Apologies in advance... I'm sure this has been discussed to death already. A friend of mine asked me this question the other day and it was something that I hadn't considered.
Apologies in advance... I'm sure this has been discussed to death already. A friend of mine asked me this question the other day and it was something that I hadn't considered.
Can the new Intel based Macs run OS9?
No.
OS 9 is a mixture of PPC machine code and 68000 machine code. On the G3/G4/G5, the built-in PPC emulator in OS 9 translates the 68000 code to PPC. That does no good on an x86 machine. And there is no x86 version of OS 9, at least not outside of Apple's archives.
Now I can hear you all saying, "well, what about Rosetta"?
I suppose theoretically that could work, double emulation, but there is also something in the bootup hardware settings of the new machines that just flat won't boot the format that OS 9 is structured in.
Someone should offer another $12K contest, "Boot OS 9 on iMac Core Duo!!!"
Yeah, it was a funny question. It's been so long since I've done anything in OS 9 that I had virtually forgotten about it.
I wasn't sure if Rosetta handled it or not.
Still, I'm glad I asked, because there are a number of auxilliary OS 9 based programs that we have to run, so for the time being, the new Intel Macs are no good to us...
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Originally posted by Messiah
Apologies in advance... I'm sure this has been discussed to death already. A friend of mine asked me this question the other day and it was something that I hadn't considered.
Can the new Intel based Macs run OS9?
No.
OS 9 is a mixture of PPC machine code and 68000 machine code. On the G3/G4/G5, the built-in PPC emulator in OS 9 translates the 68000 code to PPC. That does no good on an x86 machine. And there is no x86 version of OS 9, at least not outside of Apple's archives.
Now I can hear you all saying, "well, what about Rosetta"?
I suppose theoretically that could work, double emulation, but there is also something in the bootup hardware settings of the new machines that just flat won't boot the format that OS 9 is structured in.
Someone should offer another $12K contest, "Boot OS 9 on iMac Core Duo!!!"
I wasn't sure if Rosetta handled it or not.
Still, I'm glad I asked, because there are a number of auxilliary OS 9 based programs that we have to run, so for the time being, the new Intel Macs are no good to us...