System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4
94 points
2 hours ago
| 7 comments
| macos9lives.com
| HN
k310
26 minutes ago
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> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2.

I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry.

It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff.

Hypercard scripters did cool things that most users don't do today. And without those monster data centers.

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geerlingguy
3 minutes ago
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Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.
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nxobject
4 minutes ago
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A fun "do-it-yourself" question for people who've always wanted to learn about the baroque architecture of the PowerPC Mac and the classic Mac OS: where is hardware support for specific models implemented?
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ayaros
11 minutes ago
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I have an iMac G4 1.25 GHz. Originally, it was a 1GHz, but I swapped out the motherboard for a later model. For a while I've been wondering if I would had been better off with an earlier motherboard capable of booting OS 9 natively. Compared with using OS X's classic mode, this would omit the overhead of running a whole other OS and leave me with more resources to run OS 9 apps and games. I don't get a whole lot of use out of the earlier OS X software that I have on there...

Maybe in the future I won't have to make that choice! I'd much rather dual boot OS 9 off a different partition, but that hasn't been supported on the 1-1.25GHz models (Thanks Steve...) and no one has gotten it working properly. Maybe now it will be possible! A man can dream...

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65a
1 hour ago
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StarMax series (and the 4400) seemed to be about as close to CHRP as we got. My off-brand StarMax clone (PowerCity) had a PS/2 and an ISA port. Ran BeOS well, and had a quirk that I could hear a tight loop on the speaker.
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rogerrogerr
1 hour ago
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Misread as “Mac mini M4” and was going to be _very_ impressed.
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leoh
26 minutes ago
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Honestly this is still pretty insane.
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gnerd00
2 hours ago
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yes, multiple Macs within arms reach right now!

++ BBEdit

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mrcwinn
2 hours ago
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One of my early Macs was a Performa 638CD with no dedicated FPU. I had upgraded to a Performa 6400 (which felt like an absolute dog despite its size) but finally had an opportunity to move to the PowerComputing PowerTower Pro 225. What a beast! I hate to say it, but it was probably my favorite Mac I'd ever owned before the first iMac.
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kev009
1 hour ago
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The Megahertz wars in the 1990s made it really difficult to understand relative performance across even the same ISA like this, and I think computers with the 603 CPU were a bit of a wrench in people's perception of the Mac.

The 180 or 200MHz 603e with 16k L1 cache in that Performa 6400 wasn't slow by any stretch, but it probably didn't have L2 cache. Coupled with the gradual transition to PPC native code of the OS and apps, these machines were often a little mismatched to expectations and realities of the code.

Meanwhile that PowerTower had a 604e with 32/32k L1 and 1MB L2 cache. That was a fast flier with a superscalar and out of order pipeline more comparable to the Pentium Pro and PII.

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mrcwinn
47 minutes ago
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Oh believe me. I owned it. It felt slow even at the time.
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burnt-resistor
1 hour ago
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Yup. Recall the far better cycle efficiency of the 100 MHz hyperSPARC.

Consumers didn't grok cycle efficiency, pipeline depth, or branch prediction miss pipeline stall latency.

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E39M5S62
47 minutes ago
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I have a PowerCenter Pro 210 in my basement right now! It's not quite as nice as the newer architecture in the PowerTower Pro machines, but it runs MacOS 7.6.1 wonderfully. It is more than enough for classic Mac games of that era - and a joy to use.
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im_down_w_otp
14 minutes ago
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The later PowerCenter Pro’s could run with a 60 MHz FSB whereas the PowerTower Pro’s were usually 45-50 MHz FSB. There are a variety of tasks where my PowerCenter Pro 240 outruns my PowerTower Pro 250 for precisely that reason.
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