modelrail.otenko Trains, computers, vintage, retro, model railways… the lot…

Macintosh System 7 on x86?

Rabbit holes... My regular morning peruse of HackerNews saw me read this article on Mac OS X being ported to the original WII. Amazing, I thought to myself... I wonder if I can skip the emulator on my X68000 and port Macintosh System 7 to it directly?

I went off to read the actual blog over here. Brilliant write-up and beautifully presented. Coding on Trains and Planes... and even in Hawaii? Love it!

The comments on HN had interesting hints to the source of System 7 being available? I googled and found this github project. WTAF? Hah. Someone is having a good set of 'sessions' with an AI agent, making it disassemble, understand and re-write System 7 so that it'll work on x86? There are even released ISOs? Nuts! Does it work?

& 'C:\Program Files\qemu\qemu-system-i386' -cdrom system71-en.iso -vga std -m 256M

And wow.. it... works?

A bit clunky. Mouse works and Simpletext opened! What about on real hardware?

Burn a disc and then see if my Dell Dual-PII will boot it...

5 seconds later and we were in! Mouse moved for a bit then it all locked up. I'M IMPRESSED! Keep this alive!