Mac OS 9 Development Requests (Application and Non-OS Level)

[nanopico]

The following thread was started to gauge interest in updates to various parts of OS 9.
There has been a lot of great input from many.

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=2727.msg17839;

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=2837.msg1784
As with the other thread for OS Level Requests this one is for everything else.
Again I won't promise that any of these will get done, but it would be a big help to know what other users would be interested in.

I will create a poll for these items to see what everyone else wants once there are requests.


Things that would fall under this thread would be
Drivers for device not required for machines to boot.
Application enhancements
Protocols that would operate at a users level (midi over ip for example)

I think graphics card drivers should fall under this category, but I'm a little torn on that one.
Any one else have any input on that?

[3rd Degree]

How about extensions to bring support for class compliant USB audio and midi devices? This would really open up the hardware options under MacOS 9.

[IIO]

i can offer custom VST/MAS/RTAS plug-ins.

one of my main requests is a quick utility for adding and stripping resources to and from files upon user choice. (for example from 2 files)

another request of mine is a drag and drop utility which can add a custom icon to a bunch of files´ resopurce fork. (i have an applescript solution for that, but it is not very fast, politely speaking)

a simple app for sneaking into .docx could sometimes avoid booting the OSX or windows servers in background.

what i could also need is an OMS with more IAC buses, but i know that this will be difficult. ^^

[MacTron]

a simple app for sneaking into .docx could sometimes avoid booting the OSX or windows servers in background.

docXconverter 2.0 woks on Mac Os 9.

http://www.panergy-software.com/index.html

[Protools5LEGuy]

Find it here
http://www.panergy-software.com/buy/download.html

And more older versions

http://www.panergy-software.com/buy/downloadearlyversions.html

IIO is 16.95 euros and the OS9 up gradable to OSX is 24.95. Maybe this is just a question on buying a license if you use DOCX a lot.

[Protools5LEGuy]

i can offer custom VST/MAS/RTAS plug-ins.

Great!

one of my main requests is a quick utility for adding and stripping resources to and from files upon user choice. (for example from 2 files)

Super File Builder 

another request of mine is a drag and drop utility which can add a custom icon to a bunch of files´ resopurce fork. (i have an applescript solution for that, but it is not very fast, politely speaking)

That is what filetyper do. AFAIK

[IIO]

nah i mean the custom icons -16455 style

[devils_advisor]

now that you you take request i have one that should have been done a long time ago. give me a move commando and something like total commander. if possible i would like to see the afp protocol implementation  compatible to a more recent osx version. you might be able to use some of the linux sources for that.

[Protools5LEGuy]

IE 5 is mostly not working due to the old certificates. Maybe we can hack it.

And Flash plug-in to report as 2016 ones, just for fun.

[Alexbt]

I think graphics card drivers should fall under this category, but I'm a little torn on that one.
Any one else have any input on that?

I'd love it if they could. I'm trying to get a Radeon 9800 Pro that was seemingly BTO with a 2003 MDD G4 to get 3D working.

[Jubadub]

Not sure how insane doing it would be, but if it was me, I believe optional protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking extensions (if an extension approach would be even possible for those) would be two features that would be particularly cool to get going on a new update. Basically, any Pink idea would be cool. And, of course, as others mentioned, pushing the RAM limit up.

I also wonder if there could be potential for some sort of terminal app?

But of course, I personally find getting more machines to boot our current OS 9.2.2 more interesting than adding such new features first. But afterwards... then hell yeah, that'd be awesome.

[Naiw]

Not sure how insane doing it would be, but if it was me, I believe optional protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking extensions (if an extension approach would be even possible for those) would be two features that would be particularly cool to get going on a new update. Basically, any Pink idea would be cool. And, of course, as others mentioned, pushing the RAM limit up.

I also wonder if there could be potential for some sort of terminal app?

But of course, I personally find getting more machines to boot our current OS 9.2.2 more interesting than adding such new features first. But afterwards... then hell yeah, that'd be awesome.

Protected memory is more or less impossible to pull of on OS 9, The OS has shared data structures (Quickdraw in particular) which means you could not totally isolate an application without locking it out from using the toolbox.
The Carbon API remedies this- but unfortunately the actual Carbon implementation on Mac OS 9 sits on top of the Toolbox so it's just API level compatibility.

Preemptive multitasking on the other hand is already available (and exposed to the public API) on Classic MacOS, you probably know that already though- MPTasks are truely preemptive.

But I guess you're talking about making all processes preemptively multitasking, I believe the main hurdle here is once again shared data structures and nonrentrant code, for example quickdraw wouldn't be all that happy if the grafptr changed while it was drawing but I think the biggest problem is the 68k emulator, there is just one instance of it and it's used all the time in all software... but one thing that Apple could have done and that I don't know why they didn't was to yield on blocking system calls, there was this POSIX library for classic Mac OS written by Matthias Neeracher I think... but I can't remember it's name though... but it did exactly that on blocking posix calls and it worked pretty well... it's still cooperative multitasking though.

And another thing would just be to not block when the menus are down- I know there been hacks to avoid that before but they cause both graphical glitches and compatibility issues with tons of apps.

If anything I believe the most reasonable option would be to write a new API that builds on MPLibrary and tries to avoid MacOS as far as possible... but that would of course only work for new apps.
Or you simply have to get MachTen, at least the Unix environment is preemptively multitasking there.

[ELN]

It sure would be nice if apps could yield on blocking Toolbox calls, especially since these calls are (I think) mostly implemented on top of their async counterparts. Is it possible that SysTask gets called in this time?

Starting with Mac OS 9.1, *all* Toolbox calls can safely be made from an MTask. Glue code in InterfaceLib dispatches the call using the first available option: direct call in the MTask context, remote call serviced by blue task interrupt code, or remote call serviced by cooperative blue task code. Cool huh?