Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-21, 01:44:

There are two mechanisms, essentially, which ensure backwards compatibility.
Carbon API, which is supported on both Mac OS 8/9 and OS X and which has a subset of the old Mac OS API.
Mac applications compiled for Carbon API run on both platforms, even on Intel-based Mac OS X up until 10.6.8 (through Rosetta).

Carbon apps can be compiled for Intel up to when they dropped support for 32-bit apps (and they never made a 64-bit version of Carbon). Catalina IIRC...

(That being said, I don't know if you can make a single Carbon app that can run on OS 9, PPC OS X, and Intel OS X. It's one of those things that an enthusiasty developer might have tried, just like someone made a single app with native PPC, x86 and ARM...)

Well I do not think there is much difference between the two systems if you go back to 604e and G3 compared to Intel "at the exact time frame" of using each in mid 1990's. If you consider what those systems were mostly used for: PC = games mostly, Mac = photo/video mostly. Have a 604e and G3 and compared to similar Intel build of same era they both shine in there respective areas. You can not compare them by bench marks as those are mostly synthetic things. Just my opinion...
Still have the PM7300 and G3 box (can't recall exact P3 model), am just spouting memories of using both in mid 90's...this is comparing apples to oranges 🤣

^I'm just a layman here, but I think that the Macintosh had it worse here.
DOS VGA PC games were in low-res at 320x200 256c, while Macintosh games of the day ran in 512x348 or 640x480 in 256c and up.

It way until the mid-90s when VBE did catch on and 640x400 or 640x480 got more widespred on DOS platform.
(Exception to the rule, top notch graphics adventures and simulators such as FS4 had used SVGA in 800x600 16c before.)

I think the closest counterpart to a mid-90s Macintosh experience was a fast 486 or Pentium PC running Windows 3.1/95, maybe.
It had the power ro run demanding games on a 640x480 desktop, using GDI or WinG.

By late 90s, a beige Macintosh with a G3 processor, a 3D Rage card and a Voodoo 2 was probably high-end.
CPU accelerators (Sonnet) and clone systems (Umax) were also a thing.

By early 2000s, a Macintosh with a G4 proccessor with Altivec unit was probably high-end.
In simple words, Altivec was akin to MMX and available in later G4 chips.

Games of that time were Real Myst, which would run on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.0 or 10.1.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/2668/real-myst/

The problem is, hower, that Macintosh specific 3D APIs were dropped from Mac OS X.
Mac OS X was all OpenGL, while Mac OS 8/9 had APIs similar to Direct Draw and Direct 3D.
So Mac OS X wasn't an upgrade in every sense. Dual boot was good to have as an option.

Edit: Here's maybe something more interesting: Network performance.
The AppleTalk implementation on Mac OS-based servers were worse performing than necessary.

That's because Mac OS was single-tasked, whereas OSes like A/UX supported multitasking.
So it wasn't the Power PC hardware or Motorola hardware of the Macintoshs that were slow.
It was Mac OS, which didn't support parallel processing. Really bad for a server.

In hindsight, it's sad that A/UX didn't catch on. It had possed certain possibilities.
It could even run the Finder and certain Mac applications.

Too bad I could find that video with the benchmarking anymore. 🙁

Prince of Persia on A/UX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFMvzysIXzY

Adventures in A/UX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw

Macintosh IIfx - Booting Apple Unix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFMvzysIXzY

Apple A/UX: The First UNIX Mac OS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI

Install A/UX 2 On a Macintosh IIcx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTPv7tnNPcY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

Oh yes I remember that. Mac OS X dropped support for the ATI GPU used in the iMac G3. People who 'upgraded' to OS X could no longer play recently-bought games.

Apple's recommended 'solution' was for people to buy an iMac G4. This used an Nvidia GPU which was fully supported by OS X.

There were lawsuits over this.

Errius wrote on 2024-10-21, 08:08:

Oh yes I remember that. Mac OS X dropped support for the ATI GPU used in the iMac G3. People who 'upgraded' to OS X could no longer play recently-bought games.

Apple's recommended 'solution' was for people to buy an iMac G4. This used an Nvidia GPU which was fully supported by OS X.

There were lawsuits over this.

Now that you mention nVidia GPUs..
I vaguely remember that the GeForce 3 Ti was a bit ahead of its time.
It had advanced shader features that did pre-date DirectX 9/D3D 9.
And DirectX 8 didn't know what to do with that, either.

That GPU generation also was among latest being supported on Mac OS 9.2, I think.
The GF4MX uses a GF2 core, after all, so it's no real GF4.
GeForce FX was popular among Mac OS X Tiger fans, but provided no 3D acceleration on Mac OS 9.2. The Radeon 9xxx was popular, to, I think.
Owners of that G4 Cube talked about them in forums back in the 2000s/2010s..

Edit: The GeForce 2 and 4MX were very flashing friendly, I remember.
Especially those models with an through-hole EEPROM.
So it was possible to use PC cards and flash them for Macs.
Their use of AGP 4x made them compatible with AGP 2x machines, too, I think. Or was it other way round?

Edit: The only thing to be careful about was the story with the power pins.
Some Mac models had used AGP pins for power delivery to the ADC monitor connector.

About network performance: there was even a "MacServerIP" from Cyansoft, which ran on Windows NT and claimed to have 3-5 times faster throughput.
So basically they used Windows NT to serve Macs with their own file system. This supports the claim that it was not the file system, but the actual implemented driver stack, which slowed the network speed.

Apples networking interface was slow as hell until A/UX and then OSX.

Apple switched to X86 because of laptops. Jobs could sell the G5 was king against X86 with special benchmarks but a G5 would never work in a laptop and Apple sold lots of laptops.

Powermac G4 desktops made it up to dual 1.42Ghz (2003) before going G5 but the laptops had to deal with a single 1.67Ghz in 2005 when there were Quad G5 desktops.

Apple got lucky with the 68K chips having a decent design that lasted a long time along with many other companies using that chip so R&D expenses could be spread out. The early PPC were made by IBM and Motorola until IBM jumped ship after the G3 and the volume and profit of the G4 didn't justify the R&D for Motorola nobody else was using it in volume. The G5 was an offshoot of IBMs server chip so Apple was at the mercy of IBM's R&D.

Skorbin wrote on 2024-10-21, 13:50:

So basically they used Windows NT to serve Macs with their own file system.

That seems weird. Windows NT Advanced Server always had the ability to serve AppleShare directly - I forget what it was called, Services for Macintosh maybe? NTFS can even do data/resource forks to properly handle classic Mac files...

So why a third party product based on NT?

Unknown_K wrote on 2024-10-21, 21:11:

Apple got lucky with the 68K chips having a decent design that lasted a long time along with many other companies using that chip so R&D expenses could be spread out.

And that comes back to the point I made earlier - it is very unfortunate that everybody using 68K bought the 'CISC is doomed! must move to a RISC ISA' narrative and dumped 68K after the 68040 (I don't know of any general purpose computer that used the 68060, although there may be some...).

And most of those people went in different directions - some did their own RISC stuff (Sun), some attempted to partner with others but ended up effectively doing their own RISC stuff (Apple), who knows where some of the 68K embedded applications went, etc.

My guess is that if these people had not given up on 68K, Motorola could have invested in it and kept it going, possibly to this day...

This is where the decentralized nature of the DOS/Windows/x86 platform somewhat helped. There wasn't really anyone in charge to panic and say 'x86 is doomed', so... they just kept buying x86 chips, Intel kept upgrading x86 chips, eventually Intel/x86 ate the world. (The closest thing to such a panic, I think, was probably Microsoft shipping NT for a couple of RISC platforms) And you see the flip side of this when Intel tried to push Itanium...

I have a celeron 400 laptop, windows 95, and eats my 500mhz g3 pismo,in almost everything, the pismo looks like slow motion compared to the PC, whatever boot OS9 or Tiger. For example mplayer playing a divx is almost half speed in lombard compared to celeron

But.... i love my Pismo!!!!

Errius wrote on 2024-10-21, 08:08:

Oh yes I remember that. Mac OS X dropped support for the ATI GPU used in the iMac G3. People who 'upgraded' to OS X could no longer play recently-bought games.

Apple's recommended 'solution' was for people to buy an iMac G4. This used an Nvidia GPU which was fully supported by OS X.

There were lawsuits over this.

Does this include the ATI rage 128 cards? My iMac g4 came with one and Mac OS X supports it.

I searched for relevant papers from that period, organized the data of the SPEC testing program, and created the following table for reference

Does this include the ATI rage 128 cards? My iMac g4 came with one and Mac OS X supports it.

I think so. Basic 2D support should work on Mac OS X, but 3D support might be missing.
I suppose a Radeon is required here, rather than a Rage.

But if it matters also depends on the Mac OS X version in question, maybe.
Early Mac OS X versions don't need 3D support so much yet, the 3D GUI is still rendered mostly in software. Games are another matter, though.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger does provide some fancy 3D animations, if a GeForce FX or similar graphics card is installed. Otherwise, the normal eye candy is available.
- That card also has OpenGL 2. Celestia, a planetarium software, on Mac OS X can take advantage of it, I remember.

More information about rendering on Tiger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compos … #Quartz_Extreme
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/#page-14

‐
For Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3, a GeForce 2 to GeForce 4MX might be good enough already, though. Feature wise, I mean.
Quartz Extreme can already make use of their OpenGL graphics capabilities to draw the Aqua GUI.
Mac OS 9.2 also can fully use these graphics cards, too.

Not sure about situation of Mac OS X 10.1, however.
I've used it on an iMac G3 with an on-board Rage graphics card and the GUI looked fine to me.
I don’t think it was accelerated, though.

That was in 2000s, I think. I've previously run Mac OS 8.5 or 8.6 and 10.0 Cheetah on that iMac G3, I think. I got it second hand back then.
Later, I've bought a boxed copy of 10.1 Puma, which had Mac OS 9.2 included.
It ran "okay" after I upgraded RAM to at least 128MB or so.

PS: For best graphics acceleration on Mac OS X, the card should be AGP and have 16MB video memory as a minimum.
PCI cards aren’t supported by Quartz Extreme in 10.4 Tiger, unless a little "hack" is being used.
"Extreme"-something refers to the GPU-assisted versions of an API or graphics engine, in simple words.

Sorry for the long post. It's been quite a few years since I tinkered with these things and flashed graphics cards.
I once used to know these things a bit better than I do now. 😅

Edited.

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-21, 21:52:

This is where the decentralized nature of the DOS/Windows/x86 platform somewhat helped. There wasn't really anyone in charge to panic and say 'x86 is doomed', so... they just kept buying x86 chips, Intel kept upgrading x86 chips, eventually Intel/x86 ate the world. (The closest thing to such a panic, I think, was probably Microsoft shipping NT for a couple of RISC platforms) And you see the flip side of this when Intel tried to push Itanium...

I think the heavy competition from AMD and Cyrix during the 90's plus the internet boom is what made x86 king. The sheer volume of chips made plus the frantic speed increases from innovation made x86 king.

Intel was always known for its fabs and massive production more than CPU design, which is why PPC had a chance to shine for a while. Cyrix bit the dust and AMD stumbled after the Phenom II so Intel coasted for a long time. If neither AMD or Cyrix existed, I would think Intel's progress would have been much slower allowing other platforms to find sustainable niches. Intel would still be trying to sell Itaniums or i960's.

No.
Source: myself.
Why?
I bought a brand new iBook G4 800MHz for my wife, upgraded memory. This thing was borderline unusable, just could barely run Mac OS X. And starting OpenOffice (which also used stupid X server) took several minutes.
My Toshiba Portege 3480 with 600MHz Pentium III (which was old crap at that time) ran circles around this thing. There was no comparison. That is why Apple switched to Intel.

I was happy with my iBook G3 Clamshell. 🤷
It was mainly running Mac OS 9.2, though and had its RAM upgraded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWVsgMLnE54

PS: There's macports for Macs running Mac OS X.
It may require system updates for X11 and XCode, though.
The Apple software update doesn't cut it, manual download of several DMGs may be required.
https://www.macports.org/

Edit:

Unknown_K wrote on 2024-10-22, 07:29:

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-21, 21:52:

This is where the decentralized nature of the DOS/Windows/x86 platform somewhat helped. There wasn't really anyone in charge to panic and say 'x86 is doomed', so... they just kept buying x86 chips, Intel kept upgrading x86 chips, eventually Intel/x86 ate the world. (The closest thing to such a panic, I think, was probably Microsoft shipping NT for a couple of RISC platforms) And you see the flip side of this when Intel tried to push Itanium...

I think the heavy competition from AMD and Cyrix during the 90's plus the internet boom is what made x86 king. The sheer volume of chips made plus the frantic speed increases from innovation made x86 king.

Intel was always known for its fabs and massive production more than CPU design, which is why PPC had a chance to shine for a while. Cyrix bit the dust and AMD stumbled after the Phenom II so Intel coasted for a long time. If neither AMD or Cyrix existed, I would think Intel's progress would have been much slower allowing other platforms to find sustainable niches. Intel would still be trying to sell Itaniums or i960's.

Oof! That's something! The story of x86 was different back then than of today, I think.
For one did intel allow second sourcing of pre-386 chips (the 80286!) and secondly, 486 compatibles were the hit and were made by a dozen manufacturers.
Obviously, x86 couldn't be "doomed" if it essentially was an open architecture at the time.

Last but not least, has AMD changed a lot since its early days.
AMD nolonger cares that much about x86 processors, but has a much bigger interest in big iron.
https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-release … taining-le.html

Edit: I forgot. Internet technology maybe didn't depend on x86 so much in the grand picture. Okay, to the world of the end-user it did, maybe.
Programs such as Apache server and Internet Explorer 5 were available on Unix systems, too. Such as Solaris, HP UX, etc. Sim City, too, by the way! 😁
https://virtuallyfun.com/2022/12/30/simcity-f … unix-liberated/

Running Windows 3.1 on Unix was possible in mid-90s, too.
Either by running WABI, which ran 386 Protected Mode kernal on top of *nix or by using SoftWindows or older PC emulators like Merge.
The latter two didn't require an x86 processor, even. They could run on a RISC workstation, as well.

For Macintosh applications, there was something similar available.
It was Macintosh Application Environment (MAE).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Appli … ion_Environment

These things seem somewhat weird nowadays, but in the 90s they had been very promising.
Back then, no one was certain what would happen to x86 in the near future and if modern RISC architectures such as Power PC or Alpha AXP processors would catch on or not.
That's why Windows NT had been available to four platforms in the 90s, also, I think.

Edited. My appologies for the poor wording. I'm writing on an mobile device right now.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-23, 22:39:

Obviously, x86 couldn't be "doomed" if it essentially was an open architecture at the time.

The 'doomed' rhetoric was about the idea that CISC ISAs could not continue to scale up in performance. How many people are trying to make a processor with a given CISC ISA shouldn't really matter in that context...

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-23, 22:39:

Edit: I forgot. Internet technology maybe didn't depend on x86 so much in the grand picture. Okay, to the world of the end-user it did, maybe.
Programs such as Apache server and Internet Explorer 5 were available on Unix systems, too. Such as Solaris, HP UX, etc. Sim City, too, by the way! 😁
https://virtuallyfun.com/2022/12/30/simcity-f … unix-liberated/

'The Internet' in the 1990s was probably running on Sun machines running SunOS and later Solaris more than anything. That seems to be what replaced VAXes running 4.xBSD. Some people started using x86 servers running Solaris for Intel or BSDI. Then towards 1997-1998, you start to see more FreeBSD and especially more Linux, especially on x86.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-23, 22:39:

These things seem somewhat weird nowadays, but in the 90s they had been very promising.
Back then, no one was certain what would happen to x86 in the near future and if modern RISC architectures such as Power PC or Alpha AXP processors would catch on or not.
That's why Windows NT had been available to four platforms in the 90s, also, I think.

This dates way back to the late 1980s and the general view that CISC is doomed and RISC is the future. That's why Sun dumped 68K for SPARC. It's why Apple joined forces with IBM to make PPC. I'm not sure if SGI used CISC chips before moving to MIPS. DEC went from the CISC VAX architecture to the RISC Alpha. Etc.

And that's why Microsoft made NT very cross-platform. They didn't want to be left behind in the move away from CISC. And they wanted to enter the 'serious OS' market in which, frankly, they didn't play in 1992.

But... as we know... Intel found a way to adapt RISC principles to a CISC instruction set, launched the P6 microarchitecture, scaled up the performance, and the rest is basically history. By the turn of the millennium, say, you could get a PIII 8xx MHz server that would significantly outperform a 500MHz UltraSPARC whatever... and the Sun box cost more. The Sun box had better manageability, but once that got added to x86 servers, oops... (I have some memories of playing with Netra T1 AC200s and a Netra... was it X1? the supercheap model? Nice boxes to send to a colo across the country, but not leaders in performance per dollar).

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-23, 22:39:

Last but not least, has AMD changed a lot since its early days.
AMD nolonger cares that much about x86 processors, but has a much bigger interest in big iron.
https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-release … taining-le.html

AMD has a very limited production volume spread out over console, GPU, AI, and X64 chips they order production capacity years in advance. So, AMD tries to make the most money with that allocation and server and AI chips make the most bang for the money while console chips make the least but are sold in volumes that keep the lights on. Intel has the volume to make everything from budget to nosebleed chips and that why they have the most market share because they came meet all their customers' needs in whatever volume they want. If AMD was selling the top GPU at $1500 a pop, then they would allocate more chips to that.

Unknown_K wrote on 2024-10-24, 00:48:

Intel has the volume to make everything from budget to nosebleed chips and that why they have the most market share because they came meet all their customers' needs in whatever volume they want. If AMD was selling the top GPU at $1500 a pop, then they would allocate more chips to that.

Not anymore. Last time I saw the news Intel had lost a lot of value and there was some speculation whether or not qualcomm would buy intel.
Not sure what would be better, though. Intel isn't exactly a fine company, it's rather unsymphatic nowadays. For its plans with x86S alone I would wish intel an slow and qualful* dea, err, decline.

(*bad pun, because of qualcomm; qualvoll means painful in German)

Edit: What intel did to PC platform in recent years by forcing UEFI platform onto PC industry wasn't nice, either.
Intels iniative to force removal of CSM (BIOS) means the end of openness of PC platform.

While today BIOS is just seen as an irrelevant piece of archaic firmware to most, it really used to be the very heart of x86 PC architecture.
Along with 86 instructions set it gave the PC life and made it compatible.

That's why I think it would just be fair if intel would vanish before it can succeeed in ruining x86 PC platform.

Edit: Personaly, l suspect that the idea x86S came mind at intel becathe company struggels to compete with ARM.
The simplifaction of x86 is a sacrifice to save intel, rather than to improve x86 ISA for everyone. It's a very selfish move, I think.

Intel still sells more chips than AMD because AMD can't make enough to take over the market. AMD has little presence in the laptop market (21% compared to Intel's 71%) for one because they can't make enough chips for it.

Intel has lost value in their stock for sure. Intel's revenue was $12.8B for the 3 months ending in June while AMD was $5.8B