Mac OS 9.2.2 - MachTen 4.1.4 (or 5.0.5?)

[Protools5LEGuy]

Fredrik Andersson
Publicado el 20 ago. 2017
MachTen was one of those "bat-shit-crazy" products available for Mac OS.
In short it was a usermode port of the Mach kernel and a BSD environment, so the entire system run on top of Mac OS.

On the powerpc it featured preemptive multitasking but did not support virtual memory (including protected memory).
I bought first a copy of code builder (which was essentially machten but cheaper... and stripped of all networking functionality),  around 2002-2003 something they had a "sale" and I picked up a copy of machten as well.


Now I never actually used it whole lot back in the days when it was still relevant as I quickly run into some bugs that ruined my installation and at that time I thought it was better just use a OS X or even linux machine for what I intended to do... However in recent years I've found it fairly useful to just mess around when retrocomputing, especially since it's X11 server is actually one of the faster and best I found for classic macos. This is essentially what I attempted to improvise using in this demo. As you can see I also fight the keyboard mapping quite a bit, first of all I'm using a tiny logictech pc keyboard connected to my mac- so that's problem one, control keys swap places when on a pc keyboard on a mac. but to add to it, machten sometimes uses the system layout (in the terminal window) and sometimes US layout (in X11) and I'm used to swedish layout and additionally in different contexts it responds to arrow keys etc, in others it dont. I'm fairly sure this could probably be configured away- but this is pretty much a stock installation of machten. What I did not show however is that machten ships with ObjectiveC support (and most of the GNUStep libs) so theoretically one could write apps that could be quite easy to port to OS X (the opposite is probably not true)... Also it can actually build and compile Mac GUI applications, although I don't know why you would want to do that when Code Warrior is so much better for mac development. It's also a bit confusing when it comes to version numbers... the physical cd says 4.1.4 but the system installed says 5.0.5 everywhere. Anyway it's a fairly cool toy, although I wonder if anyone actually used it for production use back in the day.

[youtube]sSSChO-JdQU[/youtube]

[Daniel]

This is really strange and really cool. Do we have access to a copy of it?

[Knezzen]

This is really strange and really cool. Do we have access to a copy of it?

4.0 can be found at The Garden: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/machten-4