#68K Emulator For Os9 Series Of Operating#

68K Emulator For Os9 Series Of Operating

While this year is a sober one due to current events, I think a lot of people still appreciate what people are creating and sharing to keep spirits up, whether that be music or art orвЂ¦impractical programming projects. A more practical way is to run a 68k or PowerPC emulator on a modern Mac/Windows/Linux PC.ItвЂ™s April 1, and that means itвЂ™s both April FoolsвЂ™ Day and the anniversary of the founding of Apple Inc. 4Running on a 68k Mac (pre-PowerPC) with system 6 or 7 will give you reasonable usability and plenty of authenticity, but it will definitely run on any OS through 9. The Macintosh operating system is credited with having popularized the graphical user interface concept. From 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. ITunes (history) Safari (version history) Classic Mac OS is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Inc.

This year I decided to seriously attempt something that IвЂ™d thought about in the past: getting a Swift program to run on Mac OSВ 9. Project is the create an runtime library and executing environment for old Mac applications, similar to Apple's deprecated Classic environment, but without needing any ROM images or System Software binaries by Apple.Last year I implemented the worldвЂ™s best code visualizer. It is no longer actively developed.The goal of M.A.C.E. It used to be a commercial product, but it is now a free download. SoftMac is a windows-only emulator of 68xxx based Macintoshes. Good for earlier Mac games that were in color.

But Apple didnвЂ™t want to just leave OSВ 9 programs behind, so they did two things:The Classic environment set up a sandbox that looked enough like Mac OSВ 9 to run Classic Mac OS programs directly in Mac OSВ X. Its successor Mac OSВ X 5 also ran on PowerPC when it first launched it wasnвЂ™t until 10.4 that Apple began to switch to Intel processors instead, and 10.6 when PowerPC was finally dropped.Mac OSВ X was a huge step forward from Mac OSВ 9 in a number of ways, including preemptive multitasking so that you could actually run multiple things at once. 4 If a program crashed or overwrote memory it wasnвЂ™t supposed to, there was a good chance youвЂ™d have to restart the whole system.Mac OSВ 9 ran on PowerPC processors, which were also used in the GameCube, PS3, and Xbox 360 earlier versions of the OS had started on MotorolaвЂ™s 68k CPU series. It also dates from the days when only one program could run at a time because of that, even the latest version uses cooperative multitasking to run multiple programsвЂ”that is, a program has to yield its time to let others run. 3 It was one of the first OSs to use a GUI at all, something that we pretty much take for granted these days.

Think of it like Wine / CrossOver rather than VirtualBox / Parallels. But its life ended with the switch to Intel-powered MacsвЂ”Classic was built on running the instructions in the original apps directly, only having to provide compatibility shims for libraries. It really was quite effective, and actually survived longer than booting into Mac OSВ 9 (which never received support for newer PowerPC processors).

Apple never released a 64-bit version of Carbon, presumably to encourage developers to move to Cocoa, and with last yearвЂ™s macOS Catalina, support for 32-bit apps was dropped entirely with very few exceptions. (h/t Marshall Elfstrand for the video link.)Classic ended with the switch to Intel processors back in the 2000s, but Carbon worked all the way up to last year, macOS Mojave. ( Sound familiar? 7) Fun aside: This is the reason (one of the reasons?) Core Foundation existsвЂ”to provide a common interface between Carbon and Cocoa. You basically just recompiled your app and added an extra annotation saying you were вЂњCarbonizedвЂќ.

I package it up as necessary for Mac OSВ 9.Is this useful? No! Absolutely not! But neither was ROSE-8, and yet I still learned a lot doing it.As you probably guessed, I managed to accomplish this, or I wouldnвЂ™t be writing this blog post. I compile it for PowerPC with (a version of) the Swift compiler. I write Swift source code that calls Carbon / Toolbox APIs.

Gathering materialsThe last time I was building Classic Mac OS apps, I was using CodeWarrior. (And note that the SIZE and carb resources are required for any Carbon app, so you canвЂ™t just skip the Rez part if you actually want to run your app.)If you just want to try a built version of BitPaint, hereвЂ™s one: BitPaint-swift.hqx.IвЂ™d like to hear about anything you make with these tools! Meanwhile, if youвЂ™d like to hear how I made this work, read on. The required flags for swiftc, PPCLink, and Rez can be a little finicky. 9You may still want to check out the example in the ppc-swift-project repo. You will also need the mpw emulator and a copy of the Macintosh ProgrammerвЂ™s Workshop tools.

Some stripped-down form of the Swift standard library and runtime (enough to read in and interact with Carbon headers, at least) A modified version of the Swift compiler that supports emitting MPW-compatible object files My idea was to take object files produced by a modern compiler and feed them to the PowerPC linker, which means IвЂ™ll additionally need: A bunch of object and binary inspection tools, which we donвЂ™t need for the finished product but which I made a lot of use of when trying to debug mystery misbehaviorThatвЂ™s pretty good as Troughton-SmithвЂ™s blog post shows, itвЂ™s enough to build an entire app thatвЂ™ll run on Classic. The Classic Mac OS library stubs, for linking against

Clang uses the same LLVM infrastructure as the Swift compiler, so I figured I could deal with all the object format and workflow issues in Clang, and then move on to the Swift-specific parts.The first thing I did was try to figure out what the file format was for PowerPC object files. Modern compiler, classic linkerTo make things more manageable, I set an intermediate goal: build an app using Clang, the modern C compiler that ships with Xcode. My friend Nadine provided some testing on actual machines once things were working.And, well, that should be it! So, off we go. I have one, but not the charger for it, and so I did most of my testing using SheepShaver.

So I could ask Clang to generate XCOFF files for AIX, which means it should only be a short step to making it generate XCOFF files for Classic Mac OS.At this point I remembered a bit of trivia. It turns out IBM has started adding support for XCOFF to LLVM just last year, as part of adding support for their AIX OSвЂ¦ which runs on PowerPC. The first time I started looking into this project, I was worried IвЂ™d have to have my compiler write out assembly code and then send that through the MPW PowerPC assemblerвЂ¦after fixing it up to account for the differences in how LLVM and MPW print PowerPC assembly.However, when I checked to see if LLVM supported XCOFF, I was in for a stroke of luck. Pretty much no one else uses this format, which was not encouraging.

Mac 68K Emulator For Os9