD using Disk Utilities 2.1 - Restore from the CD I will say this fails perhaps 1 out of 20 times. Hard to say how often this is an actual hardware failure versus some kind of incompatibility with the mSATA SSD since I do use a range of brands. I am always using the same adapters.
apple4ever 11mo ago
Wow this is neat!!! Put on my list to order sometime soon!
trollbridge 11mo ago
Seems more of a curiousity than something practical - in particular, the System 7 "native" on the Mac mini G4 is missing a lot of drivers. There aren't that many situations where software runs well on System 7 tha doesn't on Mac OS 9.2.2, and for the rare case that it does, emulation in something like vMac is sufficient.

trollbridge 11mo ago

Slight nitpick: this isn't "natively booting" System 7, nor is any other PowerPC Mac. This is simply an emulator, no different than using vMac, qemu, etc. - it just happens to be an emulator that Apple has been shipping with PowerPC Macs since it introduced the Power Mac 6100, which "natively" booted System 7.1.2. Nonetheless, this is an impressive accomplishment.