It’s the ‘classic’ MacOS. And it requires Code Warrior 10 to build. Apparently its for the PowerPC only, although I haven’t tried to compile it yet, as I foolishly just upgraded to 10.5 on my PowerPC, which of course has no classic support.
Source code is on github, here.
It’s a nice present from Night Dive studios. I know that many people are mad at their reboot being consumed by feature bloat, but at least they aren’t going down into obscurity.
As always, enjoy!
booting
I was pretty amazed to see it even get this far. Credit to Steve Troughton Smith for his patched BootX, which gets the boot process this far. It’ll actually start the NeXTSTEP style install, but the keyboard won’t work either USB or ADB. Oh well.
..\qemu-system-ppc.exe -L .. -m 256 -drive file=MacOSXServer10.iso,index=0,format=raw,media=cdrom -drive file=BootX_custom.dmg,index=2,format=raw,media=disk -drive file=bla.disk,index=1,format=qcow2,media=disk -prom-env “boot-device=ide2:2,\BootX” -prom-env “boot-args=-v rd=sd0 debug=0xffe kdp=2” -prom-env “boot-file=ide0:11,\mach_kernel” -g 800x600x8 -device adb-keyboard -device adb-mouse -cpu G3 -M g3beige
Comdex on a disk!
I saw this floating around on some web site… And I thought I’d take a look!  Well it’s exactly what it sounds like, an ancient MS-DOS text base database from the fine folks at Folio who would later on sell off, merge and become part of LexisNexis.
Folio infobase
And what fine things were there in 1993?
IBM Power Personal Systems
Let’s not forget the false hope and promise of the IBM/Apple/Motorola PowerPC that was going to save us all, and give us the grand unifying microkernel OS of them all, PINK.
The IBM Power Personal Systems Division is introducing and demonstrating technologies featured on its family of personal workstations.  The Personal Workstations marry  the high-performance PowerPC RISC microprocessor with industry-standard PC components.  The PowerPC is featured with new human interfaces, integration of multiple operating systems environments on a single platform, and the latest in operating system, multimedia and collaborative computing technologies.  OEMs, IHVs and ISVs can explore how they can use these technologies.
Yeah, as we all know Windows NT for the PowerPC wasn’t a thing until late 1995, then killed off in 1997, Solaris saw a single release, MacOS stayed hybrid 68000/PowerPC until the acquisition of NeXT, and then was the basis of Rhapsody/OS X 1.0 and then OS X 10.0 . Â A/IX easily transitioned from the POWER to the PowerPC, while OS/2 only went as far as a limited beta, and PINK/Taligent just never happened. Â Although thanks to hard ware assisted virtualization (VT-x/AMD-V) it really didn’t matter as we can run pretty much whatever OS we wish at pretty close to native speeds. Â The line between Type-1 & Type-2 hypervisors has been blurred to the point of really not mattering anymore.
If anyone cares, I extracted the temperamental disk image as F93.ZIP
Ever get tired of x86 on x86? Â yeah me too.
How to solve that problem?
Simple, grab QEMU, and jump off into all those cool RISC processors of the 1990’s that were going to save us all from the WINTEL hegemony!
Lots of instructions, samples, images, and hints here:
https://gmplib.org/~tege/qemu.html
It’s really more comprehensive than I’ve sat down to do, so yeah it’s awesome!
Supported platforms include:
mips32,mips64,sparc32,sparc64,ppc32,ppc64,arm32,arm64,s390x,alpha
choices..
Well considering what a hit it was, the last time I did this, I thought I’d give it another go!
And after a bit of fighting, I got it to run!
Now what were the obstacles? Â Well for starters not having a full libc certainly hurts things. Â Things like a malloc. Â And without getting fancy with the memory map I did the lamest cheat ever, which is a 1MB static array I just handed out with a fake malloc (no free, I didn’t bother to track chunks), and you know it works enough.
Also I need to read files, and I need to look more into the hardware to see how to do that. Â There seems to be plenty of hooks for NVRAM, but the ROMMON substitute doesn’t seem to support them. Â Also there is no ROMMON hook for reading from the console! Â The MIPS cilo is more ROMMON dependent, while the PowerPC c1700 talks to the uart directly so this is a PowerPC thing for right now.
I also learned something exciting about ld, which is how it can absorb binary images into objects, that you can link and access directly into your program! Â No more having to convert it to hex, make these insane headders that CPP may or may not bomb over. Â No you can make them objects right away!
In this example I read the file planetfa.dat as BINARY, and encapsulate it in an object file called planetfa.o . It’ll now have a symbol name of _binary_planetfa_dat_start for where the image begins, _binary_planetfa_dat_size will tell me how big it is in memory, and _binary_planetfa_dat_end will mark the end of this ‘file’ in memory.
Now in the old days when it was a file I could access it like this:
fread ((char *)ptr,block_size,(int)num_blocks,game_file);
But that won’t work. Â So now instead of calling fopen/fclose (which don’t exist in CILO), I set a counter to what my current offset is, change the ‘fseek’ to just set the global counter to where it should be, and when I fread I just memcpy:
I suppose I could just have wrapped the f* calls into some emulation library but I don’t need to get all that crazy sophisticated.
Local UUID: 0450c178-6480-11e5-a559-019031cf957a
Pcap version [WinPcap version 4.1.3 (packet.dll version 4.1.0.2980), based on libpcap version 1.0 branch 1_0_rel0b (20091008)]
Unsure if this file (c1700_i0_rommon_vars) needs to be in binary mode
Virtual RAM size set to 4 MB.
IOS image file: ciscoload.bin
ILT: loaded table “mips64j” from cache.
ILT: loaded table “mips64e” from cache.
ILT: loaded table “ppc32j” from cache.
ILT: loaded table “ppc32e” from cache.
vtty_term_init
CPU0: carved JIT exec zone of 64 Mb into 2048 pages of 32 Kb.
C1700 instance ‘default’ (id 0):
VM Status : 0
RAM size : 4 Mb
NVRAM size : 32 Kb
IOS image : ciscoload.bin
Loading BAT registers
Loading ELF file ‘ciscoload.bin’…
ELF entry point: 0x8000d9c8
C1700 ‘default’: starting simulation (CPU0 IA=0xfff00100), JIT enabled.
ROMMON emulation microcode.
Launching IOS image at 0x8000d9c8…
CILO
CiscoLoader (CILO) – Linux bootloader for Cisco Routers
Available RAM: 4096 kB
Available commands:
queen
hanoi
horse
fib
planetfall
halt
Enter filename to boot:
malloc 64512 offset is 0 offset is now 64522
malloc 38912 offset is 64522 offset is now 103444
PLANETFALL
Infocom interactive fiction – a science fiction story
Copyright (c) 1983 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
PLANETFALL is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 37 / Serial number 851003
Another routine day of drudgery aboard the Stellar Patrol Ship Feinstein. This
morning’s assignment for a certain lowly Ensign Seventh Class: scrubbing the
filthy metal deck at the port end of Level Nine. With your Patrol-issue
self-contained multi-purpose all-weather scrub brush you shine the floor with a
diligence born of the knowledge that at any moment dreaded Ensign First Class
Blather, the bane of your shipboard existence, could appear.
Deck Nine
This is a featureless corridor similar to every other corridor on the ship. It
curves away to starboard, and a gangway leads up. To port is the entrance to
one of the ship’s primary escape pods. The pod bulkhead is closed.
Deck Nine Score: 0/4451
PLANETFALL
Infocom interactive fiction – a science fiction story
Copyright (c) 1983 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
PLANETFALL is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 37 / Serial number 851003
Deck Nine Score: 0/4451
>
For anyone crazy enough, you can find my MinGW Dynamips on sourceforge, cross compilers for PowerPC, and the branch of the firmware source that includes InfoTaskForce, and the binary image.
While I don’t want to write an OS for this, it is almost tempting. Â Or go the other route, and add in some non router based hardware… Like audio hardware, or a framebuffer.
Does anyone have a 1700 to test to see if any of this works? Â Or a 7200?! 😀
Continuing on from yesterdays adventure I built the PowerPC compiler to support the Cisco 1700 (and maybe the 7200 NPE-G2?).
Much to my surprise, this one works too!
Loading ELF file ‘../ciscoload.bin’…
ELF entry point: 0x8000cba0
C1700 ‘default’: starting simulation (CPU0 IA=0xfff00100), JIT enabled.
ROMMON emulation microcode.
Launching IOS image at 0x8000cba0…
CIL
Error: Unable to find any valid flash! Aborting load.
Awesome!
Building this was a lot more fun. Â I thought I could sidestep building a Linux to PowerPC ELF cross compiler, but as it turns out, to bootstrap libgcc, you really need a compiler that can do this. Â But with the steps basically down, it was trivial to whip up.
Although I did keep on hitting this error with the Win32 tools that “-mstrict-align” is not supported, while trying to build the startup and libgcc sources using the MinGW targeted compiler through wine.  But once I had a native Linux to PowerPC toolchain in place, not only could I build the Windows based compiler, but I can also use the flag -mstrict-align on Windows without it complaining.  So lesson learned, have a cross compiler built to the final target to make life easier when building a Canadian cross.
As always, building the binutils package was a snap, just run:
./configure --host=i686-mingw32 --target=ppc-elf -prefix=/ppc
and I had my assembler/linker/librarian in no time.
Because of the aforementioned -mstrict-align issue, I got more creative with the parameters for GCC.
./configure --target=ppc-elf --prefix=/ppc --disable-nls --disable-werror --disable-libssp --without-headers --disable-threads --build=i486-linux-gnu --host=i686-mingw32
But with the Linux to PowerPC cross compiler in place, I was able to quickly generate a working toolchain.
I copied in CILO, and added in a build batch file to manually build it, and updated the test directory to run it.
So for those who are interested here is my toolchains:
And a mirror on sourceforge of my cross toolchains, PowerPC and MIPS.
As a minor addendum, The 1700 can run stuff that is far more complicated than the MIPS. Â I’m not sure why I get so many TLB violations for doing something more complicated but I (poorly) ported aclock to run on the cisco 1700!
Aclock on the cisco 1700 via Dynamips
The Dynamips ROMMON emulator doesn’t provide the keyboard input function call so it can’t read from the keyboard. Â Also it can’t read the clock so I have it running 250,000 dhrystones between clock ticks. Â Although I think that is far too many, maybe 125,000 would be more like it but it runs on the PowerPC. Â While on the MIPS I get nothing but this:
*** TLB (Load/Fetch) Exception ***
PC = 0x80008964, Cause = 0x00008008, Status Reg = 0x00408103
Oh well. Â Maybe it’s a stack problem I guess I’ll have to break down and do a memory map and write a malloc if I want to go down this road. Â Although back in 1999 this would be incredible but today I don’t think anyone would run anything but IOS on their cisco hardware.
So I was hammering out something with SheepShaver (more on that later!) and I thought a quick test of just how fast SheepShaver is vs a real PowerMAC would be interesting. Â So I was playing with my old copy of SoftPC, which is 68000 based, but There were PowerPC versions, years ago when I bought a G4 to run OS X to only find out that it wasn’t supported (the dark days of OS X Server 1.0, before the 10.0 public beta) I used to run Windows NT 4.0 on SoftPC on MacOS 8.6. Â Ugh, dark times indeed!
So with some luck, I got SoftPC 3.0 up and running on MacOS 7.5.3 using SheepShaver for Windows. Then I noticed that unlike SoftPC for the 68000, SoftPC for the PowerPC emulates a 486! Â So how does DooM run? Â A little slow, it’s kind of dream like.
But since there is Windows and a 32bit processor, I thought this would be a great time to load up Win32s, Video for Windows, WinG, and WinDooM!
WinDoom on SoftPC
And much to my amazement it runs! Â And I was further impressed that there is a shim sound driver, and it works!
So I made a quick video to compare DooM for Windows vs DooM for MS-DOS on this setup.
Yes it’s pointless, but I kinda think it’s really cool.
As a bonus, here is E1M1 under MacOS 8.0. Â The MIDI support in 8.0 is MUCH more stronger than 7.5.3! Â And I should add, it actually feels faster on 8.0 than 7.5.3
It’s some progress!
I know it may not look like much right now, but Cormac O’Brien is working on bringing MacOS 9 support to Qemu!  This is really great news as Sheepshaver has painted itself in a corner with it’s CPU code that requires memory access to 0x00000000 which more and more operating systems deny.
So you can download the snap and follow the instructions here. And you too can watch it fail.
Starting to boot
During the boot you’ll see a message from MacOS on the CLI that it is unable to find a NVRAM partition. Â During this time you will either see a bunch of CUDA and IRQ messages, and there is a good chance from here it’ll progress to loading the New World ROM. Â If it gets stuck you’ll see tonnes of the following messages:
CUDA: read: reg=0xd val=00
CUDA: read: reg=0x0 val=30
CUDA: read: reg=0xd val=00
CUDA: read: reg=0x0 val=30
From here the screen should turn grey, and again it may or may not go to a happy mac, or again get stuck on the CUDA read 30/00 thing above.
New World ROM loaded
Once it goes New World happy mac, it’ll load MacOS then bomb over one of the extensions.
I tried some OpenBSD for the heck of it, the good news is the kernel loads and starts the boot, but it has some issues with either memory or mapping the PCI bus.
OpenBSD 5.7
OpenBSD 3.3
OpenBSD 4.0
And for the heck of it, Debian 5.0.0
Debian 5.0.0 installer
I didn’t bother installing but nice to see the installer CD runs fine.
The biggest feature of course is…
I’ve never used the PowerPC stuff before, I had a 68030 accelerator in my Amiga 2000 going back some 15 years ago, and I never could justify the cost for the board vs a new PC as the Amiga was so super fringe back then.
But for those who want to give it a shot, the installer is here, along with the PowerPC pluggin
All of the additional features are with the announcement here..
