Yes, you heard that right. Somebody is running panther, through emulation, on a Mac Centris. Incase you arn’t brushed up on your Mac history, the Centris was a pre-PPC Mac running at the blazing 25mhz. Since it’s not PPC, they are emulating it using PearPC. Right now it’s running at the speed of a, get this, 0.05mhz G3. Wow. The Apple screen took 1.5 HOURS to appear, and the total boot sequence should take a WEEK.
That’s really nothing amazing except for the fact that someone is attempting it. A processor from the good old days should be able to do the same things as a processor from today.
The problem is that the proc in the Centris isn’t a PPC based proc, instead, it’s more of an x86 based proc. Because of that, and the fact that Panther only runs on PPC, it needs to be emulated.
And emulation is incredibly slow.
Does this serve any purpose? No, but it is kinda neat. Shows just how far people can take emulation. I’m curious as to exactly how it will behave once it does fully boot. It’s all being covered pretty well on /., if your into that.
I still don’t understand why a mac taking forever to do something is considered news though.
Sorry, I had to take the cheap shot.
-Andy A.
That’s really cool. I was going to put Debian Linux on my Macintosh SE 8MHz 4mb RAM just for the heck of it but I determined that I really know nothing about linux and should stick to extending the Mac OS for something like a web server. Today, I just got my SE/30. It is 16MHz 2mb RAM and running system 6.0.8 It boots in like 10 seconds! No joke. The machine is blazing fast. It even has MS Works and can do spreadsheets and graphs. I will admit that it doesn’t do as much as my current PC (P4, 2.4GHz, 10K rpm 40gig sata hd, XP pro) but everything it does do, it does just as fast and it boots in like 1/4 the time. And it is extremely reliable. Also, the SE/30 does have color capability with the installed video card, and it will accept up to 128mb memory and like a 4 gig SCSI HD. If I wanted to, I could even browse the web with Netscape and a SCSI-ethernet adapter. This thing was made in 1991! Ah, Macintoshes are great. The more I use 'em, the more I love 'em.