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Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

Well the parent commenter said "SE era machines". That era of machines (Plus, SE, Classic) had an 8 MHz 68000 and only supported up to 4 MB of RAM. The Low End Mac page you linked says that your Classic II is 1.8x faster than an SE. On the 68000 Macs, System 7 (especially 7.1 and 7.5) feels a lot more sluggish than System 6, and will use over half the RAM just running the OS with no applications. Being able to skip the "extras" you mention that became mandatory on System 7 is useful when you have a slow machine with limited RAM. Of course I'm not sure what any of this has to do with running the OS on a Raspberry Pi.

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Fair. It's not a vast difference though.

I would love to play with a hundreds-of-megaHertz class emulated classic 68K Mac on a Raspberry Pi! :-)

The PiStorm delivered this on a lot of classic Amigas.

https://pistorm.github.io/

After I wrote about it in 2024:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2024/02/12/pistorm-turbo...

... Some people told me that everyone they knew still running classic Amigas had PiStorms in them. It is a cheap upgrade and it's apparently become ubiquitous.

As such, it's odd, but I don't know of fully-working versions for classic Atari ST or 68k Mac hardware.

There are 2 all-FOSS recreated ST OSes I know of now: AFROS, by the team behind ARANYM, and the formerly-commercial MagiX. It shouldn't be that much of an effort to make some bare-metal emulation that can run that on a Raspberry Pi.

Classic MacOS remains proprietary. Some of the comments in this thread hint at why -- that quite a bit of original Finder code at least made it into OS X. Pity. I'd hope that some day Apple might release whatever source it still has.

I'd love a community Copland to play with. :-D

> Classic MacOS remains proprietary. ... Pity. I'd hope that some day Apple might release whatever source it still has.

I highly doubt this will ever happen. It seems like Apple is trying to avoid any association at all with classic Mac OS, even to the point of declining to go after folks hosting system software or ROM images, or even leaked ROM source code... on GitHub!

Even in the case of QuickDraw, whose source was published by the Computer History Museum, it's under a non-free license — so it wasn't quite released, but merely exhibited. (If you're unclear on the difference, ask any resident of a zoo.)

In the meantime, my own work-in-progress reimplementation of Mac OS is dual-licensed AGPL/commercial. The goal is to run classic Mac applications on commodity hardware.

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