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Mac OS X Panther On A 25MHz Centris 650

Posted by timothy on from the quaalude-vending-machine dept.

Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."

7 of 499 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yay! by DarthBart · · Score: 3, Informative

    No. Just spend $70 and get yourself a 256 or 512Mb stick of ram. You'll thank yourself.

  2. Re:Cheating? by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Informative

    What's the difference? The first PowerPCs used a (hardware) emulator to run virtually ALL software, since nothing was native at that point.

  3. Re:Very simple question... by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why?

    For those who haven't bothered to mouse-over that foot icon attached to the story, it's indicates that this story has been attached to a category known as "It's Funny. Laugh". That's the reason why this story made Slashdot.

    Why this was done in the first place? Dunno...

  4. And on the other end of the mac spectrum... by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 5, Informative

    VT has officially got the BigMac up and running faster than ever at 12.25TF with 1150 dual 2.3Ghz XServes.
    Check out the announcment.

    I wonder how many Centrises that equates to...

    --
    "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
  5. Re:Cheating? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
    Yeah, back when Apple moved from m68k to PowerPC, the OS had software emulation for m68k code. Initially, most of the OS was compiled for the m68k series (the main exception being the core code, including the emulator), and as a result, the new hardware seemed slow. Newer and newer versions of the OS had more and more PowerPC native code, and that made the whole thing run faster and faster.

    They were only able to do this because PowerPC was so much faster than the old m68k. Had the speeds been comparable, it wouldn't have worked. But then, had the speeds been comparable, it wouldn't have been necessary, either.

  6. Re:Very simple question... by Drishmung · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, no. Right mountain, wrong climber.

    --
    Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
  7. Aleph One by interactive_civilian · · Score: 3, Informative
    For those Marathon fans who don't want to keep around a lot of old equipment, head over to source.bungie.org and download Aleph One, which is the updated Marathon engine. It should work just fine with your Marathon 2 and Infinity files. Then you can go here and get all of your Marathon 1 goodness for Aleph One.

    cheers. :)

    --
    "Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks