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Comment by jdofaz | Hacker News Reader

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jdofaz·

I wonder if it actually needs OS9, PPC supported started (barely) in the System 7.1 era

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Yes, but lots of software made for PPC began requiring OS8, then 8.6, and then a bunch required OS 9 to run.

How far back did Carbon support go?

native mac os 8 and 9 applications could only be run under rosetta. they could be rebuilt to run under cocoa.

They required some Carbonization. Also then would run under Classic or Carbon. Rosetta was for Cocoa I think.

Rosetta was a PowerPC CPU emulator that allowed running any kind of PowerPC OS X application on Intel Macs.

Carbon was a set of largely OS 9 compatible APIs that allowed an easy transition for apps that could be recompiled.

Classic was a virtualized OS 9 environment available on OS X (up to 10.4 Tiger, PPC Mac only) that allowed running unmodified binaries for pre-OS X Macs. Most things that didn't require special hardware access or precise timing ran fine, but things like real-time audio and MIDI applications did not.

Not Rosetta, Classic

It's not that easy. Carbon is largely a subset of the classic MacOS toolkit APIs reimplemented in MacOS X to provide a migration path for existing application to MacOS X. IIRC carbonized applications commonly targeted version going back to MacOS 8.6 - 10.x with a single executable. From my unreliable childhood memories the next common range started at MacOS 9.0 (or 9.1).

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