4 days Ago By Liam Proven
The first Intel-based Mac was 19 years ago, but new versions of apps for both Classic Mac OS and PowerPC Mac OS X still occasionally appear, and we are here for it. Most recently, some new internet tools emerged for those determined enough to try to get a vintage Mac on the World Wide Web in the 2020s. First, we thought we'd try to make you feel old.
The last new version of Classic Mac OS was 9.2.2, released December 5, 2001 .
Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah" had been released in March that year , meaning OS X had been out for nine months by the time Mac OS 9.2.
2 appeared. Since the Macintosh turned 40 in January last year , that means Classic Mac OS was around for about 17 years. What's now called just macOS is 24, older than Classic ever got.
Even the Intel Macs first appeared 19 years ago. And yet, some people still run pre-Intel Macs, and even pre-PowerPC Macs. If you do and you want to get online, then Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally.
His retro computing interests are broad, and we've mentioned him a few times on The Register , such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer , and his evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance . Back in 2020, he revived the native Classic Mac OS port of the Lynx web browser, MacLynx . Earlier this month, he came back to it and has updated it again, including adding native Mac OS dialog boxes.
His account is – as usual – long and detailed but it's an interesting read. He also maintains some other web browsers for elderly Macs, including TenFourFox for Mac OS X 10.4 and Classilla for Mac OS 8.
6 and 9.x. Back in 2021, The Reg reported the end of TenFourFox .
What Kaiser actually said at the time was that he was placing the project in what he called "hobby mode": The browser will be a hobby I purely maintain for myself, with no concessions, no version tags (rolling release only), no beta test period and no regular schedule. You can still use it, but if you want to do so, you will be responsible for building the browser yourself..
. Well, if you know how to do that, then you may want to know that back on St Valentine's Day he pushed a new release to GitHub. You will need to pull the source code from his repository and build it, but a new version is worth having.
If you're not up to git pull commands and elderly Mac OS X build tools, then there is a fork of TenFourFox that may be worth a look, InterWebPPC . It's not current with the new batch of patches, but we can still hope for another build. In other "Classic on the internet" news, although it's not a huge amount of use on its own, there's also a newly released Classic Mac OS version of Mbed-TLS on GitHub.
This ports the SSL library – also used in the super-lightweight Dillo browser – to the older C89/C90 standard, so that it can build in CodeWarrior and run with OpenTransport from Mac OS 9 right back to later versions of Mac OS 7. Modern macOS is UNIX® certified and as such it's not all that dissimilar from other Unix-like OSes, such as Linux and the BSD family. Classic Mac OS is a profoundly different beast, which makes porting modern code to it a complex exercise – but equally, it's a good learning exercise, and we're delighted to see 21st century programmers exploring this 1980s OS.
That may be part of the motivation behind the newly announced and still incomplete SDL 2 "rough draft" that appeared a week ago. It builds on the existing SDL 1.2 port, but so far, it's less complete – for instance, there's no sound support.
"SDL" is short for the Simple DirectMedia Layer . It's a set of libraries providing a sort of hardware abstraction layer for game development. If "Lauland," the developer of the Classic Mac OS port, can get SDL 2 working well, this could mean a bunch of new games being ported across to Mac OS.
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