OS on PPC

[The Macster]

7.6 is quite hard to locate

There's images of it floating around on the 'net, so it's not difficult to find either. 7.6.1 is definitely the way to go if you're using 7, though I would only use 7 on a 68k. The only issue with 7.6 is that annoying bug in the installer where you have to do an Easy Install and then manually remove the bits you don't want afterwards.

Ramdisk, perhaps?

How do you make a ramdisk?

 

[bluekatt]

i always prefer real apple pressed software over images who knows how clean those images are

 

[bluekatt]

Nobody will ever use more than 640mb of RAM.
-Bill Gates

Quadraman was correct - it's 640k

its a joke adjusted for current times

640 k turned in to 640 mb

 

[paws]

never tried that but i did run jaguar in 96 mb ram it was passable

can thelp to think that we are getting spoiled though used to be a time when 64 or 128 mb ram was a lot

these days its pitiful 512 is considerd a minimum

Nobody will ever use more than 640k of RAM.

-Bill Gates

That's "640k should be enough for everyone" (no 'forever') and he said it in the early 80's.

edit - a bit of searching show that he claims to have actually never said that. there are some attributed quotes on wikiquote's article.

 

[chris]

Ehh.. Less RAM, less OS feature development, less OS feature development, less hardware development. To keep the industry running you need to have both. That said, the modern OSen really could be trimmed a lot.

 

[Big Bird]

Rather than Mozilla, I would suggest WaMCom or iCab. IE 5, as others have suggested, is a possibility as well, but if you're used to Mozilla or prefer it, you may be happiest with WaMCom.

Owing to the unusual (and crippled) architecture of the PM 6200/6300 series, I've had the best luck with OS 8.6 (or 9.1 if you have the RAM, but I think 48 may be pushing it, depending on what and how many apps you want to run). Any version of System 7 on these machines is very unstable. OS 8.1 provides a lot of bug fixes and much more stability, but my experience has been that if you can push it all the way up to OS 8.6, you'll be a lot happier. Many of the previous posters are also correct regarding the PPC native code found in OS 8.5 and up. The PPC 603 processor, especially at 75 MHz, was a very slow and inefficient 68K emulator. You'll notice most Quadras will outpace the early 603 Power Macs running older, non-PPC native software.

My recommendation is downgrading OS 9.1 to OS 8.6. This will still let you support most applications that require OS 9.1 with the appropriate CarbonLib libraries, and has support for things like USB cards, if you have one in your Performa. With another model of Mac, my recommendation may be different, but I think you'd be happiest with this on your 6200.

 

[Maccess]

Nobody will ever use less than 640MB of RAM with Windows Vista.

-Steve Blammer.

There, that should be more suitably updated.

I had a finely tuned and tweaked 8.1 install on a Power Mac 7100, but I messed up something (tweaking finder fixer to adjust Finder RAM allocation). It was running with 8.1 for a t least three years.

I had to install 8.6 because I needed files in that computer and the 8.1 archive wasn't with me.

8.6 is slow compared to 8.1 on a Nubus PPC (that said I have 9.1 on an 8100/110). It also uses more RAM (26MB vs. 16MB).

You could get by fairly decently on 7.6.1 or 8.1.

8.1 has the advantage of supporting HFS+ (but please use HFS on the startup partition, even though it supports it 8.1 isn't very good at booting from it), lots of modern stuff: CarbonLib (old version though 1.0.4), OpenGL 1.2.1, Java 2.2.6, InputSprockets, Quicktime (5.0.5), etc.

The Finder utilities from Jerry Kindall http://www.jerrykindall.com/download.asp help speed up Mac OS installs.

For the 6200, I would use not more than OS 8.1 with complete patches such as OpenGL (which replaces some 68K code with newer PPC code), Game Sprockets 1.7.5, etc.

But if you can make do with 7.6.1, that would be better. You'll get faster performance.