Great work developing for OS9 still. I had taken started developing in Think C for a few months as a fun side project to work , and it still has some interesting ideas for development. Plenty of communities for this nowadays still.
This is really cool, time to dust off an old PowerPC. I've been thinking about building apps for old Mac OS versions for a while with the advent of LLMs, glad to see someone is doing it.
This got me wondering if vibecoding might bring with it a newfound interest in developing apps for vintage computers. Are the LLMs that most people use trained as well on these older coding languages / platforms as they are on modern ones?
Would love to see the source code for this and the underlying details like Classic or Carbon, and the libraries mentioned on Tinker Different for TLS, HTTP/2, and Unicode
The cool thing isn't so much os9map (yes it's cool) , but the fact that the data wasn't locked behind some wall and they were able to do whatever they wanted with it. There are a lot of cool ideas out there that are thwarted because the data is just locked away behind something only a very limited web gui can access, and you are at the mercy of people who's greatest ideas are ways to make the most horrible money extracting experience they can.
All of my OS-9 development was done on the 68k port. Years before that (mid 1980's), I did a lot of bare metal MC6809 embedded development, but I never did any OS-9 stuff on 6809.
Wait but why isn’t it an Electron app? I thought visual apps like this required at least 1-2GB of RAM to run. How can it possibly only need 16MB?! Must be vaporware.
I’m the author. This is an experiment of mine in figuring out how to let Mac OS 9 connect to modern network services and environments.
Since Mac OS 9 doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for modern secure networking protocols, you often have to go through a proxy, which is pretty painful. I wanted to make it possible for an old Mac to connect to modern web services on its own.
There are also two related projects for connecting to Bluesky and Mastodon:
Those also add emoji text rendering, since emoji have become such an important part of modern internet culture. Mac OS 9 does support some early Unicode, but it is, after all, nearly 30-year-old software, so that support is naturally incomplete.
The main reason I chose Mac OS 9 is that these modern services are actually fairly demanding for old machines: parsing JSON instead of a more compact binary format, handling generally large images, doing cryptographic computations, and so on. I think 68k machines would probably struggle too much. If the goal is to run independently without relying on a proxy, you really need something with relatively modern specs.
BTW, I haven’t actually run this on real hardware either. I used QEMU during development. I do have an iBook G4 signed by Woz, but it stopped booting a few years ago.
Shameless plug : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web OpenStreetMap app.
Far less difficult as coding for an old OS obviously, but still a challenge !
The Web has plenty of potential, but constraints too, mostly because of dominant actors, such as Apple that hid the PWA install button... Or Firefox not having any install banner, whereas chrome does.
Can't post it yet as a proper subject, it can't handle top page load.
I have a 2003 iBook sitting in one of my boxes, but I still haven’t had time to reinstall Mac OS 9. I tried with some CDs, but so far I haven’t been able to reset the volume, and Tiger loads automatically. I want to go back and keep using one of the most beautiful OSes Apple ever made.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] thread> The cool thing isn't so much os9map (yes it's cool)
OS9Map is absolutely the cool thing here, especially if you consider the platform lacks basics such as TLS and JSON parsing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9
(The Hitachi clone is also quite nice.)
https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/25/foss-de...
Since Mac OS 9 doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for modern secure networking protocols, you often have to go through a proxy, which is pretty painful. I wanted to make it possible for an old Mac to connect to modern web services on its own.
There are also two related projects for connecting to Bluesky and Mastodon:
https://yllan.org/software/PlatinumSky/ https://yllan.org/software/Palaeomastodon/
Those also add emoji text rendering, since emoji have become such an important part of modern internet culture. Mac OS 9 does support some early Unicode, but it is, after all, nearly 30-year-old software, so that support is naturally incomplete.
The main reason I chose Mac OS 9 is that these modern services are actually fairly demanding for old machines: parsing JSON instead of a more compact binary format, handling generally large images, doing cryptographic computations, and so on. I think 68k machines would probably struggle too much. If the goal is to run independently without relying on a proxy, you really need something with relatively modern specs.
BTW, I haven’t actually run this on real hardware either. I used QEMU during development. I do have an iBook G4 signed by Woz, but it stopped booting a few years ago.
I’d also like to thank bbenchoff’s MacSSL:
https://bbenchoff.com/pages/MacSSL.html
and cy384’s opentransport-mbedtls:
https://github.com/cy384/opentransport-mbedtls
Both were a big help.
I need to get a GPU for my MDD G4 and then I'd love to try them out on real metal
Any hunches on why the iBook might not be working? I've been having hell with PRAM watch batteries recently.
Far less difficult as coding for an old OS obviously, but still a challenge !
The Web has plenty of potential, but constraints too, mostly because of dominant actors, such as Apple that hid the PWA install button... Or Firefox not having any install banner, whereas chrome does.
Can't post it yet as a proper subject, it can't handle top page load.
http://www.headgapstore.com
This is one of those hobby businesses that got out of hand and had to go full time.
But they seem to be selling old Macs, in 2026.
They were a great source for parts etc to keep my old Macs running.