Mac OS 9 Lives
General => New Member Welcome => Topic started by: jjuran on December 04, 2025, 05:56:43 PM
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Hi,
I'm the developer of Advanced Mac Substitute, MacRelix, and most recently Legacynth. I target pretty much all versions of Mac OS (as well as POSIX generally), and I write tools to make this more practical. I primarily write in C++, Perl, and Varyx, though I just started learning Objective-C. I use Git.
I tend to work mostly on 201x-era Macs, using SheepShaver with Mac OS 8.1 or 9 to run Metrowerks C++ through MPW's ToolServer for building classic programs.
This year I started replaying TaskMaker. :-)
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Welcome to Mac OS 9 Lives!, @jjuran! -afro- It's great to have you join the fray! Mac OS 9 army grows!
For anyone else wondering about the really cool things @jjuran already brought to Mac OS 9, check out this interesting Garden thread (http://macintoshgarden.org/forum/locating-the-mac-os-9-version-of-advanced-mac-substitute).
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Welcome to Mac OS 9 Lives!, @jjuran! -afro- It's great to have you join the fray! Mac OS 9 army grows!
For anyone else wondering about the really cool things @jjuran already brought to Mac OS 9, check out this interesting Garden thread (http://macintoshgarden.org/forum/locating-the-mac-os-9-version-of-advanced-mac-substitute).
Thanks!
Sorry for any confusion around the Legacynth alpha download. I've since given up on the MacBinary+ format for general distribution and wrote a SEA shell which is now used for the Legacynth installer:
Legacynth
https://www.macrelics.com/legacynth/
The current version supports Lode Runner's sound effects...
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You have an amazing body of work. How did you first get involved in building legacy Mac software?
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You have an amazing body of work. How did you first get involved in building legacy Mac software?
When I started learning the Mac Toolbox, it wasn't legacy yet. :-) My first foray into Mac retroprogramming was MacRelix, an effort to bring POSIX features to classic Mac OS beyond the sockets API provided by GUSI, about which I've written:
MacRelix Origins
https://www.metamage.com/text/relix/origins.html
In 2003, I wrote Port XTender, my first Mac OS X application and first classic Mac OS device driver (pair), to bridge the gap between the Blue Box environment and a Mac's internal modem. (It was also my first (and so far, only) commercial product — there was a popular application called MacAuthorize that never got updated for Carbon, and its users were necessarily businesses, so they could afford to pay for a solution.) The hack is that the driver worked by... (are you sitting down?) sending Apple events. :-O
In 2007, I finally started learning 68K (and some PPC) assembly language so I could generate stack traces and do those special 68K things you can only do from asm. That led to teaching MacRelix new tricks (like installing its own hardware exception handlers), a 68K disassembler, the v68k interpreter core, a debugger, a threads library, and various trap-patching INITs.
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Very interesting history! Thanks for sharing. I also read the article on the history of MacRelix you shared. It's not everyone that would continue a project like that long after Mac OS X came out. But it sounds like you are a truly passionate developer. Both pursuing whatever catches your next interest and also seeing things through to the end.
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Welcome to Mac OS 9 Lives, jjuran! MacRelix is awesome! Glad to have you here :)