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You little beauty, someone based on this side of the pond for once! I'll be in touch in the next few weeks to try and get the best example you have over to Dublin for a dedicated Ambrosia Shareware / Legacy Audio Software machine.

I nearly considered something like this a few years back but the domestic market was way too small to consider. Fair play for the labour of love.

I am actually based in USA, but Shopify automatically localizes the site for visitors in other countries, so maybe you saw localized currency. Sounds like a cool project and yes a lot of people getting this to use old audio software or play Escape Velocity.

How hard is it to get those hacks working for the higher resolutions on the 64mb video card (1.5ghz version)? Is the extra 32mb video ram noticeable in games, or does it not even matter in OS9?

It can be a challenge under DVI->HDMI. People have had more luck under DVI->VGA. It also can vary from monitor to monitor. There is a long thread on the macos9lives.com forums about this issue:

https://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=7048.0

If you are concerned get a 1.25 or 1.42. The 32 MB of VRAM difference (the 1.5 has 64 MB of VRAM while the 1.42 has 32 MB) will not make a difference for almost any Mac OS 9 game. But yes, if you want the ultimate in terms of GHz and VRAM go for the 1.5. In some late '90s and early '00s FPS games it could be a benefit.

I love this site. So simple, so effective. Thanks for putting these Minis out there at fair prices!

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.

I did the same with a G4 Mac Mini. One suggestion for your hobby/business-- I went with a PATA->m.2 SATA adapter instead of PATA->mSATA. It works like a charm and when I built mine a couple years ago it was actually much cheaper. Obviously it completely saturates the PATA interface.

I ran 10.4 and Void (no longer maintained) so if there's a technical reason to stay on mSATA for Mac OS 9 please ignore. ;)

Can you link me to the specific adapter you're using? The thing is after doing so many, I know the adapter I use is compatible and has no issues. I buy now direct in bulk over AliExpress but here is the equivalent Amazon listing: https://amzn.to/40fohWR

I looked back at my eBay history. It looks like I bought it way back in 2021, longer ago than it feels... They don't have a brand, and the listing is long gone, but here is the description on my invoice:

2 Pack M.2 NGFF SATA SSD to 2.5 inch IDE 44PIN Converter Adapter with Case Unit price $17.98

I did a Mac Mini and also a Powerbook G4. They work great in both.

How fast do modern SSDs die in older systems without TRIM?

I am yet to hear about 1 dying from a customer. But I can't give you a scientific answer to that and I've only been doing this since April. There's a whole community of people doing these upgrades. You can find them at https://macos9lives.com

That's where the hacked Mac OS 9 comes from and there are threads about Mac mini SSDs. There are also threads at https://68kmla.org

I would ask there.

This is the patch that I wrote to make the “Mac OS ROM” file bootable on the mini. The original development happened at MacOS9Lives. Anyone interested in Classic Mac OS hacking is very welcome to join us at #mac68k on Libera.

https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi-patches/blob/master/macmi...

Most good/modern SSD's should have built in capabilities for at least the bare minimum of garbage cleanup

Is this actually enough? I've never been able to find a clear answer on this - it's become increasingly common to install SATA SSDs in retro game consoles, for example, but nobody seems to have ever done any testing to see if the functionality on newer SSDs is adequate to handle systems without TRIM support.

You used to hear all kinds of horror stories about people who threw a SSD into their PS3 and found their whole system grinding to a halt within a year.

While a year of lifetime would suck, does it ultimately matter? This is old equipment not used for anything critical in the context of the discussion in this thread.

It only matters insofar as it has the potential to cause people some annoyance down the line which they'd likely prefer to avoid.

People don't tend to want to have to actively maintain their old tech any more than they absolutely have to.

Oh absolutely, do not disagree.

Though I do think that if one is using old tech, they should be aware of the pitfalls. There was a good run of the capacitor plague, for example. I avoid this equipment in general as I don't have soldering skills (but man oh man, I would love to have a working SE/30! People trying to sell repaired SE/30s on eBay for $1400USD!) to repair them. I know the VRM on my G4 Cube can potentially have issues, as can the power brick. Fortunately there are small batch available replacements should I need them.

It’s still cheaper than actually having pay for the games that’s going unpaid for with these systems, so it all comes out in the wash for the user

Can you work around it by massively overprovision by partitioning the drive and leaving half of it unallocated? The amount of space you need for an older system like this should be tiny compared to modern storage.

That works as long as you prepare the drive on a machine that does support TRIM, to ensure the unpartitioned area gets TRIMed one last time before the drive is moved to the old machine. Then it should remain in that state as long as it's never written to.

Even if you didn’t do that, I wouldn’t expect the partitioning to write to the unallocated space. If you start with a fresh drive I’d think it should work.

Yes if you trim it after making that partition and system correctly informs SSD about empty space. Secure Erase before making partition would be the safest bet - that way SSD firmware has full control over free unallocated space.

While internally managed garbage collection is less efficient than TRIM managed, it's significantly better than unmanaged.

"Enough" is a relative term and is up to you to decide. The alternative is significantly less performant coupled with unpredictable reliability (outside of expensive enterprise options), but a higher overall lifetime.

How can the SSD controller do any garbage collection if it isn't told which blocks are no longer in use?

The SSD may not know which logical blocks are no longer in use, but it's quite easy to simply have lots more logical blocks that never get used in the first place. Not having TRIM is only an issue if your OS actually touches the whole drive. A vintage MacOS game library would be tens of gigabytes at most, and any SATA SSD you buy these days is going to be at least double the capacity of a first-gen Mac Mini's hard drive.

While it's true that mechanisms like TRIM can in many cases improve performance and extend drive lifespan, the only thing that's required for SSD garbage collection is for the SSD to be aware of which internal blocks map to logical blocks written by the OS (obviously always true for any standard SSD where garbage collection is even conceptually possible).

In practice, all SSDs have internal capacity greater than the nameplate capacity exposed to the OS, so all SSDs start with a reasonable amount of spare capacity; enabling TRIM merely increases the available spare capacity in proportion to the number of currently unused logical blocks vs. never written logical blocks — blocks outside all allocated partitions (unless written by something other than a filesystem [e.g., manually, or via a naïve disk imaging, diagnostic, or RAID rebuilding tool]) and blocks that allocated filesystems have never had the need to use (unlike SSD firmware, traditional filesystems don't practice "wear leveling" when allocating space, so, e.g., a 1TB filesystem that has never contained more than, say, 100GB worth of data at any point will probably contain a large number of LBAs that have never been written, independent of how much data has been deleted and overwritten).

Given the tiny filesizes of the games involved, if durability is a worry I’d just overprovision space. SATA SSDs are dirt cheap these days and it’d take ages for an OS 9 install to write to all the cells in a 256GB drive (assuming adequate RAM + disabled virtual memory), let alone with 500GB+ drives.

There exist (very cheap) SSDs without TRIM support at all currently for sale. I own one. It won’t die, but writes will suck if you’re writing more than the overprovisioned space all at once. For this use case, that’ll probably never happen (and it’ll probably still be faster than the original HDD both in throughput and random I/O).

Some SSDs also support primitive garbage collection if sequences of 1s are written to the disk in unused spaces. I don’t know how to accomplish that on OS 9, but it might be possible with 10.4 or 10.5’s disk utility. If I remember correctly, there’s an “erase free space” function. Whether that writes 1s or 0s I’m not sure, though.

Old OSes like MacOS 9 barely touch your disk with writes at all, they typically don't have any log files they're writing to, they barely use any virtual memory. These things are never going to see the terabytes of writes they're rated for.

Lots of people (me included) use SD card or Compact Flash adapters in old machines without wearing them out and those have way worse endurance than SSDs.

I have a PowerBook that's been running 24/7 for the past year as an Apple Internet Router and AppleShare file server on GlobalTalk off an SD card in a SCSI2SD adapter with no issues.

You also have to account for the expected writes. Modern SSDs may perform better (over time) with TRIM, but if you just create (or leave) an erased partition to bump the effective over-provisioning even cheap consumer SSDs should outlast the expected usage for a cute little retro computing system.

It would be different if you used them them 24/7 to keep some old, but demanding peripheral alive (e.g. a large old printing machine) running. If you can schedule the downtime you could still, image the disk, erase it, and restore the disk every few months under the guise of preventive maintenance. Heck if you (net-)boot Linux or *BSD depending on the IDE<->SATA bridge used you may be able to send TRIM/UNMAP commands to the SSD without opening case. Of course each such backup/erase/restore cycle would be equivalent to a full drive write.

Wait looks like you ship to Canada! I'll take a closer look now.

I do ship to Canada, but unfortunately the (auto-calculated by Shopify/UPS/DHL/USPS) international shipping prices are quite high (I've seen about $30 to Canada and $50 to Germany in the past). Plus in some countries the purchaser ends up having to pay duties, so check your local laws. A way somewhat around this is to buy from me on eBay since they take care of the shipping and duties, and have lower shipping costs:

https://www.ebay.com/usr/oaksnowconsultingllc

The downside is packages through eBay International Shipping tend to take like a month whereas UPS ships packages in less than a week pretty much anywhere. I sold one on os9.shop to Germany last month that got to Germany in 3 days and to the person's door in 5.

My prices on os9.shop are also lower to begin with because I don't have any eBay fees. The equivalent package on os9.shop to the eBay packages is the Average Condition bundles. US customers should definitely buy at https://os9.shop since it's the same stuff and the prices are lower and the shipping is the same.

RE: shipping to Canada: use USPS. Using Fedex or UPS will incur gigantic "brokerage fees" which you are not charged when using USPS + Canada Post. We're talking like $30+ on a $100 package, and that's upon arrival to your door, after you already paid $20-30 shipping. I got a plexiglass trophy from an event at my work and it cost me $25 to receive it because they used UPS to ship it.

When customers are checking out they have the option to choose USPS, UPS, etc. I've seen prices to Canada be more for USPS than UPS. Shopify handles most of this. I don't charge any handling so it's just whatever the raw shipping cost that is calculated by Shopify/USPS/etc.

Oh, perfect! I didn't realize there was a choice during checkout. I can imagine the initial price is more, but it will be less in total once the package arrives to the door.

My "favorite" thing about UPS is they like to leave a COD invoice, when they were _supposed_ to collect the fee from you before releasing the package -- but that takes too long so they just leave an invoice. Except you can't just go online and pay it - there's no facility to do this on their website (you can find countless Reddit threads of people raging about this). I had to pay by phone, which is beyond ridiculous in this day and age.

>I don't charge any handling so it's just whatever the raw shipping cost that is calculated by Shopify/USPS/etc.

What amatecha said about brokerage fees is true, but only if you use international ground (UPS Standard, and its FedEx equivalent). Any "UPS Worldwide" service is by air, and avoids brokerage fees.

eBay International Shipping is, as you said, the best option for buyer and seller as long as the buyer is willing to wait and use eBay to buy.

Another option is Pirate Ship's Simple Export Rate. Also slow, but significantly cheaper than UPS and even USPS.

Hrm, the UPS C.O.D. Invoice I have here on my phone says it was delivered via air. I don't know what service method was used though as that's not mentioned, but it says "Port of Entry: 1821 - Vancouver Air". /shrug

Can you do like a LAN party thing with two of them and play some classic games in co-op that way? Can you legally get these old games somewhere or is it all abandonware?

They all have Ethernet ports. So, yes you can hook them up to a wired router and play co-op. The vast majority of games are either going to be abandonware or buying old jewel cases on eBay.

Thanks! Does anyone know how accessing the internet works on something so old? I mean, I used computers far older than this back in my youth, but the web browsers weren't ancient back then. I guess I'm trying to say that a 25 year old browser might not work with most modern web pages. Is that right?

Your best bet is probably iCab, which had its last OS 9 release in 2008. Still pretty old, but you’ll at least have some relatively modern support for stuff like CSS. I used it on OS 9 at the time and it worked pretty well then.

Yeah most modern web pages are unusable. The most recent browser is Classilla which I copy onto most of the machines I sell. It will be painfully slow and barely load anything. There are still some sites that are designed to work on these old machines like frogfind.com

No prob. I guess you just get software on there with CD-ROM & USB? Maybe there is an adapter for the FireWire?

Also...what kind of programming language stuff is pre-loaded? I'm not familiar with Macs, but I'm guessing if it's based on BSD than there is a C compiler, Bash, Awk...that kind of stuff? Is Objective C or some kind of scripting language easy to get to?

I find a USB stick the most convenient and load some software on CDs.

No, Mac OS 9 is not based on BSD. Only Mac OS X+ is. No development tools come with it out of the box (unless you consider AppleScript). Programming for the classic Mac OS is totally different from Mac OS X+. There is the classic Toolbox with Pascal or C, Hypercard, RAD tools like RealBASIC, the slightly refined Carbon APIs, many scripting languages available, etc. But nothing out of the box that's not a separate install. Sorry, it's a big subject and don't want to get more into it here.

Not a problem. This helps a lot!

Since it has Ethernet, you can use older tooling to connect to a Linux server as a "go-between" both for some basic web-proxy and filesharing.

Worst case scenario you use an FTP client, but it might be possible to build some other ancient filesharing software like Netatalk - https://netatalk.io

You of course want to make sure your OS 9 box isn't directly on the Internet, but it's quite capable of communication if what it's talking to drops down.

You probably want some proxy turning the average bloated page into something more consumable by ancient machines. Also modern TLS tends to be a problem for these old machines. Maybe wrp might help: https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

> alt

nit: On a mac the key is called "option".

Does dialup work on these Mac Minis?

Some configurations have built-in 56K modems, but not all. I have never tested it under the hacked Mac OS 9. I would search the forums on macos9lives.com where the hack originates.