Mac OS X Panther On A 25MHz Centris 650

Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."

Wow...

[interactive_civilian]

Because its there, right?

Still as good an excuse as ever. :)

Re:Yay!

[DarthBart]

No. Just spend $70 and get yourself a 256 or 512Mb stick of ram. You'll thank yourself.

Re:Cheating?

[Guspaz]

What's the difference? The first PowerPCs used a (hardware) emulator to run virtually ALL software, since nothing was native at that point.

Re:Very simple question...

[LostCluster]

Why?

For those who haven't bothered to mouse-over that foot icon attached to the story, it's indicates that this story has been attached to a category known as "It's Funny. Laugh". That's the reason why this story made Slashdot.

Why this was done in the first place? Dunno...

And on the other end of the mac spectrum...

[RalphBNumbers]

VT has officially got the BigMac up and running faster than ever at 12.25TF with 1150 dual 2.3Ghz XServes.
Check out the announcment [vt.edu].

I wonder how many Centrises that equates to...

Installing the Hard Drive was worst part

[VonGuard]

I don't know if any of you have ever had to work on that 650 chasis, but it's a fucking bitch to deal with. The undercarriage is where the hard drive lives, and it's bolted to the outside, so actually accessing the bay it lives in is an act in near futility.

And they kept that damn chasis around until the 7100's...

Truly, an amazing feat to deal with that obnoxious piece of design.

Oh, and the sharpened metal edges inside the case are murder on the knuckles.

Amen, brother! Preach it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I never once managed to work on one of those machines without bleeding. Those and the 8100/8500 (take the whole fucking thing apart to add RAM! yay!) cases were the absolute worst that Apple ever produced.

Luckily, someone at Apple finally woke up and realized how terrible their cases were, and the very next generation of Power Macs (the 72/73/75/76 and 8600) were the complete opposite, a total joy to work with.

Re:Very simple question...

[pclminion]

For anyone wondering who first said this, it was Sir Edmund Hillary upon being asked why he climbed Mt. Everest.

Re:Not totally.

[Reziac]

BTW you'll occasionally read that Win2K won't run on a 486. I can attest otherwise... one day I grabbed a HD off the junk stack, hooked it to a 486DX4-100 (with a paltry 8mb RAM) that I use as a SIMM tester, and found myself watching Win2K boot up. Ooops... It took about 4 minutes to get to the desktop, but amazingly, it was usable after that. I'd have thought at the very least it would choke on so little RAM, but apparently not.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, back when Apple moved from m68k to PowerPC, the OS had software emulation for m68k code. Initially, most of the OS was compiled for the m68k series (the main exception being the core code, including the emulator), and as a result, the new hardware seemed slow. Newer and newer versions of the OS had more and more PowerPC native code, and that made the whole thing run faster and faster.

They were only able to do this because PowerPC was so much faster than the old m68k. Had the speeds been comparable, it wouldn't have worked. But then, had the speeds been comparable, it wouldn't have been necessary, either.

Re:Try it backwards - old OS on new machine

[bhtooefr]

Correct. IIRC, the Quadra was the top-of-the-line model. The Centris was mid-end, and the Classic and LC lines were bottom-of-the-line. (Classic being an all-in-one LC, essentially, in the Color models)

Re:Very simple question...

[Drishmung]

Actually, no [askoxford.com]. Right mountain, wrong climber.

Re:Cheating?

[Stonent1]

The said thing is you get to cheat on the PC, there is a highly optimized emulation layer for x86. Running the standard C emulation layer is about 50 times slower. Which is what this mac had to do. I actually compiled an partially ran PearPC on an UltraSparc running Solaris. It gets partly through the boot and then either gets a segfault or bus error (I forget which). Still was exciting to see it work.

Re:Cheating?

[noidentity]

The first PowerPCs used a (hardware) emulator to run virtually ALL software, since nothing was native at that point.

As far as I know, the Motorola 68K code was (and still is) emulated entirely in software. Maybe you're referring to the handful of POWER instructions implemented in hardware on the PowerPC 601, as a way to ease transition of compilers and code from the POWER line?

Aleph One

[interactive_civilian]

For those Marathon fans who don't want to keep around a lot of old equipment, head over to source.bungie.org [bungie.org] and download Aleph One, which is the updated Marathon engine. It should work just fine with your Marathon 2 and Infinity files. Then you can go here [bungie.org] and get all of your Marathon 1 goodness for Aleph One.

cheers. :)

Re:IT SEEMS

[Anonymous Coward]

not to be picky, but the specs for XP says it runs on 64 meg ram