Thanks. I think I have a disc around somewhere too, but I’m not sure how to package it so it works on Win 10. I’m sure I’ll find it when I unpack at the new place, but that won’t be before the end of the year.
Does anyone have any experience with Connectrix VirtualPC (talking c2000 here) and/or FreeDos?
I’m having a trouble getting FreeDos to see CDs. I know it can see the host CD drive because it installed from there, and also when it’s booting it displays the lines to show it has seen and booted the CD driver. But as soon as I type in D: at the prompt, I get everyone’s least favourite warning:
The drive is not ready yet.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
It does this perpetually for both written and pressed CDs and is rather aggravating. Anyone know anything I might be missing here?
If you want starfleet academy, I can send you the installers?
mscdex.exe installed?
Let me message you after I’m a bit more settled and have time to play more.
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It wasn’t, it is, the issue persists. I’m gonna try some faffing with the VirtualPC settings after giving the documentation a good poke through.
PowerMac fine > PowerMac getting more write errors than usual > More read errors > Slow boot > New IDE Flash Card interface > Install OS 8.0 > 8.1 (for nice wallpaper tiles) > 8.5 > 8.6 > Decide to see if previous problems in 9 were early warning sign of hard drive failure, install 9.0 > 9.1 > Jesus bloody Christ how did Apple release this OS without going bust out of sheer embarrassment!? > Reinstall OS 8.0 through 8.6 > Perfection
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The only reason I had a partitioned section of the hard drive that ran OS 9.2 was to play Civ II. Otherwise, I avoided it like the plague. ‘Embarrassing’ is probably the best word to describe it.
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I never used 9.x for any longer than a few minutes back in the day. I have a couple of machines now that have 9.2.2 installed (a Lime iMac G3 333mhz… with 256MB RAM! and a PowerBook G3 Pismo) and I haven’t had any issues thus far, but from the accounts I’ve read, the underlying system was past its use-by date and 9.x introduced kludge after kludge to deal with new and emerging tech (USB and wifi, to name a couple).
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I stopped using “Classic” macOS at System 7.5.5. That was the last ‘real’ macOS until OS-X arrived.
Yes, I do like to be a contrarian. How did you guess?? 
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Actually Viking my hubby agrees entirely. To him, 7 is peak Mac OS, 8 is 7 in drag, and 9 is 8 with a perpetual error window 
I’m guessing you might agree with us that Tiger is still the best OS X too?
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Ooh. That’s a tough one.
Tiger was good. So was Mountain Lion.
Jaguar was pretty “meh” on my PPC Mac-Mini. Although that was probably a RAM issue - 1G didn’t get you very far.
I’d be happier if Apple stopped messing with the UI and concentrated on tidying up the underlying stuff. (Looking at you, BigSur, with your over-rounded corners and flat UI. Bring back the old 3D / skewomorphic(??) look where buttons and UI elements were obvious.)
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UI should be a user decision, not part of the OS. Icon looks and desktop behavior should all be customizable. Spend the money on making options instead of trying to pick the perfect one.
Shit, make icon packs and UI tweaks microtransactions for all I care.
OK, maybe not.
That’s where things like TinkerTool and Shapeshifter come in handy; you had to go and find them but then you could reskin everything and add all those little tweaks that you wanted… but it’s not there getting in the way if you don’t want it.
I’d be happy if OS 11 had actually been a big enough change to warrant the digit jump 
Like the Amiga offered all the way back in 1985?
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I believe OS/2 offered the same kind of thing, although due it being an absolute pain in the arse to get running with the HDD I gave it (I think a low-level format is on the cards), sadly I cannot verify this claim as yet.
Kinda have to agree with your other half here. I spent most of my time on a Mac in System 7.x and it was really nice. I didn’t mind 8.1 but I was working with new machines that ran it, so I didn’t really get to actually use it… so my opinion doesn’t really carry a lot of weight. 
Guys, the Workplace Shell of OS/2 was the bomb.
It was light years ahead of the crap Microsoft was offering.
- You can have individual backgrounds (colors or bitmaps) per folder.
- You can have individual fonts per folder.
- You have a “work area”, which, if you close it, will close all the files (documents, spreadsheets, even web pages) inside of that, and when you open it, will re-open all the files inside that folder.
Behold… a plain Warp desktop, with a font and color palette open.
Now I drag and drop some colors and fonts to the Ook’s Folder…
And, if that’s not enough, I open the Stuff folder and also cough “enhance” cough it.
The “Work area” setting is what I was talking about - if you tick it, open a couple of files/folders in this specific folder, then just close the main folder, it’ll close everything which you’ve opened - and open it once you open the main folder.
And a bit of silliness, because, why not?
Personally, I love the idea of a “work folder” but sadly microjunk doesn’t have that feature.
Drawback is, it is easy to go overboard with fonts and colors…
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If you want to play around with OS/2, you can download the ISO here - from winworldpc.com and run it as a VM in Virtualbox or HyperV.
It’s not a resource-hogger… 8Mb RAM (yes, 8Mb) and 250Mb HDD as a bare minimum.
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This looks interesting. The AmiKit Amiga emulator has been available for a long time and the newest version is called AmiKit X. There’s versions for Windows, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi.
Dan Wood did a nice review and showed off the features, including the “Rabbit Hole”, which allows you to access Windows applications within the emulator.
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