VOGONS


Reply 15200 of 27436, by Caluser2000

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Excellent stuff ragefury32

Might even pick up an old. non butterfly keyboard Mac to play with in the future. Retirement isn't far away....

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 15201 of 27436, by Bruninho

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ragefury32 wrote on 2020-05-11, 18:49:
Eh, several things - a) Scully was shown the door in 1994 - the Apple CEO who made the decision to open up clones was Michael S […]
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Eh, several things -
a) Scully was shown the door in 1994 - the Apple CEO who made the decision to open up clones was Michael Spindler (...)

b) Yeah, of course doing it violates the DMCA and the EULA (...)

c) While Apple can in theory take a very strong tack against Hackintoshers, they very rarely do so (...)

d) Speaking of headaches, Hackintoshes are often not worth the hassle (...)

a) About that, I cannot comment, since I came to the Apple userbase around 2010 (although I had an iPhone around 2008). I never used a classic Macintosh, a clone, or anything before Steve Jobs return. I even avoided the Power PC to intel switch (thanks God, I realize it was a nightmare for who came before me and dealt with Rosetta). But my dad had used an Apple IIe in his young days, but he can't recall that much, hence why I set up for him an Apple IIe emulator I've found somewhere, so he could have some nostalgia fun with it. But If were to comment, certainly the clones were their biggest mistake. I wonder what Spindler did with his career after he was, eh... "expelled out".

b) Pretty much the same thought here. As an Apple user since 2010, not counting the iPhones and iPads we've had in the past (and we've sold to buy newer ones we actually own), we have here in house, a 2009 24-inch iMac (with DosDude's patch to run macOS Catalina, and it's running flawlessly thanks to an SSD upgrade), a 2010 13-inch MacBook Pro with a broken power supply, a 2011 i5 Mac Mini which my dad still uses as his desktop computer (also patched for Catalina, upgraded to 16GB and with a new SSD), a 2018 retina 15-inch Macbook Pro i7, which he uses as his daily driver elsewhere. I have a 2013 second-hand 13-inch Macbook Pro i7 with 16GB and 1TB SSD upgrades. Except for the 2010 MBP, all very solid macs. I also happened to own a 2010 MBP and a 2014 MB Air, both of which I sold (the 2010 in 2014, and the 2014 in 2019). From 2014-2017 I had a hackintosh because I needed to shrink my tech to just one machine, with all the Windows needs for my simracing competitions and web dev work. I eventually gave up when I quit simracing so I came back the 2013 rMBP I currently own. Not to mention the AirPorts, Time Capsule, Apple Watches and so on we have. Then you may ask, why did I had a Hackintosh? Apart of the reasons listed above, in Brazil any mac with top configuration or at least the cfg for my simracing needs, exceeds the cost of a brand new car with an 1.0 engine, thanks to import and government taxes. Also, while I worked in brazilian goverment department, all computers were Dell Optiplex, but I couldn't be arsed to deal with all the hassle of running Windows and a local web server on it, neither get used to using different tools and apps for development. The department didn't even want to get a new mac for me (they get all them for the video editing department anyway, so my request was declined). So, I virtualized macOS on it to let me do the work I needed. Performance wise, was decent enough to get the job done so no complaints. I'm a loyal apple user, but recently, with all the mess they've done since Jobs death, I am more and more less inclined to spend money on their expensive hardware and contemplating a move to linux with any distro that looks just like macOS (elementaryOS is one of these). The rumor about ARM macs just caught my attention to get prepared for that switch (to linux, not to ARM, because I do not want to work in any ARM computer).

c) Indeed. It would hurt them in front of their current fans and "future fans" much more if they were after the Hackintosh community, so they chose to pretend they don't exist really. But behind the curtains, they do all they can to stop it with a few changes here and there under the hood of macOS, in a silent manner. The ARM rumor is just adding more fuel to that fire. Pretty sure that if they were after them, the Hackintosh community would just grow up even more, because of the prices Apples has been practising with their product lines.

d) Yup. I had two - one I built myself, worked OOB, allowed me to race while I did my work on it. Maintenance sure was a nightmware after each macOS update. But around 2018, I was looking for portability, so I needed to ditch it and stay with one computer - preferably a laptop type computer. Then I quit simracing but I chose a Dell G7 for the job. While it still allowed me for gaming, the G7 was too big and too heavy to carry around. Then I realized what I was neglecting all that time: a Hackintosh is just not worth the hassle. I was spending more time mantaining than enjoying it. So I sold it, got a 2013 rMBP and never looked back again. If I were asked, I would never do it again, I'd rather move to a linux distro similar to macOS and adapt myself. I do not have complaints about macOS Catalina except the inability to run 32-bit based apps, Gatekeeper and the need to notarize the apps. These were the complaints of my dad - he got very pissed with certain updates. To give you a context, we used to be very big fans, we watched every keynote, but recently, Apple has been doing poor development, we lost the interest in their keynotes and my dad is already considering moving back to Windows. For me, it will be a sad move, and it will happen soon for both of us (he'll move to Windows and I'll move to Linux). Unless Apple can come with a cheaper mac product line with better hardware, I do not see a future with Apple for us. Although I will not ditch the iPad, iPhone or Watch because these have been working so well for me. For example, I'm deaf. Nothing in the market can wake me up in time for the work - I've tried a lot of products for that. The Apple Watch is the only one that does the job flawlessly.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 15202 of 27436, by Caluser2000

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Nothing wrong with ARM at all so why the hatred for it? Linix runs on it fine.. It's just another computer architecture. What matters is the software you run on that system and what you do with that software that matters. Acorn Risc systems is an interest of mine. Bang for buck ARM is the way to go.

There are millions of ARM devices in use every single day.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 15203 of 27436, by Bruninho

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Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-11, 20:42:

Nothing wrong with ARM at all so why the hatred for it? Linix runs on it fine.. It's just another computer architecture. What matters is the software you run on that system and what you do with that software that matters. Acorn Risc systems is an interest of mine. Bang for buck ARM is the way to go.

There. The apps I like to use aren't on it and most will never be. And I don't want to change them all in just one go. I've tested some ARM in the past and I found them very, very limited, too much power-hungry, and the apps simply didn't give me what I need to do what I want. I even threw one through the window when I got so pissed at how limited it was.

For example, my favorite web dev IDE, Panic Coda, has ceased development to work in a newer and completely different version called Panic Nova. I am one of their beta testers. I simply hated Nova from the first time because they changed absolutely everything I got used to in Coda. There is no Coda version for Windows or Linux and there will never be. Not even for an ARM mac. And I don't want to use any emulator for it (remember PPC/Intel and Rosetta days? No thanks). I simply refuse to change from Coda because I am very, very comfortable doing my work there and have guaranteed the results and quality of my hard work on it. I'd simply stay with an old mac with the last x64 macOS version just to work with Coda if they ever switched to ARM macs.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 15204 of 27436, by doogie

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The battle for a top-end socket A system continues..

Picked up a cheap, complete system that looked like it was a plain ol' home computer built by a local shop. Reasonably clean inside and out, and it looked like the case had never been opened after the initial build. Perfect. Components were of very mixed quality, but the real prize in there (other than the seller claiming it was tested) was the ECS N2U400-A.

I disassembled everything and cleaned the motherboard (and boy, that's actually kind of interesting with its purple PCB!), and fired it up with its very tired stock AMD cooler, a 2600+, and 512MB RAM. All good.

Updated the BIOS, and installed a new battery.

Let's roll with the upgrades then!
Recycled the garbage no-name power supply and subbed in my NOS PC Power & Cooling unit. Upgraded the cooler to a Zalman CNPS7000B. Dropped 2GB of DDR400 in. Swapped to my just-arrived Barton 3200+.
Except.......now, no POST. Shucks!

Swapped the known good CPU back in and, imagine that, no problems again. hmmmm......no bent pins, die looks to be in one piece, who knows. The processor was also sold as working so I suppose I'll be getting in touch with the seller.

Reply 15205 of 27436, by Caluser2000

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Bruninho wrote on 2020-05-11, 20:51:
Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-11, 20:42:

Nothing wrong with ARM at all so why the hatred for it? Linix runs on it fine.. It's just another computer architecture. What matters is the software you run on that system and what you do with that software that matters. Acorn Risc systems is an interest of mine. Bang for buck ARM is the way to go.

There. The apps I like to use aren't on it and most will never be. And I don't want to change them all in just one go. I've tested some ARM in the past and I found them very, very limited, too much power-hungry, and the apps simply didn't give me what I need to do what I want. I even threw one through the window when I got so pissed at how limited it was.

For example, my favorite web dev IDE, Panic Coda, has ceased development to work in a newer and completely different version called Panic Nova. I am one of their beta testers. I simply hated Nova from the first time because they changed absolutely everything I got used to in Coda. There is no Coda version for Windows or Linux and there will never be. Not even for an ARM mac. And I don't want to use any emulator for it (remember PPC/Intel and Rosetta days? No thanks). I simply refuse to change from Coda because I am very, very comfortable doing my work there and have guaranteed the results and quality of my hard work on it. I'd simply stay with an old mac with the last x64 macOS version just to work with Coda if they ever switched to ARM macs.

How the hell do you know whats going to be included in a ARM based Apple OS? You are just making suppositions at best.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 15206 of 27436, by Bruninho

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Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-11, 21:00:

How the hell do you know whats going to be included in a ARM based Apple OS? You are just making suppositions at best.

Mate, I know it for sure about Panic and Coda. They ceased Coda development in favor of Nova. They will not make an ARM version of Coda. They might do an ARM version for Nova, but I won't be trying it out.

I suppose that most indie or third party developers will give up on Macs when they go ARM because developing for more than one architecture is just not worth it. It has happened before when PPC macs switched to Intel so it's bound to happen again. Almost 90% of the apps I use did not come from App Store, they came from third party developers. So when an ARM mac arrives, there will be little to no ARM compatible apps for mac in their App Store except for the Apple apps that come bundled with the OS. And believe me, I do not use any of these.

Last edited by Bruninho on 2020-05-11, 21:18. Edited 1 time in total.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 15207 of 27436, by Caluser2000

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Lol Remember it is not all about you.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 15208 of 27436, by Caluser2000

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All going well I'll get a nic fitted to my Redstone XT Turbo system. Then button up a Arcon RiscPC I've just finished repairing and start on the next one which I have RiscOS 3.7 roms for.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 15209 of 27436, by Daniël Oosterhuis

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I was playing around today with the Roland Sound Canvas VA VST, looking for MIDIs to try with it. I remembered an old game I used to play called Hopmon. It's a 2001 obscure Japanese 3D Adventure game, starring a Pacman-esque, laser-firing feline character of the same name, who has to traverse puzzles, defeat enemies like ghosts (again, much like Pacman), and overcome obstacles to get all the gems and exit the level. It only has four tracks (one for the menu, the others for three sets of levels, or "Worlds"), but I always quite liked them. Messing around with them, I found out the original composer, T. Kinoshita, used an SK-88 Pro with Cakewalk Professional 6.0 to compose the tracks, intending for an SC-88 Pro as playback device.

So, I played them through the VST in SC-88 Pro, and, well, it sounded so much better. Not just the enhanced clarity and detail over the decrepit Sound Canvas implementation done by Microsoft in Windows, which uses a soundbank of rather low quality samples from the SC-55, but the fact that it uses GS instruments (specifically the drumsets) that the GM.DLS soundbank doesn't offer. Especially the main menu theme, with its alternative drumset, sounds much different from how it would sound when played on Windows with no special MIDI devices.

I've decided to upload the tracks to a second YouTube channel of mine, which you can listen to here. I've also added download links there for 320K MP3s and FLACs, if you want to listen to it in better quality than YouTube provides. This might be the first time anyone outside of the composer and perhaps developers have heard the tracks the way they were intended to sound. You can find the GM.DLS versions of the tracks on YouTube too, if you just search for it. You'll hear just how much better these tracks played through a good Sound Canvas implementation sound.

EDIT: bonus Hopmon GIF:

o7OtTTn.gif

Last edited by Daniël Oosterhuis on 2020-05-11, 22:27. Edited 1 time in total.

sUd4xjs.gif

Reply 15210 of 27436, by ragefury32

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Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-11, 20:42:

Nothing wrong with ARM at all so why the hatred for it? Linix runs on it fine.. It's just another computer architecture. What matters is the software you run on that system and what you do with that software that matters. Acorn Risc systems is an interest of mine. Bang for buck ARM is the way to go.

There are millions of ARM devices in use every single day.

Well, let's see. It's not the ARM architecture hatred as much as the fragmentation of various software environments, the patchwork silicon ecosystem along with the half-ass nature of driver support for all the hardware on the ARM platform.

Sure, the history of ARM hardware is a rich one, but its not like the Babushka doll nature of PC software where the earliest stuff written for DOS works as a drop-in (either via DOSBox or virtualization) on modern x64. If you want to run the Acorn RiscOS (yes, I used to have an Archimedes machine myself) you'll have to figure out a way to emulate the entire environment (which is how you can run Acorn RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi - someone put in the work to make it function with all the plumbing changes under the hood to make it work. The fact that the CPU architecture is roughly similar is just one hurdle amongst many). Hell, there's no way anyone would be able to get Symbian UIQ going easily on a Marvell ThunderX just because it's ARMv8. People tend to forget that the relative ease of running Linux on commodity x86/x64 hardware was based on PC industry standards that allows those devices to be supported, and willingness by hardware vendors to write, support and maintain drivers that works in Linux. That's not the case on the ARM side of things. Certain common things work out of the box, but when it comes to the fancy stuff it's all binary blobs and shims. When it came to ARM cores, there's many more of them, but much more of them are being tossed away due to planned obsolescence. Is there really a good reason to toss away a perfectly capable Snapdragon S4 (SoC found in Samsung Galaxy SIIIs and powerful enough to match 440BX Pentium IIs with a GeForce 3)?

I also don't buy into the entire ARM-is-more-efficient-per-watt argument. Just take a look at using, say, an HP t640 thin client (with a 15w TDP Ryzen embedded R1505) to drive 3 4k60 screens, versus, say, a similar embedded board with an nVidia Tegra X2 (parker). Or point a Bay Trail Atom versus a similar ARM SoC from Mediatek...I am willing to bet that both will come rather close to each other in power consumption and performance characteristics.

Reply 15211 of 27436, by ragefury32

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Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-11, 21:00:
Bruninho wrote on 2020-05-11, 20:51:
Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-11, 20:42:

Nothing wrong with ARM at all so why the hatred for it? Linix runs on it fine.. It's just another computer architecture. What matters is the software you run on that system and what you do with that software that matters. Acorn Risc systems is an interest of mine. Bang for buck ARM is the way to go.

There. The apps I like to use aren't on it and most will never be. And I don't want to change them all in just one go. I've tested some ARM in the past and I found them very, very limited, too much power-hungry, and the apps simply didn't give me what I need to do what I want. I even threw one through the window when I got so pissed at how limited it was.

For example, my favorite web dev IDE, Panic Coda, has ceased development to work in a newer and completely different version called Panic Nova. I am one of their beta testers. I simply hated Nova from the first time because they changed absolutely everything I got used to in Coda. There is no Coda version for Windows or Linux and there will never be. Not even for an ARM mac. And I don't want to use any emulator for it (remember PPC/Intel and Rosetta days? No thanks). I simply refuse to change from Coda because I am very, very comfortable doing my work there and have guaranteed the results and quality of my hard work on it. I'd simply stay with an old mac with the last x64 macOS version just to work with Coda if they ever switched to ARM macs.

How the hell do you know whats going to be included in a ARM based Apple OS? You are just making suppositions at best.

We already know what's included in 3 ARM based Apple OSes. They are called iPhone OS, iPad OS and TV OS.

Given current dev behavior during the MacOS 32 bit phase-out (announcement of end-of-support, no recompiles for popular titles, expecting their end users to pony up for an upgrade to an essentially unchanged 64 bit model), I would not be surprised if some devs will abandon ship if they are being asked to drop x64 support (especially if they have to re-purchase hardware in their build/QA chain to make it happen, and if it's overpriced Apple junk? Forget it). MacOS market share is not exactly growing, and smart money would rather go iPhone OS or Android. Knowing Apple it'll probably be fat binaries for 1 release then a wholesale drop in support. It's already traumatic enough in the past 2-3 releases when they lost focus on MacOS software and hardware and gave us terrible garbage like the butterfly keyboard Macs (ironically I am typing this on a 2015 Macbook 12" with MacOS Catalina)

If they do plan to switchover to ARM, they better hope they can beat Intel/AMD for sustainable Year-over-year speed/efficiency gains for at least 10 years, AND have the sexy hardware to match. When they changed to Intel in 2006 it was after 10 years of PowerPC, 2 years of G4 stagnation (they pissed off Motorola killing off the clones) and G5 disappointment (IBM gave them a gimped server chip) - the Intel Core 2s that came after were qualitatively much better, much cooler running and the first gen MacBooks were nicer machines than the Powerbooks they replaced. They better be able to justify why I want to spend money to buy something ARM that can objectively beat out the Intel Lakes and the AMD Zens in both speed and efficiency (and why I would want one rather that their iPad Pros). I don't think PA Semi (the ARM design shop subsidiary that Apple uses for their A-series SoCs) are quite there yet.

Last edited by ragefury32 on 2020-05-11, 22:16. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 15212 of 27436, by appiah4

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Back on topic, I've done some more soldering on my Snark Barker..

Tubetime-Snark-Barker-Day-02.jpg

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 15213 of 27436, by ragefury32

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Yes, back to the topic - spent an hour tracing the motherboard on my ISIS Imagestream Transport Router to see if it's possible to add the audio jacks back in (it does have a VT82C686B southbridge but I don't see the AC97 audio show up in lspci). Nope, doesn't look like it'll happen. I am awaiting a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz PCI soundcard (with a Crystal CS4630) to show up in my mailbox. Not even sure if my AOpen Cobra YMF744B is working at this point.

Reply 15214 of 27436, by HannibalAnthrope

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Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-11, 16:41:

That is the type of answer I was after. Your part of the 1%. Thank you. Win 3.1 does indeed use Dos calls for certain functions and therefore not would opperate without Dos. Try running Win3.1x without Dos installed and for that matter Win9X,,,
Classis Mac OS does not have that.. And yes I have used that in a Professional setting before using Dos/Win3.x
When Dave Cutler and his team were putting NT together they wanted the option to go completely cli. Bill said no so here we are....That is documented.

Yep... Dave-the-Unix-hater-Cutler 😉 Hates Unix, wanted a NT-cli.... good call on both Dave! 🤣
(I'm just joking around being funny so please don't....)
He did accomplish a lot of great things no denying. But VMS suffered just as many shortcomings as early *nix. Not sure why people get religious with hating pieces of software. If it does what I need, good enough for me.

As for the topic... what "retro" activity I did this morning, or rather last night at midnight, was to download the Dosbox source to my Raspberry Pi and built it with dynrec on and then found one of my favorite games (Lode Runner the Legend Returns) and got it working perfectly. Then I played a few hours, and will a few more 😀 The Pi3B works wonderfully as my retro game machine, running MAME and Dosbox from the console (no X11) which covers all the retro games I love! Who could ask for anything more?! 😀
(well I would be a little happier if I could get the keymapper working right... but I guess I gotta 'use the source' and make some mods to make it happen!)

Cheers everyone!

Reply 15215 of 27436, by HannibalAnthrope

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I'm not quite sure who but I think "bruninho" was mentioning his development tools and not wanting to just wholesale jump to something else because Apple(?) or whoever decided that they needed his upgrade money. And as I read a bunch of these posts, even though I have never used Apple, by swapping a couple of words around most of the posts would read like ones I wrote not long ago myself! I'm a software engineer and I do equal amounts of *nix development and Windows, with dotnet/c#/VisualStudio being my mainstay. But when Windows 10 came around and I started having to spend more time dealing with broken updates and unannounced API changes, not to mention more time helping my clients not go insane, I dug a deep hole and buried my loyalty in it! 🤣 Then I spent a few months gutting Win7.64 to bare bones and ripped out stuff like winupdate and all the bloat. Then another few months writing my own file manager to replace the horrendous Explorer, built myself a civilized browser using CefSharp. And finally, sent my MSDN copy of Visual Studio 2019 along with my last subscription invoice back to Microsoft with a nice FU. Downgraded myself to Visual Studio 2017 COMMUNITY version (as in FREE) and now the only Microsoft I touch is my neutered Win7.64 running MY UI and VS2017. The rest is all KUbuntu and various other *nix. And for me and the work I do, the hardware is irrelevant so I have no loyalty there anymore either.

So when I read all the posts about Apple stuff... it sure sounded familiar as you can see! And ps: if anyone else out there wants to know how did it and how I continue to keep my systems running with an outdated OS and never with the least bit of trouble, pm me and I'll tell you. Certainly wasn't easy because all hw mfgrs were told by MS to stop producing Win7 drivers and software. But it's most definitely possible and not all that hard!

Cheers!

Reply 15216 of 27436, by ShovelKnight

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ragefury32 wrote on 2020-05-11, 22:00:

We already know what's included in 3 ARM based Apple OSes. They are called iPhone OS, iPad OS and TV OS.

Given current dev behavior during the MacOS 32 bit phase-out (announcement of end-of-support, no recompiles for popular titles, expecting their end users to pony up for an upgrade to an essentially unchanged 64 bit model), I would not be surprised if some devs will abandon ship if they are being asked to drop x64 support (especially if they have to re-purchase hardware in their build/QA chain to make it happen, and if it's overpriced Apple junk? Forget it). MacOS market share is not exactly growing, and smart money would rather go iPhone OS or Android. Knowing Apple it'll probably be fat binaries for 1 release then a wholesale drop in support. It's already traumatic enough in the past 2-3 releases when they lost focus on MacOS software and hardware and gave us terrible garbage like the butterfly keyboard Macs (ironically I am typing this on a 2015 Macbook 12" with MacOS Catalina)

If they do plan to switchover to ARM, they better hope they can beat Intel/AMD for sustainable Year-over-year speed/efficiency gains for at least 10 years, AND have the sexy hardware to match. When they changed to Intel in 2006 it was after 10 years of PowerPC, 2 years of G4 stagnation (they pissed off Motorola killing off the clones) and G5 disappointment (IBM gave them a gimped server chip) - the Intel Core 2s that came after were qualitatively much better, much cooler running and the first gen MacBooks were nicer machines than the Powerbooks they replaced. They better be able to justify why I want to spend money to buy something ARM that can objectively beat out the Intel Lakes and the AMD Zens in both speed and efficiency (and why I would want one rather that their iPad Pros). I don't think PA Semi (the ARM design shop subsidiary that Apple uses for their A-series SoCs) are quite there yet.

One of my good friends who was a Mac developer at the time grimly predicted 5 years ago that Apple would slowly turn macOS into a mostly locked-down operating system with heavy sandboxing for all apps, draconian privacy/security restrictions and no way to distribute applications outside of Mac App Store.

I would say he was almost spot on, Catalina is not only a steaming pile of garbage, it's also a total nightmare when it comes to app entitlements (the system is not only cumbersome, it's also broken in many places and some things that used to work now don't), and given the notarisation requirements, I feel the move to Mac App Store only is basically just around the corner. If they switch to ARM, this would be a good excuse to enforce the MAS-only policy.

I used to worry about the state of Mac hardware, these days I'm much more concerned about software. I'm not running Catalina on my main Mac, but the latest Boot ROM update managed to completely break display detection both on my Mac mini and my MacBook Pro. It's now a total gamble whether the displays would wake when I wake up the computer, half of the time I need to unplug them and plug them in again. Thanks, Apple.

In the last 3 years, they went from "It just works" to "It mostly works" to "It sometimes works". What's next, "It just doesn't work"?

Reply 15217 of 27436, by Caluser2000

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HannibalAnthrope wrote on 2020-05-11, 23:03:

I'm not quite sure who but I think "bruninho" was mentioning his development tools and not wanting to just wholesale jump to something else because Apple(?) or whoever decided that they needed his upgrade money. And as I read a bunch of these posts, even though I have never used Apple, by swapping a couple of words around most of the posts would read like ones I wrote not long ago myself! I'm a software engineer and I do equal amounts of *nix development and Windows, with dotnet/c#/VisualStudio being my mainstay. But when Windows 10 came around and I started having to spend more time dealing with broken updates and unannounced API changes, not to mention more time helping my clients not go insane, I dug a deep hole and buried my loyalty in it! 🤣 Then I spent a few months gutting Win7.64 to bare bones and ripped out stuff like winupdate and all the bloat. Then another few months writing my own file manager to replace the horrendous Explorer, built myself a civilized browser using CefSharp. And finally, sent my MSDN copy of Visual Studio 2019 along with my last subscription invoice back to Microsoft with a nice FU. Downgraded myself to Visual Studio 2017 COMMUNITY version (as in FREE) and now the only Microsoft I touch is my neutered Win7.64 running MY UI and VS2017. The rest is all KUbuntu and various other *nix. And for me and the work I do, the hardware is irrelevant so I have no loyalty there anymore either.

So when I read all the posts about Apple stuff... it sure sounded familiar as you can see! And ps: if anyone else out there wants to know how did it and how I continue to keep my systems running with an outdated OS and never with the least bit of trouble, pm me and I'll tell you. Certainly wasn't easy because all hw mfgrs were told by MS to stop producing Win7 drivers and software. But it's most definitely possible and not all that hard!

Cheers!

That would be awesome. I skipped Vitsa through Win8.1 or whatever. Used my wife's laptop with Win10 on it for 12 months and then decided to put the P4 with Mint on it back in to service. Theres a nice 19" Trinitron crt the matches it 😀 File management on this is a dream compared to Win1o . Even my wife is using this ol gal more and more for her craft-work. I've installed Palemoon on both the laptop and she finds using this system is much moother for her. Even she has complaind about things having changed on Win1o compared to when she bought the laptop new. Performance wise there is very little difference with that laptop and this P4 system in respect to surfing the internet a doing things like viewing Youtube etc. Basically it's not what you have but what you actually do with it at the end of the day that matters.

Last edited by Caluser2000 on 2020-05-11, 23:36. Edited 1 time in total.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 15218 of 27436, by Deksor

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appiah4 wrote on 2020-05-11, 22:11:
Back on topic, I've done some more soldering on my Snark Barker.. […]
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Back on topic, I've done some more soldering on my Snark Barker..

Tubetime-Snark-Barker-Day-02.jpg

Oh you're doing one too ?
I'm ready to build mine as well, I'll start soon 😁

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 15219 of 27436, by dionb

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appiah4 wrote on 2020-05-11, 22:11:
Back on topic, I've done some more soldering on my Snark Barker.. […]
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Back on topic, I've done some more soldering on my Snark Barker..

Tubetime-Snark-Barker-Day-02.jpg

Looking neater than when I did mine - and mine still worked fine, so you should be safe 😀

Did a nailbiting BIOS upgrade today of my Compaq SW400 motherboard (i840 dual-channel RDRAM, from an AP550 worksation). Seemed to be hanging for almost 15 minutes before giving a success message.

Good result: clock now keeps time properly after reboot.
Less good result: my Katmai P3-600 now gives a microcode error, where it previously didn't. Also Tualatin still doesn't boot.