Slashdot Mirror

What lot of people is that? Anyway the people that made Rosetta for Apple was Transitive Corporation which was acquired by IBM. The product doesn't exist anymore. Talk to IBM if there are a lot of people willing to pay for PPC applications.

As far as classic: http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/

Or you could run SheepShaver, as long as you don't mind being limited to System 9.0.4 or earlier.

Apple should offer legacy support back to Classic, at least, with full 68K/PPC support - there's a tremendous amount of excellent software that was never brought to OSX

Basilisk II does a really great job of supporting Classic MacOS 68k from MacOS 0.x to MacOS 8.1 and Sheepshaver is capable of supporting PPC MacOS 7.5.2 thru 9.0.4. If you want, there's even the vMac project and its more portable and actively developed spin off Mini vMac which allow you to emulate the old Apple Macintosh Plus...

What exactly is it you think is missing?

Apple should offer legacy support back to Classic, at least, with full 68K/PPC support - there's a tremendous amount of excellent software that was never brought to OSX

Basilisk II does a really great job of supporting Classic MacOS 68k from MacOS 0.x to MacOS 8.1 and Sheepshaver is capable of supporting PPC MacOS 7.5.2 thru 9.0.4. If you want, there's even the vMac project and its more portable and actively developed spin off Mini vMac which allow you to emulate the old Apple Macintosh Plus...

What exactly is it you think is missing?

Remember SheepShaver, and the like in PPC days?

With Intel as a common denominator since 05, I was always wondering why GNUStep hooks to run Cocoa apps weren't being developed.

Well, now I guess they are. I wish it'd have been done, back when I tinkered more. :-)

I played through PiD on basiliskII a few years ago. the graphics are...well, just think of them as cel-shaded. :-P It does look notably better than Wolfenstein 3D, and is much more immersive imho.

The story and some of the puzzles were very impressive. I liked the scarcity of ammunition and special items.

When they abandoned Classic they made it so that a tremendous amount of software is no longer useable and will die out.

You can still run a lot of those Classic Mac OS X apps, here's some links for you:

We are stuck on PowerPC because of an old PowerPC only application, that all of our data is in

You should take a look at PPC emulators for x86. I've actually been playing with SheepShaver on my Windows box and it emulates a PPC well enough on my core 2 duo that I was able to pack up my old PPC Mac systems and run the software I need in there. I'm running Mac OS 9.2.2 though...I have no clue how well it would run OS X. IIRC PearPC was supposed to be better at running OS X when I was reading up on it.

It was a bit of a pain to get it setup initially. The Windows version of the emulator is available here. You also need a working Mac OS ROM image, which you have to find online or dump from one of your PPC Mac systems. There's an excellent torrent available called "Mac Emulation Kit" which contains a lot of good files you might want to get started.

This is really a diversion from the real application: Chrome OS with an advanced integrated Wine implementation.

All the goodness of Linux with a measure of "backwards compatibility" - because that is what general users want.
General users like the idea of Linux, but fear they will have to learn something new (OpenOffice is _so_ much different than MSOffice of course...).

I still remember fondly the Slax "Kill Bill Edition" back from 2005 - it had some wine integration.
The new target for Linux though is OS X, especially for Ubuntu.(see purple theme 10.04).

So what does it take to have a Mac-Wine equivalent? To run all those Mac and Hackintoshed programs?
quick search turned up these possibilitites: (http://www.puredarwin.org/, http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/, http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/)

old and older. I still play Spaceward Ho! (version 4) in Basilisk, on Linux. It's the fastest 68k Mac I've ever owned!

old and older. I still play Spaceward Ho! (version 4) in Basilisk, on Linux. It's the fastest 68k Mac I've ever owned!

Have you considered SheepShaver? It runs under linux and supports up to OS 9.0.4. I don't know how it would handle whatever I/O port you're using though.

You would be wrong. C64 code is far more portable than Java is or likely ever will be. Here is a list of some of the platforms that C64 can be run on use the C64 VMs Vice and Frodo:

* MS-DOS
* MS-Windows
* Acorn
* BeOS
* QNX
* OS/2
* Solaris
* SCO
* Amiga
* Mac OS X
* GP2X
* GP32
* SkyOS
* Minix
* Atari Mint
* HPUX
* RISC
* EPOC
* Zaurus
* Dreamcast
* Windows Mobile
* PalmOS
* MorphOS
* PSP
* Gameboy Advance
* Wii
* Linux
* XBox
* PS2
* Java
* And the list goes on.

All of these run C64 'byte code' exactly the same. It really is write once run anywhere. The fact that there is a C64 VM for Java means that no matter how many platforms Java is ported to, it will never equal the platforms that C64 is ported to. But even dismissing that, the number of platforms that run the C64 VM still dwarfs the number of platforms that Java runs on.

You can see similar lists if you check out Atari 2600 or NES VMs. Heck, ScummVM probably runs on more platforms than Java.

There is a port of the Basilisk II classic Mac emulator for Mac OS X. There is a universal binary although it doesn't work in '040 mode on Intel CPUs. The site recommends running the PPC version for this.
Intel Mac running PPC Mac code via Rosetta to run an emulation of a 68k Mac. The mind boggles.

You can download Basilisk, which is a pretty good PowerPC emulator.

I remember playing around with Basilisk at one point, and seem to remember there being a utility to read HFS file system disks.

Then again, I'm finding it difficult to open my old Macwrite documents (from 1992) on my current iMac because the old Macwrite format isn't supported...

The Asahi beer hall in Asakusa, Tokyo. Designed by Philippe Starck, it's meant to be a cloud.

"Hi kids!, Today's Japanese phrase is 'Kin no unchi', which means 'The golden poop'." Since this is how the Japanese refer to the building, you can tell they see it the same way.

Apple goes out of their way to ensure compatibility my a** look at how then dropped class form lintel systems and they don not want to help Sheep Shaver run os 9.2.2 as it only works up to 9.04 and that is only way to Classic on Intel Macs.
http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/projects/sheepsh aver
http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/

... for a used C64.

There are quite a number of those wonderful things called emulators :

http://frodo.cebix.net/
http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/
http://www.viceteam.org/

and even a Java one (in fact, it's an applet) : http://www.dreamfabric.com/c64/

Don't forget Aleph One, the enhanced source port based on Marathon sources. It supports OpenGL, large amount of different hardware platforms and operating systems etc. They also host all the necessary data files for Marathon, Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity.

That's a good point. I believe that (thankfully) the lowered barriers that virtual machines create hasn't significantly impacted virus development.

Sheepshaver and PearPC have been available for about a couple of years now. Performance issues and inconveniences aside, virus devs can easily *try* to write viruses for Mac OS X, and yet nothing's really come of it.

Maybe virtual machines are facilitating more virus devs using Linux to create viruses on VMWare'd Windows installations. :)

I still go with the age old adage of "You have to learn how to crawl before you can walk" or maybe it's walk before you run, look before you leap? Whatever....

Anyway, I'd say someone should start small and work their way up to the more modern languages. So my suggestion would be:

1. First learn something like the Apple ][+.

1a. Learn Applesoft and maybe some DOS 3.3 or ProDOS assembly. This will make you thank god someone came up with floating point math processors and disk drives that don't require knowledge of how to time when to read/write something to a disk drive.

2. Then learn something like the Apple //gs, Atari, or Amiga.

2a. So you can learn that color really makes a difference. Here you can learn Pascal, about compilers, and the like.

3. Then try the Macintosh and try out Windows.

3a. And ask yourself why Apple, after going all the way to the //gs with color suddenly decided that black and white was all the rage. You can also learn a lot about structured programming, handles, Pascal, C, FORTRAN, COBOL, and lots of other useful information.

4. Then try Linux and you will go - why didn't everyone go with this to begin with? You can also then learn OOP, C++, Ruby, Python, PHP, and everything else.

If you give six months to each of the above you will be a lot better off knowing why some of the things that are still drawbacks to OSs are still in there. Some are just carry-overs from yesteryear. The important thing though - is that you will at least have a grasp of the "why" certain things happen like they do. (Or maybe at least you'd have a hint as to the why.)

For languages I'd say Applesoft Basic first, then maybe QBasic (which I hear is now free from Microsoft), then FORTRAN (to learn the separation of variables into float, int, etc...), then Pascal (to help with the structuring), then C, then C++, then into Python, Ruby, whatever.

The thing is - if you do not get the basics, then you wind up like the System Programmer I once met. Didn't even know how to make a cursor move on the screen. "Duh....the terminal does that. I can't control what it does." Ever hear of ASCII control codes? "Nope. What are they?" Ever hear of the curses routines? "Nope. What are they?" Yeah. System's Programmer.

Or you get the System Operators who were running the computer at a company I used to work with. They were running a program that slowly but surely gobbled up all of the memory on the system and then the computer would crash. (This was a mainframe system with something like 10GB of memory on it back in the late 1980's! Although at the time I think they referred to it as 10,000MB of memory. Each person on the computer gobbled up 100MB each because of the program they were running and there were 300 people who kept trying to use the program.) I went over, looked at what they were doing and told them to run a program (which was in their manuals) that would recover the memory let go by programs. "We can't do that," they said, "it might crash the system." I looked at them and said "And the alternative is....?" They wouldn't do it and so I just went "Well, it's not my system so crash away!" They did - on a daily basis. Sometimes two or three times a day. Their solution? "WE NEED MORE MEMORY!"

I still have a Comodore 64 in the basement (alas since 15 years, or so) and I finally managed to emulate a C64 on my Nokia 9300 (And if I can finally figure out the German key mappings I oughta be able to play my favorite games from 15 years ago).

So what I wanted to say: You're an insensitive clod, you...

Try Basilisk. It's a GPL'd 68k Mac emulator, so should be able to run all of your classic Mac OS programs (up to a point), and should be able to work on the new intel macs. PearPC does PowerPC emulation but not sure how fast it will be for classic games. I'm not so sure how fast Basilisk will run as my last experience of a Classic Mac was a 68k performa which most systems should be able to emulate without any problems at all.

What you need is an emulator, e.g. Basilisk II

I had an Amiga (also a 68k processor), and there was some company back then that sold a board that allowed you to take ROMs out of a dead Mac and put them on their board, and then you could boot Mac OS up as a task under AmigaDOS.

When they release OS X for x86, you can expect a huge jump in marketshare from the current ~2%, simply because people will be torrenting this thing like crazy. (as if they aren't already)

Some years ago I actually dumped my ROMs from my Ebay Mac IIcx before I scrapped the thing. I cut off the ROM chips with a dremel tool and have them in my desk drawer even now. I have fooled around with the Basilisk ][ macintosh emulator using my ROM dump and I must say its pretty nifty. I actually used it to read a Mac CDROM in my PC and copy a datafile over to the hard drive.

I'd gladly install OSX on my PC if I could purchase it at a reasonable price. I've always admired Apple software, its simply a matter of economics in my case.