A better classic than Classic.

[NJRoadfan]

Back in 2004 or so there was a short lived alpha quality port of the Mac-On-Linux virtual machine to Darwin platforms. I took a keen interest in it as my Aluminum Powerbook G4 could not natively run MacOS 9 and I had a program (Bernie ][ The Rescue, an Apple IIgs emulator) that wouldn't run properly in Classic. I managed to get it working and much to my surprise Bernie ran much better. Sound and graphics worked great unlike under Classic where the sound output frequently broke up. The sound output did require some work on my part. I hastily hacked in a CoreAudio HAL output driver (complete with multithreading!) into Mac-On-Linux that somehow managed to work (I had zero OS X programming experience at the time). Sadly this experiment was short lived. Tiger (10.4) broke the kext Mac-On-Linux required and the port was never updated.

There was a short lived attempt to add a GUI VM manager and native Cocoa video output (the port required X11 for video display), but it too didn't go anywhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Mac

Here it is in action on my Powerbook back in the Panther days:



One nice thing about this project is that it could run MacOS 9.2.2 without a problem, something Sheepshaver simply can't do. The alpha builds never ran OS X or MKLinux like the original Mac-On-Linux if anyone was wondering. Its too bad the project didn't continue, it would be a nice alternative for PowerPC users running Classic-less Leopard to run all their pre-OS X applications.

 

[Gorgonops]

It's sort of a shame that Mac-On-Linux seems to be a dead project. I actually got some real-world productive use out of MOL back in 2001. (To run Photoshop on a G4 Tower I inherited when our floundering startup laid off the website guy. Strangely it seemed far more stable inside MOL than it was when OS 9 was actually running the whole show.) It's almost enough to make me want to slap Linux on one of my G4 PowerBooks and see if it's even possible to use MOL in any capacity anymore.

 

[CC_333]

It's open source, right? This means the source code should be available somewhere, so maybe someone with enough experience could update it for Tiger/Leopard (or, how about this, port it to Intel! It would probably need lots of extensive, nontrivial work to do that, though.)

Also, I seem to recall that there was a project to run OS X PPC apps (sort of the "new" Classic") on Lion and above by coming up with an open source Rosetta equivalent.

If anyone has even minimal experience in these matters, maybe we could give this a try?

c

 

[NJRoadfan]

It's open source, right? This means the source code should be available somewhere, so maybe someone with enough experience could update it for Tiger/Leopard (or, how about this, port it to Intel! It would probably need lots of extensive, nontrivial work to do that, though.)

This isn't getting ported to Intel. Its a virtual machine, not a full blown emulator. In order to work, you have to load the included kext which rules out Rosetta.

http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/

Browsing the SVN, it looks like some work was done to get it working in Tiger.

The stillborn "Mac-on-Mac" can be found here

http://sourceforge.net/projects/maconmac/