Tag Archives: QEMU

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 9.2

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This was the last release of the classic Mac OS operating system, before it was discontinued in favour of Mac OS X. The emulator used here is a custom build of QEMU that has sound support.

QEMU config file, remove the ^ and collapse everything onto one line

qemu-system-ppc-screamer-fpu.exe ^
-L pc-bios ^
-M mac99,via=pmu ^
-m 256 ^
-sdl ^
-boot c ^
-drive file=quicktime.img,format=raw,media=cdrom ^ //CD-ROM Drive
-drive file=MacOS9.2.img,format=raw,media=disk ^ //IDE Master HDD
-drive file=Software.img,format=raw,media=disk //IDE Slave HDD

Up to four disk drives can be accepted by QEMU?OS 9.2, five if you use USB

Install

Mac systems will boot into a live cd like environment where the hard disk can be partitioned and formatted. In some circumstances, the Mac firmware can be upgraded here, which may be required to install.

The setup assistant that runs after you reboot following the install. It mainly helps with connecting to the internet or a network and configures sharing options

Applications

OS9.2 comes with plenty of bundled applications, many of which can be configured from the installer. This allows for you to pick and choose applications to install, and to disable un-needed applications

Apple Extras

A folder on the CD-ROM that has additional applications, similar to the VALUEADD folder on Windows discs that contain various optional utilities.

Apple Video Player

Plays back MPEG video and works best with an MPEG addon expansion card.

AppleCD Audio Player

The CD player of which QEMU does not pass the audio data to the virtual machine, so it wasn’t possible to test the CD Player functionality.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer Mac OS

Internet Explorer 5 shipped with Mac OS 9.2 and was the default browser on default installations. Unlike the desktop version, the Mac version used the Tasman rendering engine rather than the Trident engine the PC versions used. The interface is remarkably different with sidebars being used for favourites and history

Netscape Communicator

Netscape was the other popular browser of the time and was bundled with the operating system. This was the precursor to the Gecko rendering engine used in Mozilla Firefox

Outlook Express

Microsoft’s mail client for Mac OS, which was replaced by the Mail client for OS X

QuickTime

A view of sample channels in QuickTime, these would provide links to online video content such as trailers and previews. Similar to what modern YouTube is like now

Sherlock2

Sherlock was an integrated search engine for both local files and online websites. Various different categories could be used to find a certain website like in the shopping category you would find links to Amazon and eBay.

SimpleText

A basic text editor, like Notepad for Windows

Sound Support

A build of QEMU exists that enabled basic sound support using the Apple Screamer chipset which was used in the early Power Mac G3 (Minitower, not the blue/white version). By installing the latest QuickTime version for this operating system (QuickTime 5) it’s now possible to have basic sound support and acceleration.

Games and Third Party Applications

OS9 was compatible with many of the existing software for OS 8 and below

SimCity MacOS

Simcity 3000: Works well but lacks content in comparison to the later unlimited release. Has a different intro and some music was changed compared to the later release which I’m more familiar with. All base cities and scenarios are present.

Duke Nukem 3D Atomic: Tested the PowerPC build, seems to work fine but the desktop seems to have issues after exiting the game

Driver: You Are the Wheelman: Did not work as it failed to start in software rendering mode, the game thinks there is a glide capable card upon startup but fails to load. Since OS9.2 came out around the same time as Driver I would assume this game would have worked as intended.

Unreal Tournament: Possible to run under software rendering, adequate performance at 640×480. Whish we had some 3DFX emulation in QEMU though. The master server for this game went offline a while back after GameSpy had shut down, but new master servers have been hosted and can be accessed by amending the unrealtournament.ini file

The Sims: Worked just fine but had to change to mac99-pmu as the mouse wasn’t being picked up correctly in-game, and would randomly recenter in the middle or off-screen which made it cumbersome to play

Microsoft Office: Office 98 was released around the same time and was the popular office utility suite back then, which had full compatibility with its PC counterpart

Uh Oh

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!

SimCity 3000

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The next installment of the popular SimCity series of games, where the goal is to build and maintain your own city. All aspects of city-building have to be managed, from the power stations to building roads and zoning for different houses/buildings, all whilst being prepared for any disaster that might strike.

Playing SimCity

Residential:
Where sims will live, the density relates to how large the buildings are, with low density being used for small houses, and higher density for apartments.

Commercial:
Shops and businesses, where sims go to work and spend their money

Industrial:
Another place where sims can work, but also where materials are manufactured and produced, and also helps with jobs for your sims.
Farms are one of the types of industry available, but they are difficult to actually have them be built. Every time I zone for farmland, it does start to build a farm but eventually, it will lose out to dirty industry with farm lots being replaced with a bunch of smog-o-matics. I can’t see why they would not just give farms their own industry zone?
Supposedly the key is to not give them any water, just power and roads. But then the news ticker will keep bugging about sims being too far from any water.

Have no idea why the text is missing…

Versions / Ports

SimCity was ported to most of the popular PC platforms, even a port for Linux operating systems. Sadly a port for OS/2 was not released, as IBM had phased the operating system out by then.

SimCity 3000 was not released on any consoles of the era.

Windows (Original Release)

The Windows release only supports Windows 95 or 98 onwards, it does not support NT 4 unless service pack 3 or higher is installed. DirectX does not seem to be used, running solely through the Win32 API.

Windows (Unlimited/Edition)

Released a year later and features a few changes compared to the original release.

  • The user interface was changed slightly, with the query button being moved to a more prominent place on the UI
  • The music was changed with some tracks being added and others being removed
  • This version of the game is available on gog.com and will run effortlessly on modern Windows versions.
  • New city templates have been added which are based off real-world locations, like Liverpool, London, Berlin, Madrid, etc
  • Some existing cities have been renamed, Metropolis has become Europolis but remains the same
  • Some existing cities have been removed in favor of the new cities: Littleburg, Big Mountain City, Sim Isle
  • New scenarios mode has been added, which are small cities that have objectives to complete
  • Outside of the game, new tools have been made like the scenario creator tool which uses the Microsoft Access engine to create and customize customs scenarios

MacOS

Installing SimCity
Splash Screen
Settings Screen
And we crashed

Simcity 3000 was released for the PowerPC Mac OS platform and was targeted for the classic Mac OS. The Mac platform only had a port of the original Windows version, it did not receive the updated unlimited edition that was released for Windows and Linux.

Compared to the Windows version, there are a few differences, the opening FMV seems to have less compression compared to the Windows version and appears to be of higher quality, the animations on the menu buttons are much more fluid on the mac (Is this due to the graphics card?), lastly the close button on the menu box is on the left side for the mac, and on the right side for the PC.

Playing this on modern Macs is a challenge as modern MacOS does not have native support for PowerPC or applications using the older mac libraries. You must use emulation software like QEMU (screenshots above) or Sheepsaver. The last version of OS X to support PowerPC applications was OS X Leopard (10.5)

Linux

Corel Linux

The installer worked, but the game would not run.

Ubuntu

A Linux port of the game was released by Loki games in 2000, and is a port of the Windows PC version. It’s mostly accurate to the Windows version but is more difficult to install and get working, depending on the distro and the libraries/packages installed. I’ve tested it on a few distros of the era, and some more modern distros.

Installing and running the game on Ubuntu

  1. Install the game as normal, remember to note the install directory – you will need it later
  2. Download the official Loki Simcity 3000 patch
  3. Run the patch installer, preferably as root. Easy way is to open a root terminal session (Should be an option in your Linux application launcher) Easy way is to copy the patch file to your home directory/folder, open the terminal and run the command: sudo sh sc3u-2.0a-x86.run -keep (Why you can’t just double-click to run the installer in Linux I do not know)
  4. Once this is finished, you should see a success message
  5. Now you need to run the game in a specific way, in the terminal you have to run the below command: LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.26 /usr/local/bin/sc3u

Hopefully, it should now start the game and you should see the intro movie play. This worked well on Ubuntu 4.04 running inside a VirtualBox VM, although there were a few issues. The sound was rather high-pitched and played too fast, and would stutter at high resolutions or when having a busy/large city map. Also running in a windowed mode wasn’t perfect, since it would display in the upper left part of the screen whilst the Ubuntu desktop remained in the background. The fullscreen mode works fine though. This could be due to the lack of drivers in my Ubuntu VM, it’s likely using stock/fail-safe drivers which provide little to no acceleration.

You could just use the Windows version running through Wine, although where is the fun in that? Plus it’s nice to play a native Linux game and in early 2000 there was a push for certain developers to embrace Linux as an alternative to Windows, That said, I can see why this didn’t take off…

Mandrake 7

Worked but had issues but these could be due to the emulation in 86box. The game installs and runs mostly Ok but some of the colors are messed up, the game also runs very slowly. Interestingly this uses a graphical installer which is missing when running in either Ubuntu or Corel Linux.