ClassicHasClass
Well-known member
Aha. But nice to know they "just work" in 7.6. I bet the System7Today guys loved it. 
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Mac OS 8 - 8.6 -- Are you a Fan?
- Thread starter uniserver
- Start date
A bit late, but I've always loved system 8. I wish I could get my Sawtooth to run it; I know some sawtooth's can with a special build, but I've never figured it out.
8.6, I should say, is probably the best classic system. It doesn't have much if any OS X cruft grafted on to run in classic mode; yet it has most if not all of the features that 9 added. It has decent firewire, and carbonlib 1.6 runs, so carbonized apps will run. The font bug is about the only major bug I'm aware of, and it places nicely with big drives.
It's so much faster than 9, too. Much more "modern" than 7, though I can't deny I'd love to have a g4 machine running 7.6--it would fly.
Possibly apocryphal, but does anything speedwise beat system 6 on a ram disk on a Daystar turbo 040 accelerated IIci? Doesn't that cold boot in less than 1 second?
8.6, I should say, is probably the best classic system. It doesn't have much if any OS X cruft grafted on to run in classic mode; yet it has most if not all of the features that 9 added. It has decent firewire, and carbonlib 1.6 runs, so carbonized apps will run. The font bug is about the only major bug I'm aware of, and it places nicely with big drives.
It's so much faster than 9, too. Much more "modern" than 7, though I can't deny I'd love to have a g4 machine running 7.6--it would fly.
Possibly apocryphal, but does anything speedwise beat system 6 on a ram disk on a Daystar turbo 040 accelerated IIci? Doesn't that cold boot in less than 1 second?
HOMMII. Heroes of Might and Magic II runs on 8.6 but will not work on properly on System 9.x. The game will launch, and you can play, but if you try to save or load, it will crash.
This is a pain because my son (11YO) and I both like this game. I have a frankenized Umax S900 with 1GHz G3, but he has an 800 MHz iLamp and the iLamp won't run anything older than 9.2.2, so there's no way to play a networked game of HOMMII together. My old S900, of course, has boot volumes for 7.6.1, 8.6, and 9.1.
So, it's only one example, but there's one. Of course, HOMMII will run fine in 7.6.1 as well, so there's still not a lot of impetus to have 8.6, except.... I had a hard drive crash a while back, and I can't restore my 7.6.1 volume because I have a 7.6 installer and a 7.6.1 updater. So I have to run HOMMII while booted from my 8.6 volume until I can recreate the 7.6.1 volume.
When I try to instal 7.6 the installer tells me it won't run on this machine, because I soldered PM9600 Enhanced (Kansas) ROMs onto the S900 board. So it thinks it's a Kansas machine and wants 7.6.1 or better. I guess there must have been a direct 7.6.1 installer out there somewhere but I've never seen it. I can get around it by creating an installation on an older machine, but then I'd have to set up an older machine. Time....
Very cool. I've often wondered about that. Way back when, I spent a while replacing the Flash chips on Sapphire R7000 cards and flashing them to Mac compatible and selling them. The Radeon installer wouldn't install to anything older than 9.x. I just pulled the relevant extensions from 9.1 and moved them to 8.6 and found that it seemed to work fine. I never tried 7.6.1 though. I even had a little CDROM authored that I sent with a folder of the files one needed to use the card with 8.6.
If you have a PCI slot available in your 9500, get a Wired4DVD card. Unfortunately, they're not available from the manufacturer any more. A few years (more?) ago they were clearing out old stock at $15 each for new cards.
Ah, here we go. You might try emailing wiredinc.com at wiredinfo at wiredinc dot com and ask if they have any Wired4DVD cards left over. New, and current, they were about $100. After most machines had video cards that would playback DVDs the cards weren't so current any more and that was when the remaining stock went to $15. But they were great cards in their day. Hmmm. Looking at the dates, this web page may be a zombie, but it can't hurt to try.
Also, the Wired4DVD manual:
http://www.wiredinc.com/wp/pdf/Wired4DVD%20Manual.pdf
Oh, hmm. says the system requirements are 8.0 or higher. Drat. Well, maybe you can hack whatever library it wants into 7.6.1.
Okay, last edit. The URL for the manual led me to the order form for the card, from 2007. $19 not $15.
http://www.wiredinc.com/wp/pdf/wired4dvd_order.pdf
DVD play with a Wired4DVD card is fantastic. I guess that doesn't help if your movies are encoded in MPEG4 or something, but it solves the MPEG2 issue nicely. You need the little cable too, although one could be made. Actually, the ReelMagic card for PCs can be hacked into a Wired4DVD card, but I never found any way of doing it that doesn't involve actually copying the Wired4DVD Flash chip and soldering the copy onto the ReelMagic card.
Also never managed to hack the region change scheme. I can see the code change in the Flash with each region change, but I can't figure out what code or meaning they're using for each change.
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Before I had a son, I had more time for this kind of thing. I designed a 4-layer circuit board and built almost 200 Beige G3 ROM modules so that folks with Rev. A ROMs could upgrade to Rev. B or C and have Slave IDE support.
And I thought Trash80 was hard-core
All that experimenting with the ROM chips also led to things like hacking the Kansas ROMs onto other members of the PowerSurge family (x500, x600). Interestingly, the Kansas ROMs will even work in the 7200.
