Classic Environment vs Emulation.

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enryfox
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Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

Today I resurrected my old Mac Mini (1st gen from 2005, PPC G4 1,25 GHz, 1 GB RAM, ...) and installed a fresh copy of the original OSX 10.4; updated to latest release (10.4.11) and then installed the Classic Environment. This mac does not boot in Mac Os 9 (even hacking the ROM it does not boot anyway) and classic is the only option.

I tried some games both 68k (Monkey island 2) and PPC (Doom II, Duke Nukem, The Incredible Machine 3) and to my surprise, Basilisk II and Sheepshaver on my current iMac are much faster and more compatible! Duke Nukem does not even start in Classic while it plays fine (smooth and no stutter) in SS; Monkey Island 2 has some stutters in Classic while in BII it runs perfectly ... I thought Classic would execute the code almost at CPU speed as there is no translation (except for system calls) but either the Mac Mini is not a great performer (actually it wasn't even back in its days) or Classic has way too many bottlenecks.

Too bad I cannot try native Mac OS 9...

bye
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adespoton
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by adespoton »

Is that the original Mini with 2GB RAM? If so, then there's your problem :) You're running two operating systems in tandem, and have used up the memory. If you can upgrade it to 4GB, there will be a noticeable speed improvement.
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

Uhm, are you sure about the 4 GB memory support ?

It's the 1st gen of Mac Mini back from 2005: it was originally sold with 256 Mb and Mac Os X 10.3, but when I bought mine (July 2005) it was upgraded to 512 Mb and Mac OS X 10.4. In later years I swapped the ram module and plugged in a Pc-2700 1 Gb and that according to any specs is the maximum supported. I'm not sure it even exists a 2 GB or 4 GB module PC-2700 or PC-3200 on 184 pins format.

Anyway with both Os X and the classic environment loaded I still have more than 300 Mb of free memory which should be more than enough to play old titles like Monkey Island II (my basilisk II machine is configured with 256 MB and runs perfectly). It seems that stutters are related to sound playback..

I should try to run Norton benchmark and compare it to Sheepshaver results.

Too bad the mini is essentially useless these days: too old to run anything recent (tried web-browsing with tenFourFox and it is sooo sloooow), too recent to run natively anything mac OS classic.. I have used until 2014 as a download machine for torrent and eMule, but now HDD is too small for anything useful.

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kikyoulinux
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by kikyoulinux »

Mac Mini G4 was an iBook G4 in a box, of course without keybord and display . They used the same CPU and chipset.
I got an iBook G4 (1.07GHz, 1.25GB RAM, running Leopard) last month. I tried to run OS 9 on SheepShaver. But SheepShaver was extremely CPU hungry. So I installed an OS 9.2 natively on my iBook. I found that hacks were needed when installing OS 9.2 natively on unsupported G4s. There's a modified OS 9 iso in Macintosh Garden and a how-to guide in ThinkClassic.
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

kikyoulinux wrote: There's a modified OS 9 iso in Macintosh Garden and a how-to guide in ThinkClassic.
I saw the thread on Think Classic but so far nobody was able to boot OS 9 on a Mac Mini G4 ... They succeeded on slightly older machines, but the best you can get with a Mac Mini is a grey screen ...

I will try anyway the ISO and see what happens (hoping not to brick the mini) !

thanks
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Jorpho
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by Jorpho »

Has anyone looked into whether there are any components of Classic that BII can salvage, i.e. such that the need for downloading a ROM or a MacOS installation is unnecessary?

I suppose it's probably a bit pointless now since Classic is dead and buried.
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

enryfox wrote:I will try anyway the ISO and see what happens (hoping not to brick the mini)
As expected the ISO does not boot on the mini: just a grey screen in place of the boot progress bar ...

As for classic, it is indeed a full Mac OS 9.2.2 installation (with bundled applications): on older mac, the os 9 folder will appear as a boot option besides OS X and it will boot a fully fledged Mac OS. Classic is an OSX application that acts as a sort of wrapper and run MacOs 9.2 as a single process (it is called trueBlue). Not sure what Sheepshaver could take from classic, the approach is rather different ...

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Enrico
kikyoulinux
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by kikyoulinux »

Well, there's a virtual machine called Mac-on-Mac, a fork of Mac-on-Linux, allowing to run a Mac OS 9, Mac OS X Cheetah to Panther and Linux virtual machine on Mac or Linux host. It's a vm instead of emulator 'coz it requires a PPC host.
However, Mac-on-Mac itself does not run on Tiger or Leopard hosts.
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

After playing with Classics on Tiger I am a bit disappointed: it is a fresh install no extra extension or control panel but OS 9 keeps hanging with CPU spiking at 100%. It happens with full screen games (e.g virtual pool) and that is somehow expected, but it also happens with harmless old games (life and Death, 68k B&W); I have read elsewhere that classic on tiger was (well ...is) indeed barely usable and that it was much better in panther. My mini would run panther but I cannot find the original DVD to install it (it requires a custom 10.3.7 DVD) and my mini shipped with tiger.

bottom-line Classic Env vs Emulation - Emulation wins by a large margin.

bye
Enrico
airat78
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by airat78 »

Mac mini 2005 going with 10.3.7. Panther able to run mac-on-mac, which runs from OS 9 to 9.2.2. MOM runs fine but have some glitches.
TiddK
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by TiddK »

enryfox wrote: Too bad the mini is essentially useless these days: too old to run anything recent (tried web-browsing with tenFourFox and it is sooo sloooow), too recent to run natively anything mac OS classic.. I have used until 2014 as a download machine for torrent and eMule, but now HDD is too small for anything useful.
Have you tried running just SS and no other OS X apps on the Mini? If so, you may be pleasantly surprised by how fast Classilla runs - a version of Mozilla that gets its speed by effectively running the mobile version of the web within the Classic environment. I've tried it in OS 8.6 and 9.0.4 and it licks the pants off anything else like Opera or Internet Explorer. Never compared it with TenFourFox on a G4 though.
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

A couple of weeks ago I bought an iBook (snowwhite dual USB with a G3 500 MHz) and I have been running Mac OS 9.22, just for fun. Surprisingly, the iBook is much faster than Classics on the Mini, even with CPU intensive applications like doom, quake, duke nukem, the iBook leaves classics in the dust.

I have been using Classilla on the iBook as it is the most modern browser available (the iBook has an airport card supporting wireless b network at a whopping 11 Mbps with no security/encryption whatsoever) but it is essentially the old mozilla code with several back portings from more recent browsers. The most recent build is from 2013 and even back then it was not exactly cutting edge. TenfourFox is a fork of firefox and as such it is definitely more up to date.

I bough that specific iBook so that i will be able to install also OS X from the 10.0 beta to 10.3.. when I'm tired of mac OS 9.2 i will try the beginning of the unix-based era.

bye
TiddK
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by TiddK »

enryfox wrote:A couple of weeks ago I bought an iBook (snowwhite dual USB with a G3 500 MHz) and I have been running Mac OS 9.22, just for fun. Surprisingly, the iBook is much faster than Classics on the Mini, even with CPU intensive applications like doom, quake, duke nukem, the iBook leaves classics in the dust.

I have been using Classilla on the iBook as it is the most modern browser available (the iBook has an airport card supporting wireless b network at a whopping 11 Mbps with no security/encryption whatsoever) but it is essentially the old mozilla code with several back portings from more recent browsers. The most recent build is from 2013 and even back then it was not exactly cutting edge. TenfourFox is a fork of firefox and as such it is definitely more up to date.

I bough that specific iBook so that i will be able to install also OS X from the 10.0 beta to 10.3.. when I'm tired of mac OS 9.2 i will try the beginning of the unix-based era.

bye
You will be able to run OS 9 and OS X on that iBook, as it's dual boot.

Yes, I'm aware that TenFFox is more up to date than Classilla - what I don't know is whether the former is faster on a G4 running Tiger or Leopard (where it's very slow - and slower still on a G3) than the latter is on 9.2.2
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

Classilla on the iBook is rather slow, scrolling a page is far from being smooth and loading time is not exactly instantaneous.
Moreover is fails to render page on "modern" website such as tripadvisor (but I have to admit I changed the user agent to a standard desktop as the mobile version of sites is too small on a 1024x768 display) Moreover yesterday tripadvisor almost crashed the iBook due to a bombing of error messages regarding a missing encryption protocol; what surprises me is that even websites that should render properly on a vintage mac (e.g. macintosh garden) have minor glitches.
TenFFox did not have similar problems, but I re-shelved the MacMini as It is essentially useless and I can no longer do side-by-side comparisons.

bottom-line - the modern web is not for such old computers and even if it worked, I would not use them to enter sensitive data due to inherent lack of security in the OSes.
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adespoton
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by adespoton »

As long as you've got a recent TLS library on your old web browser, any 68k/PPC computer is actually much more secure on the modern Internet than a more modern machine -- this is due to the fact that the malicious software/landing pages that are out there only know about x86 and ARM architectures, so almost all attacks and exploits will completely fail on 68k/PPC hardware. Back when that hardware was common, attacks were more based on viruses and other attacks on the operating system and specific applications like MS Word. Modern cross-application attacks, heap attacks, browser exploits, etc. were written after people stopped using those architectures, so they were never targeted.

So as long as you've got Disinfectant running and don't load Word macros, there's not too much that can happen to you on your old machine, as long as your browser is using TLS 2.0 for its encryption layer (SSL is now being rejected by web servers due to it being insecure, as you found out).
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by TiddK »

enryfox wrote:Classilla on the iBook is rather slow, scrolling a page is far from being smooth and loading time is not exactly instantaneous.
Moreover is fails to render page on "modern" website such as tripadvisor (but I have to admit I changed the user agent to a standard desktop as the mobile version of sites is too small on a 1024x768 display)
There's your problem. Classilla only works by rendering mobile web pages or else it would - as you've found - grind to a halt trying to render desktop web pages.

enryfox wrote:bottom-line - the modern web is not for such old computers and even if it worked, I would not use them to enter sensitive data due to inherent lack of security in the OSes.
You're both right and wrong. Yes, the web has advanced way beyond the powers of such old computing devices; even the original iPhone is much more capable than a 68k or early PPC. However, as adespoton points out, no-one is making exploits for such old computers. His point about TLS 2 is interesting though : yesterday I was on a site that said it was about to reject browsers that didn't have it and offered to test the browser. Safari 5 will be rejected as it runs 1.x - can I upgrade Safari 5 to TLS 2, and if so, how?
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

I'm not a big expert on the subject of internet security, but relaying on what is called "security through obscurity" is never a good idea :)
What I'm most afraid of are websites which might still support old protocols to send sensitive data; old encryption protocols are easy prey of modern CPU and I hope almost no one still supports encryption which can be decrypted in a matter of minutes ...

Anyway browsing the web on an old 68k or PPC Mac is mostly pointless: the only reason to use a web browser on MacOS 9 is to head to on-line abandonware archives (macintosh garden) and download the software straight on the mac without having to go through usb key, floppy of complicated network sharing.
There are even limited resources in terms of help and support forums: try a web search with "mac os 9" as key and 90% of resulting links are for OS X.

It's fun to play with emulators and old mac's, but their only reason to exist today is to run the software they supported back in their days.

I'd like to try OS X 10.1 on the iBook, but it looks like any OS X prior to 10.3/10.4 is even more dead than Mac OS 9...

bye
Enrico
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adespoton
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by adespoton »

enryfox wrote:I'm not a big expert on the subject of internet security, but relaying on what is called "security through obscurity" is never a good idea :)
What I'm most afraid of are websites which might still support old protocols to send sensitive data; old encryption protocols are easy prey of modern CPU and I hope almost no one still supports encryption which can be decrypted in a matter of minutes ...
I'm a big expert on the subject of internet security :) When you get right down to it, all security is security through obscurity -- sometimes it's a case of not knowing which prime number to select, sometimes it's a case of not knowing a password. But the information always exists somewhere, or you wouldn't be able to validate it. The goal of security is to make finding the solution statistically so small that it is extremely unlikely someone would stumble on it, even if they know the obscuring scheme used and were actively trying to find it.

I see stats on hundreds of thousands of exploits and malicious files each day; I haven't seen a new piece of malicious software targeting PPC Macs since around 2010/2011. On the exploit side, I've seen a number of current exploits that technically affect PPC Macs, but once you've caused the buffer overflow, etc. you need to actually be targeting something -- and the ROI is so small that there's no reason for an attacker to go through the work to do that unless they have a specific target in mind. So a PPC Mac is currently more secure than a fully patched Windows box which will have 0-day attacks being tried on the up to date software continuously.
enryfox wrote:Anyway browsing the web on an old 68k or PPC Mac is mostly pointless: the only reason to use a web browser on MacOS 9 is to head to on-line abandonware archives (macintosh garden) and download the software straight on the mac without having to go through usb key, floppy of complicated network sharing.
There are even limited resources in terms of help and support forums: try a web search with "mac os 9" as key and 90% of resulting links are for OS X.
I browse the web on PPC Macs all the time; using mobile layouts, it is actually quite pleasant. The added benefit is that malware landing pages have no idea what to do with a PPC browser with a non-standard name. So it's a safe machine to use when investigating dodgier sites. Slower, but safer.

As for finding resources, there are still plenty of places with OS 9 support if you look for them; Google isn't really the best way to search though. Dmoz.org still returns good results, and even duckduckgo will return hits of useful archive.org archives and hits on sites like this one.
enryfox wrote:It's fun to play with emulators and old mac's, but their only reason to exist today is to run the software they supported back in their days.
They can also be used for other purposes, some of which I've pointed out :)
enryfox wrote:I'd like to try OS X 10.1 on the iBook, but it looks like any OS X prior to 10.3/10.4 is even more dead than Mac OS 9...
Er, I run OS X 10.1 on my MacBook Pro via emulation -- PearPC 0.4 Redscorp in a Wineskin runs it quite nicely.

Here's the current state of my "Runnable Mac Apps" folder. As you can see, I'm currently missing Mac OS 9.1, 9.2, OS X 10.0 and 10.5 PPC (and 10.5 x86 is broken with the current VirtualBox/MBP combination):

ImageApple Emulation by adespoton, on Flickr
enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

Wow, that's quite an impressive collection ! The icons themselves are really a nice touch.

I agree the ROI on targeting PPC mac is nearly 0; the problem is (I know it is extreme paranoia) if someone is targeting specifically you: using and old and insecure system makes the job pretty easy.
As an (odd) example, I'm using the iBook airport wi-fi card (it's there, why not use it ?) but OS 9 does not support any modern encryption protocol (not even the obsoleted WPA) so I set up an open guest network in my router to use only for the iBook. Any data is sent in the clear and it is there to be captured. Sure I could use the Ethernet (I would actually need a 30 meters cable) or one of those devices to turn Wi-fi into Ethernet, but the internal airport is free and no extra cables are required.

Personally I prefer to browse the web in a modern environment, so I do not have to worry if the page I'm opening will be correctly rendered. But anyway it's fun to browse the web on an old platform, you start appreciating those websites that do not shovel unnecessary Mb of data just to display a text articles; on the other hand, the speed at which pages are rendered sometimes remind me of the old 56k modem days even though the actual connection speed is hundreds of times faster. Not sure where the bottleneck is, the G3 CPU runs complex 3D games pretty fast and smooth so it should have enough horsepower to render pages quickly. Maybe the TCP-IP stack is not too fast and/or the rendering engine in classilla is not super-optimised and/or the bus speed is limiting memory access thus slowing the overall system.

What I mean about OS X 10.1/10.2 is that it seems Mac OS 9 has more recent versions of critical apps than those pre-tiger OS'es. When I tried tiger on the mac mini a couple on months ago, besides ten4Fox, the most recent version of apps supporting tiger is back to 2009~2010. I think that for Puma the best you can hope for is something updated in 2005; but that makes sense as OSX was an ongoing development and as new versions were released, the old one were quickly dropped.

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enryfox
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by enryfox »

As an update - I'm running Jaguar 10.2 on the iBook after having quickly tried puma 10.1 (too buggy) and I'm using Firefox 2.0 as browser.
Despite being last updated on 2005, it works decisively better than Classilla (latest version from 2013): several more pages are rendered correctly, https works better (after manually accepting certificates though) and it seems slightly faster. I thought Classilla was somehow using firefox code, but it appears it is still deeply rooted in the Netscape legacy it is based on and therefore, even if nominally more recent, its heart is quite old.

Jaguar memory footprint is three times MacOS 9, but overall it does not feel slower; actually having real pre-emptive multitasking, in several situations, jaguar appears faster than Mac OS 9 (e.g. you can actually do something else while copying files from a USB stick). Starting any MacOS 9 application under jaguar indeed kills the system, but maybe 256 MB is not enough for jaguar + classic.

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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by adespoton »

Yes, 256MB isn't enough to run both Jaguar and Classic on that system; too much memory is used. Make sure you upgrade to 10.2.8 and apply the security patches plus the third party time zone and NTP patches. I believe you can also upgrade a bunch of the BSD system on there using a combination of Darwin updates and MacPorts updates. It's a good idea to get a modern version of OpenSSL installed.
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Re: Classic Environment vs Emulation.

Post by airat78 »

I believe that the class environment kills the system, not because of the small amount of memory. On my Powerbook G4 with 768 mb RAM, going the same thing, when i'm starting audio intensive classic application it hangs all system, same thing but a much less often happens in other systems Tiger and Panther. But, guest Jaguar with 256 mb RAM in Mac-on-Mac works a very stable.
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