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benkan

BeOS! Good memories. I tried out BeOS maybe 20 years ago until it was dropped. Is it still maintained?

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Haiku is an open source BeOS clone that is still developed, but the original isn’t

Thank you!

You might enjoy this piece I wrote at the start of the year.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/

You can use haiku os it’s the open source beos and even runs the binaries

But this requires a PowerPC processor under BeOS so you can’t use this with Haiku at the moment. The Linux version looks like it emulates the CPU so it can probably be made to work I guess?

>But this requires a PowerPC processor under BeOS so you can’t use this with Haiku at the moment.

Bold of you to assume a forum full of tech enthusiasts don't have PPC machines sitting around.

No, not really. It isn’t just PowerPC, it is a very specific and picky Mac, has PCI, is old world, has a 603 or 604 processor when shipped originally. If you have one, you then need a copy of BeOS R4.5 or R5, and getting that installed can actually be non trivial (as ActionRetro proved on YouTube - it was my custom pre built image that he finally got working.)

I have 2 BeOS PowerPC boxes, so yep - know all the hassles first hand.

If you do too - awesome, you should come find me on Haiku forums and we can contribute to the BeOS PowerPC preservation effort I started last year.

PowerPC was during my early childhood but our lines never met, so I would be one case where your assumption will unfortunately fall short.

By the time my family got a home computer it was a 120 Mhz Pentium system, but I spent basically all of elementary, middle and high school using m68k and PPC macs at school. During the pandemic i picked up two m68k Macs and 2 PPC Macs to satisfy my nostalgia. I enjoy playing with old tech, but theres nothing wrong if you don't! Different strokes and all that.

Ah, please don't get me wrong: I love playing with old tech too. The first computer I used was some 386 or 486 machine running Windows 3.11, it even had a turbo button and a 5.25" floppy drive. Really wish we still had that thing.

It's just my path never crossed PowerPC's, so I don't have the nostalgia for them that I do for classic x86 hardware. Regardless I'm sure they are an important piece of computing history.

Will BeOS PPC run on a POWER workstation like the Talos Raptor? That would be a hell of a combo...

Near as I can tell the POWER9 chips (at least the IBM ones) only have backwards compatibility through POWER7 from 2010. The last PPC chip Apple used, the G5, implemented the POWER4 ISA, so that's pretty far back.

Nope. It really never even supported G3 officially. It will boot on the BeBox natively an a Mac with a boot loader. Without modifying the kernel, I doubt it will boot on much else.

Haiku should be portable to it, but that's a lot of computer for an OS that is not daily-driver grade.

Haiku will never support legacy BeOS PowerPC apps though, as that makes no sense. PEF is hard to support even today.

It’s a shame, but it’d probably be easier in a VM.

There is also currently no way to even virtualize BeOS for PowerPC. I wish there was. The closest I have seen is a MESS that could boot and show the boot splash screen (this is a 3d Be logo on PowerPC, the one you see on Intel was only ever on Intel.) The dingusppc have BeOS as a possible target for their Mac emulation, but it is not there yet. I'm pretty sure QEMU can't boot BeOS because BeOS requires an old world ROM and it requires a PCI Mac with a 603 or 604 processor - so a 4400, 7300, 8500/8600, 9500/9600 and a few others (including clones) work - but nothing NUBUS and nothing post the first motherboard revision of the 8600/9600. The later x600's have a different motherboard and do not work. Nothing that shipped with a G3 and nothing with new world ROM.

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