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[jjuran]

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. :-)

[Jubadub]

Welcome to Mac OS 9 Lives!, @jjuran! 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.

[jjuran]

Welcome to Mac OS 9 Lives!, @jjuran! 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.

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...

[davecom]

You have an amazing body of work. How did you first get involved in building legacy Mac software?

[jjuran]

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.

[davecom]

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.

[Knezzen]

Welcome to Mac OS 9 Lives, jjuran! MacRelix is awesome! Glad to have you here