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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

This is a fun project, but at least for my uses is a bit hamstrung by SheepShaver's capabilities. Most of my desires/needs for Classic Mac OS are PPC-era, which rules out the use of the stable and generally capable Basilisk II… I'd need to use SheepShaver instead, which is ok but generally more crashy and has more shortcomings.

Beyond this project, there's a fork of QEMU that emulates a PowerMac G3 pretty well and is generally nicer than SheepShaver, but doesn't emulate a GPU properly and as such isn't suitable for some things (mainly games).

So for now I have a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 Pismo I pull out as needed, but it'd be really cool to have a full featured PPC Mac in a more compact form factor.

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Given the similarities between a Gamecube and a g4-era iBook (down to the ATI 9200-Like GPU) I'm surprised nobody ever tried modifying Dolphin to boot up Mac Os Classic.

Now you made me look at Wikipedia and I'm more interested in the possibility of Mac OS booting on a Wii U.

>which is ok but generally more crashy

So it is a fully accurate emulator. Why are you complaining?

(I'm still upset over my 7100av going pffft at day 3 of a 4-day Strata render.)

Hah yeah, the stability of the Performa 6400 and iMac G3 I grew up with was anything but stellar. SheepShaver feels more touchy than either though.

I wonder if it would be possible to pass through an era appropriate graphics card to QEMU instead?

If one can dump the Mac VBIOS for an old PCI Radeon card and attach it to a supported motherboard, would it be possible to get the machine to use that GPU? Obviously the host system can't touch it since it's providing PPC code, but if it's all being handled inside QEMU itself it seems plausible enough

VFIO doesn’t work on emulated architectures. Maybe on Talos it could kinda sorta start, but then again, you’d have to build a contraption to physically fit old PCI into PCIe.

You could also start a reverse engineering effort for one of those old cards and emulate it properly in QEMU. Once done, it would be much faster than the original. It could be ready by the time my grandkids entered adulthood.

> it'd be really cool to have a full featured PPC Mac in a more compact form factor

Good reason to find a G4 Mac Mini: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/faq/differences-...

PearPC may be worth a try.

When I last looked the original dev wasn't working on it as much, but there is at least one fork that brings gets it working fairly well in the 64 bit x86 era.

Out of curiosity, which Mac-only games are you interested in?

Personally I would play the Marathon series of games. Love the narrative and atmosphere of those games.

edit to add a link for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)

FYI: There's a modern source port for the Marathon series called Aleph One[1]. 60+ FPS support was recently added, so it's running better than ever.

[1] https://alephone.lhowon.org/

Just a smattering of shareware games that I played growing up that never got big enough to get modern ports. A more capable GPU could also be nice for having the emulator drive modern screen resolutions smoothly.

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