MacOS User

Classic On Intel

(20 votes)

Written by Andrew Youll

Thursday, 03 January 2008

When Steve Jobs announced Apples transition to Intel's X86 processor line, a huge stir occurred among some Mac OS X users who depend on "Classic" the OS9 environment in Mac OS X for their day to day Mac usage, as Mac OS X on intel means no more "Classic" and they were right.

Rosetta allows PowerPC applications to run on X86 through JIT (Just In Time) architecture emulation, but its translation is not on a low enough level within OS X to allow "Classic" to work on X86 and as such those among us who use OS9 applications have been left out in the cold.

Until now that is; a project called "Sheep Shaver" was created to allow BeOS on PowerPC emulate the PowerPC architecture to run another PowerPC Operating System on top of BeOS, this application was ported to Mac OS X with the demise of Be Inc. and has since been ported to Mac OS X on Intel processors.

A group has created a program called "Classic-On-Intel" or COI for short which is essentially, the Sheep Shaver emulator for OS X on Intel, with either an OS9 Installer Image or an OS9 Installed System.

The present release of COI is Version 4.0.1 which is Sheep Shaver with a OS9 Installed System. Sheep Shaver is notoriously difficult to setup so COI takes the difficulty out of running OS9 Applications on Mac OS X for Intel.

This application is of questionable legality due to the fact it includes both a Mac ROM and a OS9 Installer / Installed System, so it is recommended that you already posses a OS9 install disc and a Mac from which you could in theory extract a ROM from.

If you wish to customise your COI 4.0.1 install you can download Sheepshaver GUI to configure it and tweak settings further. For example you can disable "QuickDraw Acceleration" which is enabled by default, or you can adjust the amount of available RAM.

I personally have a couple of old games and printer utilities that require OS9 namely:

Starcraft
Starcraft: Broodwars
Canon BJC-55 IS-Scan

Yes I know both of the Starcraft games have Mac OS X installers available now but for the purpose of this review I thought a computer game would be a good test, okay it may not be the most graphically intense game ever made but I do think it represents an average game of the period.

Also the Canon BJC-55 Scanner utility will show whether COI is capable of hardware access, which I do doubt but would love to be proven wrong, as Canon haven't released an updated utility for my Printers Scanner cartridge.

The system I am going to be using to test COI 4.0.1 is an Aluminium Apple iMac:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz
2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM
250GB HDD
ATi Radeon HD 2400XT 128MB
8x Super Drive
Mac OS X 10.5.1

COI communicates with OS X via the "/Users/Shared" folder in Mac OS X it appears as "Unix" in Mac OS 9 in COI.

First off I'm going to try getting Canon IS-Scan for Mac OS 8.* - 9.* to work inside v4.0.1, first

4.0.1 is a cut down version of OS9 with a lot of components and extensions removed to make it lightweight, but this has some side effects namely... lack of TCP/IP support, and lack of colorsync extensions, you may be asking why do I need TCP/IP? well because when I copy the IS-Scan setup program over to OS9 using /User/Shared it refuses to open the file, so I'm attempting to download the file directly into OS9.

After much well... cursing I decided to bite the bullet and actually do a clean install of OS9 from an install CD I bought off eBay for my old G4 iBook.

After installing OS9, you are presented with a desktop with some "Aliases" to what Apple expects to be the most used applications, Internet, Email, etc.

First what mac does COI 4.0.1 provide emulation of?

Power Macintosh 9500 Series

PowerPC G4 @ 100MHz

256MB RAM

And supports a maximum OS 9 version of 9.0.4.

Now to download the required files to test the scanner usability in COI 4.0.1, opening IE for Mac OS9, presents you with Networking Configuration Wizard, COI 4.0.1 supports Ethernet emulation for the emulated environment and as such you can add OS9 to your network quite easily as long as your Intel Mac has an active connection via either Modem, AirPort or Ethernet.

First I had to download the BJC-55 drivers and IS-12 Scanner Cartridge drivers so I downloaded these files from the Canon website, once downloaded I proceeded to decompress them into folders, as they are all in .sea format from the the Canon website.

Once this was complete, I attempted to install the Printer drivers, at first everything seemed to go ok, until I was presented with the following: "Unix is not a valid destination drive". It seems that the installer wants to use the "Unix" drive but can't access it, so I selected "Custom Install" in the menu, no difference, it doesn't allow you to change the destination of the files.

So I decided to reboot OS 9 and see if that made a difference, which it did, it now wanted to install the BJC-55 drivers to "Classic 9" which is the OS 9 system drive, I thought this may actually work, but apparantly not; the installer crashes and locks OS 9 up with an install disk error, so you have to kill COI 4.0.1. Hours passed, and finally after 4 hours of trying I gave up and conceeded defeat, I wont be able to use my IS-12 scanner cartridge on my Intel iMac, atleast OS X supports the printer itself.

Now for the other part of this review, installing Starcraft; now starcraft isn't the most graphically or resource intensive application, this is one reason why I chose it, also other than Age Of Empires it happens to be the only OS 9 game I own. As previously mentioned I am aware that Starcraft has an OS X installer now kindly provided by Blizzard, but for the sake of testing COI 4.0.1's usability I want to see if Starcraft will install, let alone run.

First off I have to insert the install CD which is instantly recognised, now to run the installer, which loads fine as expected, I am now presented with a screen asking what I wish to do, after selecting "Install Starcraft" I am prompted to enter my CD Key, once confirmed, I configured the installer to install the game to the "Classic 9" HD, in a folder named "Starcraft" in "Applications", after clicking install, the installer copies and configures all the relevant files for Starcraft, and it appears to go without a hitch. Next I was presented with a restart screen, so I rebooted OS 9 in COI 4.0.1, and once OS 9 had fully restarted I began to attempt to play the game.

COI 4.0.1 features OS X Quickdraw Acceleration by default to help render all graphics, so this fact may allow the game to run smoothly.

Upon opening the game you are presented with a dialogue to configure the game, I selected my configuration settings, and at first selected "Slow Memory Graphics" as I had no idea how well COI 4.0.1 would play the game.

To my suprise it plays it exceptionally well, all graphics are smooth, and are displayed in their full 256 colour glory, as a further experiment into COI 4.0.1's abilities I disabled the "Slow Memory Graphics" option, and the game still ran very well.

So in conclusion, Classic-On-Intel 4.0.1 does provide Intel Mac users with a viable way of actually using their old OS 9 applications asl ong as they dont require direct hardware access, as COI 4.0.1 doesn't support direct hardware access. You may have to play around with what extensions work and what causes instability within OS 9 as some users of COI 4.0.1 report stability problems with a stock OS 9.0.4 install but my install works fine, it was only the Canon installers which crashed my system.

It's versatility makes it easily tweakable to suit every users needs, as long as your applications aren't too demanding, this is a perfect way to recreate the "Classic Environment" that Apple so kindly "Giveth' and took'eth" away.