Category Archives: Mac OS X

Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2)

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The third release of Mac OS X, let’s hope the bugs from the last version were fixed in this build. Some screenshots come from QEMU (4:3) and off a real PowerMac G4 (16:10)

The desktop, not much has changed from Puma, aside from a few new icons in the dock.

QEMU has a few issues running this build of OS X relating to the finder, where the main Finder window will not open correctly. As a workaround, you can click on the Go menu and then select the window you wish to open.

The emulated IDE controller also has a few issues with a blank/duplicate hard disk.

Install

Install procedure remains the same as the previous versions, with the ability to modify what components are installed. Print drivers were removed since we are never going to use them in QEMU, and we also dont need any additional languages.

Setup

After the install we are presented with the registration wizard.

Desktop

Appears mostly the same as Puma, although you lose the pinestripes out of the dock. Finder window appears to be the same as Puma, with some elements of Windows explorer included which gives it a browser-based feel with the back and forward buttons.

Rendezous is a feature that you will come across in OS X, this allows for local network devices to discover one another, typically used for media devices like DVR (Digital Video Recorder), and Printers. This was later renamed Bonjour, although the technology remains the same. In Safari you can view any local webpages offered by supported devices, such as the configuration webpage of certain routers, and in iChat you can use it to discover other users that have Rendevous enabled. Many OS X applications make use of this technology.

Sound: Works somewhat if you use the screamer audio builds from emaculation. It’s not very good quality audio with stuttering and crackling when playing mp3 audio via iTunes (This might have more to do with the emulated CPU running at 200MHz. Eventually the sound just gave up one time and I had to reboot the OS to get it back.

Applications

iTunes – Version 3 comes bundled with this release and serves as the default music player. This release predates the iPod and the iTunes store, and thus cannot sync without an update.

iChat – Apple’s alternative to MSN Messenger, which supports AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) accounts. works to some extent, whilst the online service will no longer allow sign-in from this client, we can enable Rendezvous chat to communicate with other compatible users, at least on the local network. iChat was originally intended to be used with AOL Instant Messenger.

DVD Player: Plays back DVD movies if your Mac is equipped with a DVD drive or a Combo (DVD Player with CD-R capability) or a Super drive. Also blocks screenshots when using the built-in grab tool.

iMovie: A basic video editor that lets you create home movies, complete with special effects using clips stitched from various video files, typically from a digital video camera. You can also add your own voice effects, allowing you to add commentary to your video. This is one of those apps that runs in full screen, hiding the dock.

iPhoto: Import pictures from your digital camera and organize them into various different albums, Different effects can be applied, and features a printing utility if you have a photo printer.

Address Book: Appears to have a brush aluminum appearance which would later influence the Finer window interface for Panther and Tiger

Sherlock: opens but refuses to load any channels, possibly its no longer online.

Photo Import: is a tool that transfers photos from a supported digital camera connected via USB, and can transfer files to your Documents directory. You can choose to import them all or manually select which images to transfer and if they need to be rotated. YOu can also set to delete the photos from the camera itself to free up space. A good utility but surely this could have been integrated into iPhoto.

Bundled in later updates:

Safari – Although mainly introduced in Panther, one of the OS X updates introduced Safari as an alternative browser. This was to replace Internet Explorer and would include its own rendering engine.

AirPort: Additional drivers are included in later releases of Jaguar, third-party cards are supported providing they are using a specific Broadcom-based chipset (The wireless card in my G4 is actually a BT Voyager branded PCI card). But you are still limited to WEP support, no WPA or WPA2.

Third-Party

RealPlayer: Popular video streaming application, before Youtube was king video clips and music videos were streaming using RealMedia .rm files. RealPlayer later evolved into a full-fledged MediaPlayer similar to iTunes or later versions of Windows Media Player

Opera: An alternative browser using the Presto rendering engine. This was from the era when Opera was a browser you had to pay for, but a free version existed that would show adverts.

Camino: A fork of Firefox designed to be built for use on Mac OS X, making full use and integration into the Finder.

Appleworks: Apple’s own productivity suite of applications that consists of a word processor, spreadsheet and desktop publishing. Technically this is first-party, but is not included with the OS install. Appleworks was never really popular, and many mac users would opt for Microsoft’s Office which had full compatibility with the mainstream file formats. In contrast, the CWK format was used to save text documents.

Norton Utilities: A must for early versions of Mac OS X, includes a set of tools to keep OS X running smoothly.

Mac OS X Puma (10.1)

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Windows XP caught us off guard…

Cheetah wasn’t well-received in terms of performance and compatibility and understandably so, given that this was a completely new OS environment with steep hardware requirements compared to OS9. With this in mind, Apple continued to improve OS X and released Puma a few months later.
System requirements were still the same, you still required 128MB for adequate performance (despite the iMac G3 shipping with 32MB as standard a few years before), for most users installing OS X necessitated a few hardware upgrades.

Install

Here we installed over Mac OS 9.2 as an upgrade which would have given us compatibility with the classic applications by using the classic environment. Compared to OS X Cheetah, more languages and print drivers are included. Again like Cheetah we miss out on the graphics acceleration and sound support.

Setup Assistant

Mostly is the same as the Cheetah version, a lot of the forums are compulsory like the address and contact details which is pointless in this version can no longer connect to Apple

Login Screen

Login screen

Desktop

Most improvements are made under the hood, the user appearance resembling the same as Cheetah.
Many of the existing applications that shipped with Cheetah were included in Puma, being slightly updated versions of Internet Explorer and QuickTime.

Browsing the filesystem using the Finder. Seemingly it has issues displaying the filename on CD/FAT filesystems

iTunes

iTunes makes its Mac OS debut in Puma. This version functions as a media player that is capable of importing CD’s and managing a CD library. A basic internet radio station is supported here, but the servers are no longer functional. I’m not sure if this build can sync with an iPod since it was released before the first iPod was released.

Mail

iMovie

Create and edit moves imported from a digital video camera, typically used on Mac with built-in Firewire. iMovie would later be included in the iLife suite.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer has been slightly upgraded compared to the previous release and is running a later build

Acrobat Reader

Acrobat reader is included with the operating system. One of the early features of OS X was the use of PDF rendering embedded into the operating system. A separate version is provided here since it includes features the embedded version lacks.

iDVD

For Macs with DVD drives and an MPEG2 accelerator, a DVD player is offered which was once offered in Mac OS 9. Since QEMU does not emulate an MPEG2 decoder and there is no graphics acceleration we are unable to access the interface.

System Preferences

The system preferences panel has been redesigned and applets are sorted into groups for easier navigation.

Imageviewer

Classic / Start up

Changing the startup mode, on an actual Mac will change which operating system boots the machine, but on QEMU it will brick your install. The classic environment will still work as normal

Screensavers

A nice selection of screensavers that take advantage of the new graphics engine.

System Profiler

Gives much more detailed information on your system, including the software components and the hardware installed in your Mac

Applications & Games

We had better luck getting apps to run in this version compared to Cheetah

The Sims

We were finally able to run The Sims, which we had failed to do previously. This was a Carbon-based app which was an API that allowed for use for Mac OS Classic and OS X. OpenGL is the main rendering engine used here, and this is integrated into OS X.

3D titles however are more of a problem with the emulator, which lacks 3D acceleration which means we have to rely on software rendering, and many games of the time were starting to require hardware T&L

Microsoft Office X

Microsoft’s popular productivity suite had a version specifically for OS X and takes advantage of the user interface elements. Functionality is similar to Office XP which was released at the time.

Norton

Norton had released their Utilities for OS X, which is a collection of software typically geared towards maintenance. Here you can run tasks that can check your mac’s hard disk, and access Norton AntiVirus if it’s installed.

PageSpinner

An HTML text editor for OS X and one of the first to be carbonized for OS X.

Windows Media Player

Opera

One of the other alternative browsers for OS X, If Internet Explorer or Netscape isn’t your thing. Curiously I did try Netscape navigator 6 but this required classic environment and wasn’t a native OS X application.

Mac OS X Cheetah (10.0)

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The rocky start to the next generation MacOS

Mac OS X mouse cursor is black, the white one comes from Windows 11

Running in a build of QEMU Here there is limited to no graphics acceleration, no sound support. In QEMU the G3biege switch works best instead of mac99 which still boots but was unable to use the keyboard or mouse, even with the usb/kvm or adb switches.

The emaculation guide recommends using the PPC builds, but I found the screamer/audio builds to work and have sound support (somewhat, it does crackle)

Install

Initially when trying to install, the OS X installer had difficulty locating the QEMU hard disk. This is possible because the disk was a newly created drive and had not been initialized before, and this version of Mac OS X was intended to be installed as an upgrade since many Macs were shipping with a version of OS9 still.
There probably is a way to do this through the command terminal but for now, let’s just boot into a 9.2 CD and initialize the drive from there. I’d recommend installing in conjunction with an OS9 install since you have the benefit of using classic mode.

The desktop is a radical departure from Mac OS 9 and introduces new UI elements like the Aqua design language and the dock, which would be a staple of Mac OS X for years to come.

Finder

The Finder acts very much like Windows Explorer and allows the user to browse the different directories of their system. It’s the main area where applications can be launched (If they’re not in the dock). Like Windows Explorer it has web browser-inspired back and forward buttons, along with view change options and links to commonly used areas like Computer, Home, Favorites and Applications.

What I don’t get is this button on the top right, which compacts the window you have selected by a few pixels. I’m not sure why but given low-resolution screens were common back then maybe it was a product of its time. But then you might as well minimize it to the dock.

Applications

A few applications have been bundled with the OS, some of which come from previous versions of MacOS and some which came from the NEXTSTEP side (Chess)

Clock: Displays a clock in the dock
Mail: The email client for macOS which includes support for Apples .mac email service and AOL
Image Capture: Import photos from your digital camera
Address Book: The contacts area where you can store phone numbers and email addresses for your contacts, these are then accessible from the Mail app
TextEdit: Just your standard text editor
Stickies: A nice feature, that lets you quickly take notes and keep them on your desktop

Internet Explorer

Everybody’s favorite browser is pre-installed with the operating system, a preview release of 5.1 for Mac. This browser uses the Tasman rendering engine in comparison to the Trident engine that the Windows version uses

Sherlock

The main search engine for the operating system. Here you can search for files and folders that are stored on the computer’s hard disks. But you can also search online through various websites split into sections: Internet, Shopping, Articles, reference, and entertainment. None of the search links work any more, and some just open a link to the website which the browser is incapable of rendering.

Quicktime

Apple’s video and multimedia player. This version places channels at the forefront of its interface.

Chess

Apple’s chess game originated from the NextStep linage. If only I knew how to play chess

Mail

Apple’s new mail client. Sadly no longer compatible with modern protocols.

Stickies

Address Book

System Preferences

Replacing the control panels area of Mac OS 9, contains most of the systems configuration tools, with the rest being located in the utilities folder.

These don’t run well in QEMU on the count of the low CPU speed and the lack of graphics acceleration.

The Cosmos screensaver

Sherlock looks mostly the same as the OS9 version, this was meant to be the search engine of the operating system with the ability to link to online websites.

Window management in OS X

Networking in OS X, QEMu does provide an ethernet SliRP adaptor

Third Party Software

This was a bit of a disaster since although MacOS has compatibility with Mac OS 9, the classic environment is not installed by default and had to be installed separately, and many apps that were developed for OS X were intended to be used on later releases.

I did get some software to run in both native and classic mode. This wasn’t faultless however as the mouse cursor would frequently disappear when Classic applications were running and only a reboot would get it back. It seems to port the OS 9 UI elements into the OS X display, as the menu bar changes to the OS 9 platinum design when a classic application is active.

You will be using this a lot

To be fair these are limitations of the old Mac OS kernel since it could not do true multitasking, and with OS X the whole classic layer runs in the same fashion. Should one classic program crash, the others will become unresponsive until the classic mode is restarted which can be done in OS X, whilst the native OS X apps are unaffected.

Microsoft Office 2001

This does affect the screen rendering, but this could be more due to the emulation rather than the operating system itself, QEMU isn’t 100& accurate. Still it’s better than nothing and was from a time when Apple cared about backward compatibility.

Trying Unreal Tournament didn’t fare any better since this is also a classic Mac application. Trying to run the game with software rendering results in a blank screen, and QEMU must be restarted to get back into the Finder.

The Sims didn’t fare any better since despite being compatible with Mac OS 9, for Mac OS X it requires 10.0.3 update. It is however a carbon application which was a new API that Apple introduced to help with the OS X transition. Carbon applications will run natively in OS X

Conclusion

OS X Cheetah was not received very well since it lacked a majority of features from OS 9, DVD playback was not yet possible and the classic environment was very hit or miss. But the Aqua design was applauded for its style and gave an insight into what the next century of desktop computing would look like. The stability was also well-received that’s to its Unix-like roots, but at the cost of performance. Users would continue to run OS9 and Apple never shipped it as a default OS (at least to my knowledge). Then again Microsoft did the same for its Windows NT line of operating systems. Whilst they were stable, lacked the compatibility and performance offered for gaming or low-end hardware.

Cheetah was short-lived on the market and was replaced with Puma in the same year as a free upgrade. Today there isn’t much reason to run Cheetah except for historical interest.

Oh come on!