by WoodenChair
3 subcomments
- 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
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.
- > 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.
- > 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
by rogerrogerr
2 subcomments
- Misread as “Mac mini M4” and was going to be _very_ impressed.
- 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.
- 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?
by trollbridge
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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...
- This is really cool, the kind of content great to see here.
- That's impressive but early macOS were pretty awful UX; I think the UI thread was everything.
I remember clicking and waiting.
by system7rocks
0 subcomment
- 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!
- 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.
- 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 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
Usenet will work fine without any TLS, and there's tons of content out there.
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