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Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

Well, 3 actually, you missed the 68000 architecture.

I'm not sure it really matters, in the end. How often would people want to run PowerPC-era Mac software on modern hardware natively if they could? The HN audience will include a disproportionate number of people who do, so you guys aren't included ;-)

I haven't used a Mac in several years but it seems like the whole Apple mindset is more appliance like, that if you bought old software you just keep running it on the original old hardware, and given the problems with Microsoft's eternal backwards compatibility approach (applications and the OS bundling forever ancient code and keeping ancient interfaces around forever, and ending up with a disproportionate number of API calls numbered foo2, foo3, foo4ex), I'm not sure either way is strictly superior to the other. There are trade-offs with both.

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There are some universes where old software or hardware is still heavily used or valuable. One area where I dabble is electronic music. Sure there are lots of new things, but a 50 year old guitar is still a viable instrument, so why not a 30 year old synthesizer? So in this universe, some people go to great lengths to maintain software that supports these instruments. I have a Yamaha VL1. Released in the mid 90s, it was Yamaha’s flagship “tech preview” for waveguide physical modeling software. You could play the instrument and tweak some very basic parameters without a computer, but if you want to actually edit the modeling, you need the “expert editor” which requires MacOS System 7 and a direct serial MIDI port or Apples long gone “midi manager” software. I keep an old 68k laptop around for that purpose alone.

Korg released an audio DSP playground in a PCI card called the OasysPCI which never got OSX drivers, so I have a MDD PPC Mac to run that. There are probably better things running natively today, hey instruments are things that shouldn’t be obsoleted, since they all have their own sound. Most of the rest of the ancient software I run is run under Wine (which worked quite well up to Mojave, but became difficult when Apple killed 32 bit support) because Microsoft has done better at retaining backwards compatibility. So now I have a laptop permanently stuck on Mojave.

> How often would people want to run PowerPC-era Mac software on modern hardware natively if they could?

I think some creative people, e.g. writers, might like to be able to continue to run their favorite old word processors if they could. Every so often you'll hear about a writer who's still using Wordstar or WordPerfect or some other old software because they know it inside out and it does what they need.

Oh, definitely. I'm just wondering how many Mac people would want to run said software on new hardware, as opposed to using their old hardware.

Of course, using old hardware has plenty of disadvantages (the increasing scarcity over time as parts become impossible to acquire) but even now you can find power macs for cheap. Your average ebay listing is pretty ridiculous but I snatched a G4 ibook there 2 years back for $14 USD, essentially in like new condition.

Not PowerPC, but 32-bit programs are no longer supported since Big Sur - since they decided to no longer ship 32 bit libraries. There's software on the Mac that's 4-5 years old and cannot be run.

And it's not an academic one - a large percentage of somewhat older Mac-native Steam games don't even start.

> I'm not sure it really matters, in the end. How often would people want to run PowerPC-era Mac software on modern hardware natively if they could?

It includes much more recent software too. It seems like half the mac games on Steam are 32-bit binaries published before October 2019 that no longer run on modern versions of macOS.

4 if you count 6502 (Apple II).

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