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MacintoshPi

github.com

199 pointselvis7034 comments

Amusingly, they didn't call it ApplePi and instead went with their (in my opinion) less intuitive name.

Anyway, I wonder how long before someone can get OS X (macOS?) to work. I'm sure the early big cat OS requirements are within the capabilities of beefier Pi units. I fondly remember making my first Hackintosh and accidentally wiping my Windows partition. If it can be done for only $40, very cool!

ApplePi would feel more for the Apple II to me

ApplePII?

Or PiMac. :-)

MacInPi

I think Apple’s trademark lawyers would be not amused by that at all.

Figured they would be more focused on the Hackintosh part than the trademark.

By good fortune the custom PC I had at the time was 100% compatible with 10.6 Snow Leopard, including WiFi and Bluetooth, by learning about tonymacx86. I've been on Apple ever since, both personal and professional.

"accidentally wiping my Windows partition. If it can be done for only $40, very cool!"

I'm sure it can be done for a lot less.

There is an existing ApplePi project which is an Apple ][ emulator on the Raspberry Pi.

This is a fun project, but at least for my uses is a bit hamstrung by SheepShaver's capabilities. Most of my desires/needs for Classic Mac OS are PPC-era, which rules out the use of the stable and generally capable Basilisk II… I'd need to use SheepShaver instead, which is ok but generally more crashy and has more shortcomings.

Beyond this project, there's a fork of QEMU that emulates a PowerMac G3 pretty well and is generally nicer than SheepShaver, but doesn't emulate a GPU properly and as such isn't suitable for some things (mainly games).

So for now I have a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 Pismo I pull out as needed, but it'd be really cool to have a full featured PPC Mac in a more compact form factor.

Given the similarities between a Gamecube and a g4-era iBook (down to the ATI 9200-Like GPU) I'm surprised nobody ever tried modifying Dolphin to boot up Mac Os Classic.

Now you made me look at Wikipedia and I'm more interested in the possibility of Mac OS booting on a Wii U.

I wonder if it would be possible to pass through an era appropriate graphics card to QEMU instead?

If one can dump the Mac VBIOS for an old PCI Radeon card and attach it to a supported motherboard, would it be possible to get the machine to use that GPU? Obviously the host system can't touch it since it's providing PPC code, but if it's all being handled inside QEMU itself it seems plausible enough

VFIO doesn’t work on emulated architectures. Maybe on Talos it could kinda sorta start, but then again, you’d have to build a contraption to physically fit old PCI into PCIe.

You could also start a reverse engineering effort for one of those old cards and emulate it properly in QEMU. Once done, it would be much faster than the original. It could be ready by the time my grandkids entered adulthood.

Out of curiosity, which Mac-only games are you interested in?

Personally I would play the Marathon series of games. Love the narrative and atmosphere of those games.

edit to add a link for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)

FYI: There's a modern source port for the Marathon series called Aleph One[1]. 60+ FPS support was recently added, so it's running better than ever.

[1] https://alephone.lhowon.org/

Just a smattering of shareware games that I played growing up that never got big enough to get modern ports. A more capable GPU could also be nice for having the emulator drive modern screen resolutions smoothly.

>which is ok but generally more crashy

So it is a fully accurate emulator. Why are you complaining?

(I'm still upset over my 7100av going pffft at day 3 of a 4-day Strata render.)

Hah yeah, the stability of the Performa 6400 and iMac G3 I grew up with was anything but stellar. SheepShaver feels more touchy than either though.

> it'd be really cool to have a full featured PPC Mac in a more compact form factor

Good reason to find a G4 Mac Mini: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/faq/differences-...

PearPC may be worth a try.

When I last looked the original dev wasn't working on it as much, but there is at least one fork that brings gets it working fairly well in the 64 bit x86 era.

The more interesting part of this project is the inclusion of BMC64, an emulator for various 8-bit Commodores that does not require an underlying operating system. (It uses VICE linked against circle-stdlib.) I guess it's made for people who need to do some writing in Word 5.1, and who play Bruce Lee during their breaks!

Interesting. Last summer, I followed the instructions on https://www.instructables.com/Making-a-Tiny-Mac-From-a-Raspb... to get a Pi-zero-based mac emulator up and running with Gryphel's Mini vMac (https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/index.html) - it looks incredibly cute on the 2.8 inch LCD. I notice since I built mine, they've now added SE and SE/30 variant front panel models too!

Anyone have any sense of the technical differences between this project and mini vMac?

Basilisk II supports color but AFAIK Mini vMac does not.

No, mini vMac runs in color just fine for me.

Called mine Classic-Pi http://galgot.hd.free.fr

Get it running on Emu68 and I will be interested: https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68

Previous HN discussion of Emu68: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114208

I so much wish to be able to use Classic Mac OS without all the jumps and hoops. Apple, please open source the darn thing.

What has become of the LISA source code? (It was announced to be just months from publishing a few years ago, but then everything went silent.) Does anyone know?

No Pi 4 support as yet.

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