Mar 12, 2017 Classic is not 'just any OS before OS X', that Mac Classic is probably running Mac OS 6 or Mac OS 7. That is many years before OS 9 & OS X. When OS X was released people still wanted to run OS 9 applications but the OS's were so different that Apple had to make the Classic environment to run them inside OS X.
This page lists some of the best software for the Classic Mac OS – System 6 through Mac OS 9.2.2 – in my admittedly biased opinion. Listings are alphabetical, and some programs have OS X versions as well as classic ones. Many links are to archived files in my Dropbox.
Freeware
Classilla is the most up-to-date browser for the Classic Mac OS and Classic Mode in Mac OS X up to 10.4.11. It’s based on the old WaMCom port of Netscape/Mozilla. Classilla is PowerPC only and works best with Mac OS 9.x, but it is pretty compatible with Mac OS 8.6 if that’s what you happen to have. To speed up loading, version 9.3.0 and later appears as a mobile device when visiting websites. The Classilla FAQ tells you how to disable that if you want full versions of websites.
DaylightSavingsTime is a control panel that automatically changes your system clock and toggles the DST bit when daylight savings time starts and ends. Not necessary with Mac OS 8.5 or later, it’s a great thing to have with older versions of the Mac OS.
Disinfectant 3.7.1 is a free antivirus program for the Mac. It does not handle any macro virus or deal with the AutoStart Worm. There will be no future updates.
Eudora (freeware) is an excellent email program, although I prefer Claris Emailer. The Light mode is feature limited, the sponsored mode displays ads, and the $50 paid mode is full featured, ad free, and includes SpamWatch.
Pre-6.x versions were available on the Old Eudora Installers page, and Really Old Eudora Installers are also available for Eudora Lite on System 6 and 7, but these links now go to Thunderbird.
iCab, the perennial beta browser from Germany has been developed for Mac OS X, the classic Mac OS, and even 680×0 Macs. The 680×0 version supports Mac OS 7.1 through 8.1. The PowerPC version supports OS 7.6.1 through 9.2.2. iCab 3.0 requires Mac OS 8.5 through 9.2.2.
Macjordomo (Leuca) is a remarkably easy to use mail list manager. The program is under constant update. I recommend running it on a separate computer from your mail server, since bad subscriber commands can occasionally lock it up. Because it runs a Mac Plus, you won’t need a lot of power to do this. I used it to manage several email lists in the past.
NetPresenz 4.1 (Stairways, free) lets you use your Mac as a web server, FTP server, and with Gopher (whatever that is). Running it on my vintage Mac II, it served pages about 50% faster than MacHTTP. Requires System 7 through 9.2.2.
Netscape Communicator 4.8 (Netscape) used to be my favorite Web browser. Not as svelte as Navigator 3.0, but you don’t have to (or want to) install all the options. (Netscape Navigator 4.0 is too stripped down – it can’t even send email!) Firefox is available to OS X users, and TenFourFox is a port of Firefox to PowerPC Macs running OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard.
PopChar Lite v2.7.2 gives you a pulldown window displaying the entire character set in your current font. Much easier than remembering some of those obscure keystrokes. Requires System 7 to 9.x. Also a download link on Pure Mac.
SIMS 1.8, the Stalker Internet Mail Server (Stalker) is faster than EIMS (Eudora Internet Mail Server). Better yet, it offers spam filtering – essential in the era of junk email. The latest beta adds support for multiple spam blocking lists.
Microsoft’s free TrueType fonts are nice, but they are no longer available for separate download. Just install Internet Explorer 4 or 5 (which Microsoft has also made hard to find, so use your Mac OS install disc), and you’ll have them. For many years, Low End Mac was optimized for their Verdana font, which is more legible on screen than Arial or Helvetica.
Shareware
Address Book 4.2.4 (shareware, $30) is a great program for storing addresses, printing envelopes and address books, etc. (Jim Leitch, the author of Address Book, passed away in October 1996. Address Book was being handled by Jim Smith Software, but I am no longer able to locate jimsmithsoft.com on the Web.)
Default Folder 3.1.5 (shareware, $25, St. Clair Software) does what Boomerang and Directory Assistance used to, until Mac OS 8 broke them. Of course, it works with System 7, too, and tracks the various folder’s you’ve been working in. It also works beautifully in Classic Mode. I wish OS X had a way to make navigating as simple and powerful as this little Control Panel does.
GraphicConverter (Lemkesoft, shareware, $30 or $35) is a great, easy-to-use image editor that can work with more graphic formats than you can shake a stick at. Only drawback: It makes much larger GIF files than Photoshop (which means that after working in GraphicConverter, I run the GIF through Photoshop to reduce file size and use the Export For Web option). You could also try SuperGIF, which requires System 7.5.5 or later, but it’s $30 shareware. You could try the CompressNow website, which is a free service that reduces the size of GIF, PNG, and JPG files. I use ImageOptim (freeware) on my OS X Macs – the oldest version requires OS X 10.3 Panther, and there are versions for almost every OS X version since.
MenuChoice 2.1 (Kerry Clendinning, shareware, $15) is much faster and more flexible than Apple Menu Items. Requires System 7 to 9.x.
SmoothType 2.3.1 (shareware, $10) provides anti-aliased TrueType and Type 1 fonts, which can look just great on your screen. Be forewarned, this will make your Mac more sluggish. Try it to see if the improved look is worth it. (Alas, it didn’t work well with FrameMaker 5 and/or Mac OS 8.1 on my Power Mac at work.) Recent versions of ATM and ATM Deluxe (much more expensive) offer anti-aliasing, but only with Type 1 PostScript fonts.
ramBunctious 1.6.2 (shareware, $12) allows you to create RAM disks. The RAM disk that you can create using Apple’s Memory control panel has two drawbacks:
Since ramBunctious is an application, you can launch RAM disks as you need them. It can also mirror any change to your RAM disk to an image file on your hard drive or a removable media disk (Zip, SyQuest) of flash drive, making it easy to restore the contents of your RAM disk. Also available for OS X.
Remember? (Dave Warker, shareware, $20) is a helpful program to remind you of birthdays, anniversaries, and appointments. Version 3.4 supports System 7.x and later; version 4.2 requires Mac OS 8.0 or later and supports OS X.
Commercial
AppleWorks 6 (formerly ClarisWorks) is simply the best integrated software ever made. Period. For most users, it’s all the word processor and all the spreadsheet you’ll ever need. It’s a shame Apple hasn’t updated it in years and hasn’t updated it top run natively on Intel Macs. Version 6.2.x runs natively in Mac OS X and is written for PowerPC, and it runs just fine with Rosetta on Intel Macs through OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.
For OS X users who have AppleWorks files but can no longer run AppleWorks on their new Macs, LibreOffice (free) opens AppleWorks word processing documents and most spreadsheets. Versions for OS X 10.4 and later.
Claris Home Page 3.0 (FileMaker, discontinued) is the easiest to use page design software I ever worked with, and it produces pages that display pretty consistently across browsers. This entire website was constructed using Home Page from 1997 until 2013, when we switched to WordPress. You can learn and use all the HTML tricks you want – but you don’t have to learn any.
Claris Emailer (Apple, discontinued) is an excellent email program, easily handling multiple accounts, offering sophisticated filtering, and very intuitive. A f ree 60-day trial version was available from Claris. Helpful review on MacSpectre.
FileMaker Pro (FileMaker, about $200) is easy and powerful, perhaps the best and most Mac-like database ever created. Version 4 even supports putting your data on the Web. (I’m still working happily with version 3.)
Speed Doubler 8, Copy Agent (Connectix, discontinued) provides smart file copying (only changed files are replaced), a more intelligent disk cache, and, for Power Macs, a better 680×0 emulator than Apple has. Speed Doubler works through Mac OS 8.6; Copy Agent requires Mac OS 8.5 or later and eliminates the disk caching and 680×0 emulation. Look for these on eBay.
QuicKeys (CE Software, under $100) lets you create macros and other shortcuts. I found it invaluable with the classic Mac OS, but I don’t use it under OS X. Version 5 requires Mac OS 8.5 or later.
RAM Charger 8.1 (Jump Development, $40-45) dynamically allocates memory as programs need it. I’d call that smarter than RAM Doubler, which it is compatible with. By launching applications using the minimum amount of memory they need, RAM Charger lets you run more programs.
Photoshop (Adobe, under $600) is the best image editor I’ve worked with. Hint: You can sometimes buy a good color scanner bundled with a full version of Photoshop for less than the cost of Photoshop alone or pick up an older version on eBay that has all the features you need for a lot less than the cost of a new copy. Even the Lite and Elements versions of Photoshop have plenty of power for most users.
PowerPrint and PowerPrint Pro (Infowave, discontinued) <see review> let you print to almost any parallel-port printer from your Mac with a DIN-8 serial port. PowerPrint is for a single user; the Pro version lets you put the printer on a network. Excellent with DeskJets, OfficeJets, etc.
Keywords: #classicmacos #classicmacsoftware
Short link: http://goo.gl/rgRxcL
MPW, Carbon and building Classic Mac OS apps in OS XJanuary 24 2015
MPW
In 2014 I came across a project on Github described as “Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop (mpw) compatibility layer”.
There has never been a good way to compile Classic Mac OS apps on modern OS X — for the most part, you were stuck using ancient tools, either Apple’s MPW or CodeWarrior, running in a VM of some sort. Nick app for mac. CodeWarrior, of course, is not free, and MPW only runs on Classic Mac OS, which is unstable at the best of times and downright nightmarish when trying to use it for development in an emulator like SheepShaver.
Enter ‘mpw’ (which I will refer to in lowercase throughout as something distinct from Apple’s MPW toolset).
mpw is an m68k binary translator/emulator whose sole purpose is to try and emulate enough of Classic Mac OS to run MPW’s own tools directly on OS X. MPW is unique in that it provided a shell and set of commandline tools on Classic Mac OS (an OS which itself has no notion of shells or commandlines) — this makes it particularly suited to an emulation process like mpw attempts to provide, as emulating a commandline app is a lot easier than one built for UI.
At the time I came across the project, the author himself had never attempted using mpw to build a Classic MacOS app — only commandline tools and Apple II-related stuff. Naturally, building a UI app was the first thing I’d try.
The Experiment
I started off by writing code just to see how well mpw emulated the MPW compilers, and over time managed to write a working shim of an app that could run on System 1.1g. This in itself was a learning process, not only in code but in piecing together the build process. All the sample code and documentation of the time was in Pascal, so I had to translate that to C — not so difficult, it turns out (technically, first I had to transcribe it from a PDF…).
Eventually I had something that worked, built a few sample projects, uploaded some to Github and left the classic Mac stuff for a while.
More recently, towards the end of 2014, mpw added support for the PowerPC tools, so I immediately set out to update my build processes to support that — a trivial effort.
However, now that it was possible, I really wanted to try Carbonization.
Why Carbon?
I vaguely knew what Carbon was from having lived through the OS 9 -> OS X transition, and that knowledge came with a certain amount of bias. “Carbon is that thing that badly ported OS 9 apps used, right?” It always felt 'off’ in OS X, in the same way that cross-platform UI toolkits invariably feel off.
I knew I wanted to understand the process better, however, and see what would be involved in porting my sample projects to Carbon (and thusly, OS X). I read some books, and set to work.
Mac Os X Download
The actual porting process didn’t take much time at all, and for the most part I ended up with fewer lines of code than where I started. Most of the changes involved #ifdef-ing out lines of code that weren’t necessary anymore, and changing anything that directly accessed system structs to using accessor functions — a trivial amount of work (for an admittedly trivial set of projects).
What interested me the most is how so much of the API remained identical — I was still using only functions that existed on System 1.0 in my app, but they were working just the same as ever in a Carbonized version. The single built binary ran on OS 8.1 all the way to 10.6 (care of Rosetta).
My mind wandered to Carbon as it exists in 10.10. While Apple decided not to port it to 64-bit (for all the right reasons), the 32-bit version of Carbon is still here in the latest release of OS X — I wondered how much of it was intact.
Turns out the answer is: all of it.
The only change I had to make was to point my header includes at the right place, but after that the whole app came to life exactly as it did on Classic Mac OS.
With the same source file, and only a handful of #ifdefs, I could build the same app for 1984’s System 1.0 all the way up to the current release of OS X, Yosemite.
The Sample Project
Just to provide an example for this post, I put together a trivial drawing app called BitPaint. It isn’t very interesting, but it should illustrate a few things:
Carbon, redux
The more I dug into it, the more I came to the conclusion that Carbon was probably one of the most important things Apple did in building OS X. Even today it provides source compatibility for a huge chunk of the classic Mac OS software base. It kept the big companies from ditching Apple outright when they were needed the most, and gave them a huge runway — 16 years to port perhaps millions of lines of code to OS X while still being able to iterate and improve without spending thousands of man-years upfront starting from scratch. Over time, of course, Carbon has improved a lot and you can mix/match Carbon & Cocoa views/code to the point where you can’t realistically tell which is which. I appreciate what a monumental effort Carbon was, from a technical standpoint. That Cocoa apps always felt 'better’ is more to Cocoa’s credit than Carbon being a bad thing — it’s a lot easier to see that in hindsight.
Podcast creator app mac. Final Thoughts
I am incredibly psyched about mpw. Its developer, ksherlock, has been very responsive to everything I’ve come up against as I stress test it against various tools and projects.
Right now it’s a fully usable tool that makes Classic Mac OS compilation possible and easy to do on modern versions of OS X, without requiring emulators or ancient IDEs or the like. To my knowledge, this is the first time this has been possible (excluding legacy versions of CodeWarrior).
I have used this toolset to build all kinds of things, including fun ports of my own apps. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to it for a long time to come.
I’m hoping I’m not the only person who’ll ever get to use it ?
Misc Gotchas
Macos edit lauchpad apps. I ran into a few things along the way that are worth noting, mostly because information about them either doesn’t exist or is difficult to find on the web — check BitPaint’s makefile for context on any of these:
Pascal Strings
You want to tell clang to enable Pascal-style strings (
-fpascal-strings ).
-mmacosx-version-min=10.4
If you specify
-mmacosx-version-min=10.4 , your Intel binary will work all the way back to 10.4, otherwise it will crash on launch trying to use invalid instructions.
PICTv1
Systems 1–6 support only one picture format for resources, and that’s PICTv1. Helpfully, it seems like nothing on Earth supports the creation of PICTv1 files anymore, so I wrote a very suboptimal one (but it works well): https://github.com/steventroughtonsmith/image2pict1
Mac Os Versions
OS X Packages
When you package a Carbon binary into a .app folder structure, as necessary for OS X, you’ll find it won’t be able to find its resource fork anymore, despite the fact that running it from the commandline will work fine. Instead, you can put the resource fork into a data file inside the bundle’s Resources folder and it will work as expected.
'SIZE’
If you accidentally your SIZE resource, your app will launch on OS X but appear to hang, unresponsive, in the background. I ran into this more than once.
'carb’
Mac Os X Installer Download
From what I can tell, including a 'carb’ resource in your binary will stop it from launching on System-7.x, but be fine on System 1–6 and 8–9.2.2. Not sure if this is an MPW problem or a me problem, but I lost quite a bit of time to “This version of MPW is not compatible with your system” alerts from my apps before realizing this.
Packaging!
Those who knew Classic Mac OS will be well accustomed to type/creator codes and resource forks; those who did not will be absolutely baffled by trying to figure out why they can’t open their files/disk images/binaries. I run SetFile on my disk images after creation so that DiskCopy will be able to see/open them, and I binhex encode the disk images so I can safely transfer them to a real Mac using Internet Explorer without losing the resource fork. Neither Samba (as used in VMWare’s Shared Folders) or FAT32 support resource forks, so they will get stripped and render your files unusable. SheepShaver’s external folder support does indeed support resource forks, so you’re totally fine there.
Rez
Mac Os X Run Classic Apps Download
MPW includes a version of the Rez tool (which compiles your resource forks for you), but currently mpw is unable to emulate it successfully. Fortunately, Xcode still ships with Rez and today’s Rez seems almost unchanged from the version included with MPW all those years ago. Pass it the Classic Mac OS set of includes and it’s happy to spit out resource forks compatible with System 1.0.
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