It's really a great time to be a classic MacOS developer - tons of resources out there such as Retro68k, AmendHub, and a small but active community of people interested in sharing examples and help.<p>Back in the day when this stuff was modern I didn't have many resources or people to talk to about it, so exploring what could have been is an interesting endeavor.<p><a href="https://github.com/autc04/Retro68">https://github.com/autc04/Retro68</a>
<a href="https://amendhub.com/" rel="nofollow">https://amendhub.com/</a>
Wondering what I could do with it ... I rewrote Glypha (an old Mac shareware game I wrote) using modern SDL2. Might be fun to try to "back port" (?) it to OS 9 on top of SDL2 (rather than the clunkier CopyBits() calls I used in the original shareware game).
Looks neat! SDL seems open to supporting legacy platforms, so hopefully it'll get mainlined at some point (at this point, may be more likely if they port SDL3 though, SDL2 is in maintenance mode). Does anyone know if it's possible to use a new compiler for this rather than CodeWarrior 7? It would make it easier to port stuff to Mac OS 9 if you don't also have to deal with the compiler only supporting old C/C++ standards.
Cool to see. SDL 1 went back to System 7, awesomely enough.<p>Before that you had... Sprite Animation Toolkit by Ingemar Ragnemalm which powered Escape Velocity, etc.
So Mac OS9 is PowerPC macs, but this also covers 68k macs with OS 7.6:<p>> Compatibility
Architecture: 68k PPC
MacOS 9 PPC, MacOS 7.6 M68k, using CodeWarrior 6 and 7 Pro.
Whenever I think that the time I invested in some of the mini-projects is lost/wasted time and that it was probably better choice to do just about anything else instead - I come across something like this. The only thing I can conclude is that there is no such thing as wasted time, as long you enjoy the road.<p>Kudos.
Pretty cool!<p>I have heard stories of people in 2025 creating a fat macOS binary containing arm64, x86_64, x86, and ppc slices.<p>I hope that we can get virtualization of x86_64 macOS on arm64 hosts. It would be really cool to be able to do such a thing solely on a modern machine!
I think it's amazing that we would have a new way to make apps running on macOS 9 systems since with a well known standard such as SDL2 we could make far more apps.
Uhm, nothing says <i>what SDL is</i>? The description is an interesting story about the struggles of getting vintage code to build; but it assumes that the reader knows what the thing is to begin with.
Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.