I was looking for some generic music and I thought I’d just download some MIDI files, and go with that. I mean come on, it’s 2020, even Windows 10 can play MIDI’s and even Microsoft has finally put in some sampled sound banks back in the what Vista days? Maybe XP??
Anyway, Apple has had sound banked MIDI for ages, going back to MacOS 7.something with a really revamped and great one in MacOS 8. Anyways I download Cuba Baion, and it doesn’t know what to do with it. I drag it to QuickTime 10, and it doesn’t know either.
So I fire up a Snow Leopard VM, and it too has QuickTime 10, and although it cannot play it, it offers to open up QuickTime 7 for me, and it plays. So I do the natrual thing, and zip of QuckTime 7, and copy it to Mojave, and lo it runs!
Back in the day, I bought QuickTime so I search my emails, and yep April of 2006 there is the receipt with the code!
I put in my pro key from back in 2006 and it happily registered.
Awesome!
Now, another thing from Snow Leopard that isn’t around anymore is X11. Can it be that easy?
I copy the app over, along with /usr/X11 and yes, that’s all it takes, and now I have X11 running on Mojave!
And well it’s a Mac. I did the Windows Key + R to boot into recovery mode and install some old version of OS X over the internet. Nice.
I updated to Catalina and kind of forgot about the break with the ‘awesome world of home 32bit computing’ as it’s all 64bit now.
Needless to say none of my favourite stuff runs.
I’ve been maintaining a subscription to Crossover for a while, as I really like to support the future of Wine. I know a while back they too had the 64bit freakout, but they apparently found some shim to keep on running Win32 apps. And sure enough I loaded up my old Fortran Power Station bottle and it actually run!
Fortran on OS X!
Sadly SQL Server 4.21 seems to lock up, but it has been doing that under Wine when I last gave up on OS X a few years back. I tried some Win16 games (SimCity) and it bombed out. Looks like there is no support for Win16 apps. Pitty.
Steam is 64bit now, however none of Valve’s hits that have 64bit versions for Windows have made the 64bit leap for OS X. I have a feeling it’ll never happen as OS X users are so few and far between they are literally outnumbered by Linux users.
I did fire-up Subnautica, and of course the PC with the RTX 2070 blows this thing away. Although it’s hardly a fare competition. But who wants to play fare?
It’s far too early to really tell, and who knows I might just wipe this thing and install Windows. In my opinion OS X 10.6 was the greatest release ever bridging the divide from PowerPC to x86, just as 10.2.7 on the G5 was the greatest PowerPC version to bridge that 68000 divide. I still have that G5, but now my 2006 machine is dead. I’ve seen them in the used stores for around $100 USD. Although I don’t know if I can be bothered as they are incredibly heavy. And I’m pretty sure 10.6 will run on VMWare thanks to hackintosh efforts.
Also I should add as a personal note, my 2006 MacPro 1,1 died. I let someone else use it, and she broke it in one day. I’ve had it for years, several moves in the USA, then to Canada, then to Hong Kong. It died with only one day on the job. Sad.
I just got another PowerBook, and the disk had been wiped by the prior user, and all it did was boot up to the blinking mac face. So not very useful. I did luckily buy some CD’s from a user on reddit a few months ago, so I had 10.4 install DVD, and an install of 9.2.2 for the emac.
Now the OS 9, is an install disc, not one of the recovery discs, and naturally the aluminum powerbooks don’t boot OS 9, so I’m kind of out of luck for getting Classic working, or so I had thought. I copied the System Folder from the CD onto the hard disk, and told the classic applette to boot it, and it updated some system files, and then gave me this fine message:
The system software on the startup disk only functions on the original media, not if copied to another drive.
So this got me thinking, back in the Sheepshaver days when trying to boot from an ISO as a disk file, it fails the same way because the image is read/write. If it’s read-only it does boot up however. So I used disk util, and made a new read-only disk image from a directory, and pointed it to a directory that I’d moved the CD’s system folder, desktop to. After mounting the read only image, it booted!
Now for the best part, I then kicked off the installer from the CD, and had it install a copy of OS 9, onto the OS X disk.
OS 9 Installer running under OS X
It’s worth noting that just about every optional install fails. It’ll come back with an error, and you can skip the component. It’s probably just easier to install the minimal OS image.
But rest assured it really does install.
After the install you can eject the CD, unmount the read-only copy and tell the classic to stop and then boot from the new installed copy of OS 9 on the OS X disk. It didn’t interfere with my OS X from booting, although the ‘sane person’ would probably have disk image make a small (1gb) read/write virtual disk, and have the installer install to that.
So to recap, copy the system folder from the CD onto read-write media, and let classic update it. get it to the point that it’s not happy about being mounted read-write. Move it to a read-only disk image and have classic boot from that, and then run the OS 9 installer to install itself to whatever target disk you need or want.
SimCity 2000 on Classic / OS X
I’ve run Netscape 4, IE 3 & 4, QuickTime 4, and the SIMS version 1 (the OS 8/9 carbon version). using 10.4.0 on an aluminum powerbook.
I don’t know if anyone else has done this, I couldn’t find any real concrete guides for installing OS 9 from OS X. So here we go.
The LC isn’t a strong Macintosh. It is after all, a low cost model. And what I’m doing isn’t even slightly fair to it.
Since it has a mere 68020 running at a blazing 16Mhz with no 68881 nor any MMU running something like A/UX is simply out of the question. However MMU less Mac’s can run MachTen.
Although I did make a backup of the disk to find out that this thing had been in Harvard of all places, apparently once belonging to Mark Saroyan.
Although there was nothing even slightly academic or useful on the disk. I wonder if the software was even pirated as the last owner sure enjoyed all the various SIM games (city/earth/life/ant) it seems more than anything else.
I formatted the massive 50MB SCSI disk, put on a fresh copy of MacOS 7.0.1 along with the network driver and MachTen 2.2.
System 7.0.1
And as far as LC’s go, this one isn’t too bad, it’s loaded up with the maximum 10MB of RAM, although it seems the VRAM is pretty sparse as it’ll only go to 16 colours. But since we are playing UNIX here, I didn’t see any need for that, and set it to mono.
I thought it’d be fun to install a gopherd server onto this machine, and that is where the fun started.
Granted it’s been a long time since I used a machine with no real L2 cache, let alone running at a whopping 16Mhz, and using a compiler like GCC is just incredibly slow.
So I thought I could just ‘cheat’ the system by taking the source code to GCC-1.42 and tweaking the SUN3-Mach configuration into a SUN2-Mach configuration but keeping it targeting a BSD like OS, along with setting it to compile to a 68020 without a 68881. Oddly enough getting a cross compiler wasn’t so difficult, but the assembler on the LC, a modified GAS wouldn’t assembler the files. So I went ahead and built a68 from GAS 1.38 and now I can cross assemble from Windows. However I couldn’t get the linker ld from binutils-1.9 working. I guess it was an endian issue somewhere, but my attempt at byte swapping files it was reading just led to further confusion. And I figured linking on the target host wouldn’t be the end of the world, as compiling sure feels like it is.
So fighting the source and in a matter of a 30 minutes of on/off work I had it compiled. All I needed to do then was FTP the objects to the machine, link and run. Surprisingly this proved to be pretty simple.
gopherd running!
I managed to get a few pages out of it, and suddenly my telnet sessions dropped. Looking over at the console and MacOS was busy being MacOS.
error of type 3
And that was that.
I tried another program to cross compile and upload phoon!
phoon cross compiled, natively linked.
It took a while to set the clock to the right year, as my minimal System 7 install doesn’t have the time control panel, and advancing 1 year at a time from 1999 takes time, by advancing the date to New Years Eve every minute 19 times to get us to 2018 with the old date syntax:
date 12312359
Lessons learned?
Obviously if I want to do something like this, I’m going to need a better Macintosh. Or just not do things like this….
I’m kind of on the fence as to whither 68k Unix is really all that useful in the age of Ghz x86.
I came across this hefty box, “the easy way bundle”, as it bills itself, the easy way to save over $1,000 on four popular software packages for your new Macintosh computer. Clearly the box has seen better days over the last 27 years but amazingly the contents are just fine.
$399.00 USD
It’s amazing how much more cheaper software has gotten over the years. Software used to be super expensive on the PC level, it really wasn’t until the office bundling with new machines that drove the price down. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to pay upwards of $500 USD for a single application, like a spreadsheet or word processor.
bundle contents
Inside the box is more boxes, and inside those boxes is a rare sight, manuals! Actual printed manuals! That is how you know this is something of near museum quality. I kind of like being able to read a physical book from time to time, and it’s really great.
Oh and incidentally the disks all worked, much to my amazement. I just needed to get a working Macintosh with a drive that can read 800kb disks and an Ethernet card.
4 great programs!
Although it does list four packages, it really is 3, featuring:
WordPerfectÂ
Lotus 1-2-3
SoftPC
AccessPC is simply a FAT driver for MacOS to read MS-DOS floppies & removable media.
So let’s take a quick look!
An actual software license
I haven’t seen something like this in a long while, an actual license printed on nice stock certificate stock paper (remember those?!), with a hologram tag. Does WordPerfect even exist anymore? Can I mail this in for an upgrade? Does it even matter?
Install options for WordPerfect
While the install options give the impression that WordPefect is a really full featured word processor once loaded up for some reason it really felt barren.
Although it does have the important proofing tools, don’t expect a dictionary or thesaurus to have anything more than the words, no definitions or anything like a style guide. It did ship on floppy and I guess I’ve just become so spoiled living in the future with terabytes of storage and an overwhelming supply of deference media.
Going back to 1992 is a real trip to not only how clean some of the UI elements feel, but just how seemingly feature sparse the more advanced applications feel.
Personally I never really liked WordPerfect so I more so installed it as a curiosity, much like when I had WordPerfect for Unix. I’m the crazy one that likes MS Word.
Lotus 1-2-3 1.00 for the Mac
With that said, I went ahead and installed Lotus 1-2-3, and I was really surprised, that the installer was not only really appallingly bad, requiring you to copy the contents to the HD before installing it (so you need a lot of free space), but there was no copy protection at all either on the disks, or in the form of a certificate/serial code. In school I did start with 1-2-3, but with the onslaught of Microsoft Office had quickly moved to Excel, and after 30+ years I really don’t remember much of the slash commands, let alone how to use if effectively. Luckily the menu is okay to walk through, and of course there is Macintosh style menus so you don’t even have to deal with the slash menu if you don’t want to.
SoftPC
SoftPC didn’t come with a box within the box, just the two manual sets & the disks shoved into the manuals. I doubt it came like that, but this is all I have.
SoftPC licensing stickers
Compared to the WordPerfect certificate, the stickers hidden in the folds of the SoftPC manual just feel cheap. And the years have not been kind as you can see with the discoloration, and the cheap adhesive on them has completely dried off. After I had scanned this they have all fallen off the backing paper. Although I also have version 3.1, I didn’t want to lose this so I’ll just save it for prosperity.
And SoftPC is a great program, although it really is an absolute crutch, allowing you to run PC software on your Mac. Flash forward 30 years, and the industry continues with VMware & Parallels. What is more amazing is how so many leaders in PC emulation completely missed the virtualization market. But most people would think you were a little strange to run a PC on a PC. Or more than one at the same time.
The SoftPC platform
SoftPC emulates a really barebones PC, it only supports a maximum of 640kb of RAM, and the CGA graphics adapter. For anything more advanced you really need to get SoftAT, which supports more options. Or even better, get a copy of SoftPC 3.1, which not only allows more memory but bundles a copy of MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1
SoftPC 2.52 CGA running Space Quest 1
I found the emulation of the CGA kind of lacking when compared to version 3.1Â Although some games like BattleTech render just fine, Space Quest just looks horrible in version 2.52.
SoftPC 3.1 CGA running Space Quest 1
Although to be fair it doesn’t look so much better in version 3.1 either. However 3.1 emulates both EGA & VGA (along with expanded & extended memory) giving a far more richer 286 based emulation solution
SoftPC 3.1 EGA running Space Quest 1
As you can see there really is no comparison to the EGA version.
Although there are far more better solutions today to do PC emulation, for some reason there is always something cool to have an emulator running an emulator.. Sadly the 80386 based emulation didn’t come to the 68000 based platform, instead the later generation emulation was only available to the PowerPC.
I guess it goes to show, but of all the applications I have for MacOS, I enjoy SoftPC the most. I suppose I need better softwares.
Well I put out a cry for help all over the place, looking for Darwin 0.3
And much to my amazement, when I woke up, I not only got a reply but a link to a toast image. Â Great, what is toast? Â Well simply put toast is a format made popular by then Adaptec Toast. Â Obviously the sane thing to do is to find Toast, install it, and mount the disk image inside of a Macintosh.
Adaptec toast 4.0
But, honestly, where is the fun in that?
Instead let’s have Cockatrice III do it! Â Now I never did get around to writing proper CD-ROM emulation, nor integrating it, but that doesn’t matter! Â Instead I’m going to rely on Daemon tools Lite, to do all the heavy lifting. Â DTL will create a virtual SCSI adapter, add in a SCSI CD-ROM device, and mount the image. Â Needless to say, I’m on Windows and that is where that part of the adventure ends, as Windows 10 cannot read HFS.
Now back to Cockatrice!
All I had to do was assign the SCSI 6 position to the mounted drive letter, and I’m set!  Just add this to the CockatriceIII_Prefs file:
scsi6 \\.\e:
And now I can mount the image from within Cockatrice III
Darwin 0.3 toast mounted
And there we go, now I can copy the files of just like having a real Mac.
But sure enough, the file GNUMPW.SIT, and the later gcc-1.37.1r15-all.sea.bin are the real thing!  The file GNUMPW unstuffs to GCC 1.37.1r7(All), although Stuffit 5 and higher won’t unpack the file, I’ve converted it unpacking with version 4 & repacking with 5.5.
The readme from r7 is dated November 2nd, 1990. Â I found some history on this port on the archives of the GCC mailing list here. Â The port was done by Stan Shebs, while working for Apple. Â As he states the port started in 1989 and was first used in an abandoned m68k based project, and later a possible replacement for the Apple compiler for OS 7.
For this experiment I was using the r15 version, as I didn’t find anything out about the prior versions until after I had written this.
GCC on MacOS needs the MPW environment, which for me is incredibly awkward to work with. While some people may love it, it is very strange in that you have to highlight commands in the window, then hit clover+enter to run them. Â Like a mainframe, you can input commands wherever in the screen.
The next hardest thing was finding a version of MPW that will work with this. Â It needs the MPW C compiler for it’s includes, and libraries. Â The 3.5 stuff didn’t seem to work for me, however doing a LOT of searching, and I did find a ‘toast CD-ROM’ image‘ of 3.1 that includes all the C, and Assembler tools that I need to build an executable.
I also don’t know why, but running make just shows me what needs to be done, it never actually makes anything. Â I’m probably doing something wrong, but for such a long dead tool, trying to find out how to use it, or how do you interrupt a “stream” like manually running cc1 is beyond me. Â I just have to force quit the emulator.
But beyond that, running make gives me the steps, and I manually select and run the steps, and I was able to get a program to run!
sieve
I know it may not look like much, but getting it to actually run something was quite monumental for me!
I thought for the hell of it, I’d try to build the InfoTaskForce 1987 interpreter, but it seems to get confused at the whole input method.
Planetfall on MPW
There were some issues compiling input.c, as it didn’t like the external table, so I made it’s own local table. Â It also didn’t like some pointer arithmetic, but making GCC happy only gives me a program that can’t recognize any verbs. Â And from there it won’t quit, basically hanging the system.
I’m sure I’m doing something wrong, but at the same time it was interesting to see GCC on MacOS, during the whole GNU boycott of Apple for the ‘look and feel’ lawsuit against Microsoft. Â No doubt it let a lot of people sell other C compilers on the Mac Platform during this window of time.
GCC requires a 68020 processor, as GCC’s native 68000 based target would be SUN-2 hardware. Â While it can compile with the -m68000 flag, I haven’t tested with a 68000 based emulator to see if that’s even true. Â In the off chance someone wants a combined MPW+GCC I made a disk image here:Â MPW 3.1 with GCC 1.37.img.gz. Â Disk Copy 6.3 should be able to mount it OK, or any emulator that likes HFS disk images.
So after looking at the -Ofast flags in that utterly unfair GCC 1.4 vs GCC 5.1, and 6.1Â , I thought I’d try to build Cockatrice III with it. Â Everything went well, and I had a build in no time.
I always hated how I had to massively downsample the audio so I could at least hear things, so I thought I’d try to put them back to 44100Khz, 16bit stereo. Â And while compiling, older GCC runs fine, while 6.1 throws this run error!
../SDL/audio_sdl.cpp:57:43: error: narrowing conversion of '-1404829696' from 'int' to 'uint32 {aka unsigned int}' inside { } [-Wnarrowing]
uint32 audio_sample_rates[] = {44100 << 16};
^
makefile:104: recipe for target 'obj/audio_sdl.o' failed
make: *** [obj/audio_sdl.o] Error 1
Well it turns out that it’s getting truncated as the audio_sample_rates are defined as an unsigned int, but it really want’s to be a regular integer. Â So I changed the type, and now I have high def audio! Â While I was in there, I fixed some stupid typos in the keyboard so I can actually use vi in MacMiNT.
It’s still in 256 colors, I’m missing something fundamental as to why it’s not working but I just don’t have enough time to mess with it today.
The NeXT community has been about this old Mac emulator, daydream making a comeback onto NeXT hardware. Â Branded as darkmatter it runs on the bare metal of the NeXT cube/stations and can run MacOS in much the same way that Basilisk II does.
System 7.1 running on a NeXT cube!
What makes this interesting is that the 68040 is cycle set, and uses a much more mature CPU emulation core than Basilisk II, so it should give more accurate emulation. However it will run at 68040 25Mhz speeds, so it won’t win any speed records.
Naturally programs (Space Quest I) that blit directly to the display probably expect Mac/Plus/Se dimensions so the NeXT display won’t be ideal. Â But good old SoftPC for MacOS runs great!
SoftPC 3.1 for MacOS
And again, being set to 68040 speeds, it’s nowhere near as turbo as Basilisk II/SheepShaver.
For anyone interested, you’ll want Previous, the latest build and a test disk. Â Set the emulation for either a NeXT Computer (68030), or NeXTcube (68040), add the test disk as SCSI disk 0, and either type in ‘bsd’ at the firmware prompt, or have it automatically boot in the options.
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