Stupid Intel Mac
Some people say that Apple is a bad company because it doesn’t provide enough backwards compatibility. Let’s think about that for a minute. 68000 -> PPC chipset transition. Invisible emulation mode provided. OS 6-9 -> OS X transition. Visible OS mode provided. Me running a program I built for an operating system that hasn’t been sold for 10 years by double clicking the app Icon? Priceless.
Too awesome. Unfortunately I do not believe that OS X 10.5 will run OS 9 and even if it did, I have to believe that it doesn’t emulate the 68000 chipset. Of course the main reason they dropped that was the PPC -> Intel transition. *sigh* Maybe I won’t upgrade quite yet. I still love my G5.
May 7th, 2008 at 23:36
Hey Alain, apparently my dad still kept using this until he retired!
May 8th, 2008 at 07:17
That’s great that he kept using it! It was a fun program to write.
May 8th, 2008 at 09:40
That is pretty damn awesome.
Did I ever tell you about spending a month or so hacking into a 1993-ish Lisp Tutor app written in MCL? I think that was in 2006. I actually had to use the Pismo, because it wouldn’t run properly on the G5. Those crazy Lisp people, and what they did to try and run efficiently on machines with 4 MB ram…
The most commonly recommended way to run Classic on Intel is SheepSaver. I haven’t tried it, but it gets mentioned a lot.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:41
Alain - Yeah it was fun. What amazed me was that he kept using it even after he switched to OS X. I also found the Thane code, but due to fork splitting I wasn’t able to run it.
Mike - Yeah, I haven’t been to Emulation.net for a while. Their schtick was always that the PPC allowed for extraordinary emulation, so I figured it would all be over with the Intel macs. Looks like there are a number of 68000 emulators, and the one PPC (SheepShaver the only way to say that name) that run on intel. I wonder if you could run the native 68000 emulator in OS 9 in SheepSaver? I suppose you would be better off just running the old emulator directly. Now if I can only figure out how to merge my resource forks with the application they came from…