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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

So how are folks doing "Classic Mac" development these days?

Was this done on real hardware? Are folks developing within simulators? Just curious what the Classic development experience is like today.

Sometimes I muse it might be fun to dabble, but then I look at that 9" screen and go "Um, nah."

For example, many folks do CP/M development, but almost none of them do it actually on a CP/M machine. I think that's similar for many retro projects.

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> then I look at that 9" screen and go "Um, nah."

System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 with its 9" screen and 68000 @ 8 MHz. It can run System 7. And then there's 200 MHz PPC machines with PCI and Ethernet and 64 MB of RAM and all that, which can also run System 7.

It's a lot more flexible than CP/M, that's for sure. It's surprising how far it stretches to the current day, without snapping. For example, the last time I played around with it in emulation, it was quite happy to drive my dual 1920 x 1080 displays in 32 bit colour. Sure, it'd be hard to find a '90s era card that could actually output that in a real Mac back then, but the OS has no problem with such resolutions, or multiple displays.

I actually have a small stack of Radeon 7000 64MB PCI cards in my basement, capable of driving two displays at (at least) 1920x1080 (up to 2048x1536, I believe).

I used them in Power Macintosh 9600s running (IIRC) System 7.6.

ATI never released a 64MB Mac version of the card — I bought the PC version, desoldered and replaced the flash chip with one large enough for the Mac-compatible firmware, and reflashed them.

> System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 with its 9" screen and 68000 @ 8 MHz. It can run System 7. And then there's 200 MHz PPC machines with PCI and Ethernet and 64 MB of RAM and all that, which can also run System 7.

System 7.5/7.6 have similar flexibility. It’d run on a lot of 68k Macs, and it’ll just as happily run on that 200Mhz PPC Mac you mentioned after it’s had a 400Mhz+ G3/G4 upgrade card installed (System 7 might able to do this too but I’m not certain). Of course this CPUs are bottlenecked by the bus speeds of that hardware, but the gap between the power available and power required without virtualization/emulation is kind of wild.

> but the OS has no problem with such resolutions, or multiple displays

I don't recall the resolution, but there was a weekend where I was able to play around in a lab with several Mac IIfx machines. I was able to get one machine with a full set of video cards and arrange the monitors in 5 of 8 faces octagon and play a flight simulator where it could map different monitors to different viewing angles. So I had the front view, front angles, and shoulder views. It handled it with no apparent problems.

One of the machines that my father used was a IIfx that had a 32 bit color primary monitor, and then a 2 page 16 gray scale (that thing was monstrous) and a 1 page 16 gray scale monitor to either side.

https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-two-page-monochrome-dis...

Hello! MacDock creator here. As another person posted below you can see some of the development details on the two tinkerDifferent threads (one was the study group one and then after I felt my posts were too much of the convo I made a new thread). Anyway i did it mostly on my physical SE (upgraded with an SE/30 motherboard before I started programming and I will say compiling is much faster on that). I admit I did some of it in an emulator but I was interested in giving my machine and awesome M0116 keyboard some real use. Its been awesome fun!

Have you considered sharing this on AmendHub? I'm still trying to come up with a fun project idea to implement and share there.

Hadnt heard of AmendHub. Will check it out

This app started from our retro programming study group[1] where we're going through the 1992 book "Macintosh C Programming Primer" (come jump in anytime!). Some of us are using real machines (we collect them, also I'm working with SCSI so I need real hardware) or you can grab a premade image and start coding. There's also gcc cross compiler Retro68[2] where you can develop on a modern machine.

[1] https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/study-group-0-getting-yo... [2] https://github.com/autc04/Retro68

jcs has a very nice series of Classic Mac programming videos, he writes programs in Think C 5 on System 6, on real hardware: https://jcs.org/system6c

He even made a version control system for the Mac called Amend, and a website to share Amend repositories, called AmendHub!

I'm also working on my Mac Plus under System 6, but I haven't finished any projects that I could share.

This shows how advanced the Macintosh was for its time. I've tried using an Apple II for modern development, but it's too antiquated for that. The Macintosh, released just a couple years later, still seems contemporary by comparison.

Glad to see new programs being released for System 6!

> still seems contemporary

https://i.imgur.com/s8Zk7on.jpg

The similarity is pretty amazing.

If you can live with cross-compiling from a modern PC (or Mac) you can use https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 which uses a recent version of GCC.

MPW is probably the way, it emulates just enough to run the classic build tools on OSX

https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbo...

Ha - I love doing CP/M development in turbo pascal on my kaypro. It's shockingly usable with a 9" 80-column display, and no distractions. The edit-compile-run debug loop is somehow on par with doing it in simulation (usually a couple of seconds).

Quadra 700 with a Radius Pivot display :P

I have a Quadra 950 with plenty of RAM and a 100baseT network card.

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