Weird question, especially at such a late hour, but...

Has anyone ever attempted to boot his/her minis under Mac OS 9.0.4, 9.1, 9.2 and/or 9.2.1 instead of 9.2.2?

Could be useful to have 9.0.4 in a separate partition to run those few problematic programs that will throw a fit at anything higher than 9.0.4.

I need to fetch myself some System (and Finder?) files from 9.2.1 and lower and try it sometime this week.

Mac mini booting System 7.5.5

This is not a direct answer to your question but more a clue to "how to try it" I think.
If you don't already know, there is this thread on 68kmla:
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/mac-os-8-6-for-some-unsupported-g3s-and-g4s.46765/

Chris, you're spot on in your statement about (in most cases) senseless encryption and artificially created requirements - quite often coming from the same party that wants us to believe they're advocating "sustainability" (a much hollowed-out term these days).

Take Wikipedia for example. It's a website that serves strings of text and pictures from their server to a user's client. That's so basic web 1.0. It's beyond me why they can't offer an unencrypted access via http, despite numerous people who had asked them about it in the past. After all, Wikipedia complains they want to be that open-to-everybody worldwide encylopedia (but then they hide behind encryption!?)

The problem I see with a kind of public proxy service is the same that I see with the big corp internet of today - you have ONE person that basically controls the traffic and you, the end users, don't really know what they're doing. That goes both ways, btw - how do you know what your users will use the service for ? That's a tricky thing so I would only offer such a service to folks I'm 100% sure they won't do silly things. So rather than centralization, decentralization is the way to go in terms of proxies. Jubadub provided some good links in his post, check them out.

Finally, as somebody who has been using a proxy in conjunction with Classilla for years I can say that it doesn't really solve the problem. Yes, you can reach more websites. But with ever more sites relying on JavaScript to even render correctly (who cares about "progressive enhancement" these days?) you won't be getting far.

The solution as I see it is rather to create an alternative WWW with low tech websites - a web within the web, so to say.

That why I created my projects. And after some digging and searching I found there are hundreds of cool projects - created and maintained by individuals (not corporations). It's just that ever since Google focussed on brands, these will never pop up in Google's search results again and hence go unnoticed. But they exist! It's not that the so-called "fan page" came out of fashion, it's rather that Google & others killed it off because it didn't bring any ad revenue in!

So the real challenge is really finding the unencrypted low-tech websites. I use Wiby.org a lot for that, as it focusses on live websites (not incomplete Internet Archive snapshots from the past). I've fed it two dozens or more URLs already. I'd wish more people would do that.

I'm testing the power supply outside the QS, bridging green wire with black.

I have replaced several capacitors, checked several suspicious tracks, checked the 4A thermofuse... and it still doesn't work. It doesn't seem like a capacitor problem, I think there is a short circuit in some component but I can't detect it with the naked eye.

Quote from: bamdad on Yesterday at 02:19:13 AM

i don't think it's about resource (fork) compression, because i have 9.1 running on my pismo and hellcats runs just fine after removing some unneeded monitors extension or something (i can't recall but i can dig it up).

I see. In that case, did you try all 3 color depths (256, thousands and millions), as well as all possible resolution settings? I assume you already did, but I'm asking just in case.

of course :) hellcats errors out if you try to run it on any depth above 256 colours, and it adapts pretty well to resolutions. if i plug in my pismo to the same monitor my mac mini is using it happily runs at 1920x1080 by scaling its interface to a 4:3 aspect ratio leaving the desktop visible beneath.


somehow i need to identify what causes the dynamically rendered part of the screen (above the cockpit) to be completely blank on 9.2.2. i'm pretty sure it's not an extension like quickdraw or quicktime because the same thing happens when booting with extensions off. next i'm going to try (on my pismo as it's not as hacky as the mac mini)
- older versions like mac OS 9.2 and 9.2.1
- mixing and matching ROM files in the system folder
- looking through hellcats's resources in resedit (at least the ones i can understand)
and see if i can come up with something.


if someone who's a pro in any of the above could join me in my efforts it would be really appreciated.

@chris, you can get around the SSL/TLS nonsense using Crypto Ancienne, using Power MachTen or an x86 VM of your choice. No need for extra machines, although that works, too.

I'm satisfied with Classilla 9.3.4b. MacLynx is also good. Older browsers also serve their various purposes well. If a website is coded like cr4p, I don't want to visit it in the first place, it's not even a matter of a browser being able to render it or not, for me.

As for what is happening and has been happening to web browsers in the past decade, and is getting far worse now with scope creep through the likes of WebAssembly and beyond, this is not lazyness. It's sabotage. So f*&^ them. We don't need them, and we especially do not even want them. I don't trust their browser code, for good reason. Did they even get a PPC compiler for Rust going, in the end? That move from C/C++ to Rust in Firefox is yet another thing that, due to absence of compilers for many targets, plus other things, are clear acts of sabotage AFAICT. And this problem is not simply limited as a "corporations" issue, it unfortunately stretches way beyond that. So-called "academia", for example. Agendas such as the decommissioning of what little hardware is left that is still reliable (because semi-old and new hardware both aren't). And more.

TL;DR I don't need a new web browser. Most of us don't. What we need is new websites, not web browsers.