Shameless plug : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web OpenStreetMap app.
Far less difficult as coding for an old OS obviously, but still a challenge !
The Web has plenty of potential, but constraints too, mostly because of dominant actors, such as Apple that hid the PWA install button... Or Firefox not having any install banner, whereas chrome does.
Can't post it yet as a proper subject, it can't handle top page load.
I’m the author. This is an experiment of mine in figuring out how to let Mac OS 9 connect to modern network services and environments.
Since Mac OS 9 doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for modern secure networking protocols, you often have to go through a proxy, which is pretty painful. I wanted to make it possible for an old Mac to connect to modern web services on its own.
There are also two related projects for connecting to Bluesky and Mastodon:
Those also add emoji text rendering, since emoji have become such an important part of modern internet culture. Mac OS 9 does support some early Unicode, but it is, after all, nearly 30-year-old software, so that support is naturally incomplete.
The main reason I chose Mac OS 9 is that these modern services are actually fairly demanding for old machines: parsing JSON instead of a more compact binary format, handling generally large images, doing cryptographic computations, and so on. I think 68k machines would probably struggle too much. If the goal is to run independently without relying on a proxy, you really need something with relatively modern specs.
BTW, I haven’t actually run this on real hardware either. I used QEMU during development. I do have an iBook G4 signed by Woz, but it stopped booting a few years ago.
For the time when OS 9 was relevant that would have been a RAM hog. My iBook (first generation) had 32 MB RAM on board (plus an upgrade slot, how refreshing).
Sure, that wasn't top of the line, but it would definitely restrict your ability to multi task with other programs at the same time. My memory is that many programs used far less than that, allowing you to easily have 5-7 programs open (I had a RAM upgrade for a total of 64 MB).
Wow. As a comparison, I just opened a new Google Maps tab in Chrome.
According to the Chrome Task Manager, the tab alone uses 433mb RAM and 34mb GPU memory footprint after first load.
This is really cool, time to dust off an old PowerPC. I've been thinking about building apps for old Mac OS versions for a while with the advent of LLMs, glad to see someone is doing it.
Would love to see the source code for this and the underlying details like Classic or Carbon, and the libraries mentioned on Tinker Different for TLS, HTTP/2, and Unicode
Great work developing for OS9 still. I had taken started developing in Think C for a few months as a fun side project to work , and it still has some interesting ideas for development. Plenty of communities for this nowadays still.
Currently my "big" native 9.2.2 system is a MDD G4 with a Sonnet 1.8GHz dual 7447A upgrade, 2GB RAM (1.5GB useable in OS 9) and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. I'm sure there's a config more extreme than that out there. It is a pleasure to use even though it's one of the windtunnel systems.
My OS 9 battlestation is a G4 tower (Digital Audio) with a Sonnet dual 1.6GHz upgrade, 1.5GB RAM and a nvidia GeForce4 Ti which is one of the best OS 9 graphics cards available.
Probably an SE/30; vastly different internally than the original 68000 SE, more like a MacⅡx wearing a classic Mac shell. Great machine <3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE/30
The cool thing isn't so much os9map (yes it's cool) , but the fact that the data wasn't locked behind some wall and they were able to do whatever they wanted with it. There are a lot of cool ideas out there that are thwarted because the data is just locked away behind something only a very limited web gui can access, and you are at the mercy of people who's greatest ideas are ways to make the most horrible money extracting experience they can.
Wait but why isn’t it an Electron app? I thought visual apps like this required at least 1-2GB of RAM to run. How can it possibly only need 16MB?! Must be vaporware.
Far less difficult as coding for an old OS obviously, but still a challenge !
The Web has plenty of potential, but constraints too, mostly because of dominant actors, such as Apple that hid the PWA install button... Or Firefox not having any install banner, whereas chrome does.
Can't post it yet as a proper subject, it can't handle top page load.
Since Mac OS 9 doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for modern secure networking protocols, you often have to go through a proxy, which is pretty painful. I wanted to make it possible for an old Mac to connect to modern web services on its own.
There are also two related projects for connecting to Bluesky and Mastodon:
https://yllan.org/software/PlatinumSky/ https://yllan.org/software/Palaeomastodon/
Those also add emoji text rendering, since emoji have become such an important part of modern internet culture. Mac OS 9 does support some early Unicode, but it is, after all, nearly 30-year-old software, so that support is naturally incomplete.
The main reason I chose Mac OS 9 is that these modern services are actually fairly demanding for old machines: parsing JSON instead of a more compact binary format, handling generally large images, doing cryptographic computations, and so on. I think 68k machines would probably struggle too much. If the goal is to run independently without relying on a proxy, you really need something with relatively modern specs.
BTW, I haven’t actually run this on real hardware either. I used QEMU during development. I do have an iBook G4 signed by Woz, but it stopped booting a few years ago.
I’d also like to thank bbenchoff’s MacSSL:
https://bbenchoff.com/pages/MacSSL.html
and cy384’s opentransport-mbedtls:
https://github.com/cy384/opentransport-mbedtls
Both were a big help.
Sure, that wasn't top of the line, but it would definitely restrict your ability to multi task with other programs at the same time. My memory is that many programs used far less than that, allowing you to easily have 5-7 programs open (I had a RAM upgrade for a total of 64 MB).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9
Probably an SE/30; vastly different internally than the original 68000 SE, more like a MacⅡx wearing a classic Mac shell. Great machine <3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE/30