I bought a Power Mac G4 (2003) the day after they were discontinued in June 2004. My main reason is that it was the only model of Mac (at the time) that would hold 4 hard disks and 2 DVD drives internally. A secondary reason is that it was the last CPU Apple sold capable of booting directly into Mac OS 9. I’m not an old-school Mac graphic designer, but I figured it might be useful to have that ability at some point in the future.
The unit came with OS 9 on the hard drive, I believe, but since I formatted the hard drive first thing, it never had the chance to boot OS 9. Well, today, I finally did.
Why the hell, might you ask, am I looking to boot an OS that was discontinued almost 7 years ago? The answer is slightly complex, actually. I’ve got a metric crapton of old Apple system floppy images that I want to test and verify. Operating system images, actually. No problem, you say. Well, early Apple systems used a file system called the Macintosh File System, or MFS. Problem is, MFS is not supported in Apple’s OSes beginning with Mac OS 8, and even System 7.5 cannot format a disk as MFS. This leads to problems.
I’m having a bitch of a time getting software like Basilisk II and SheepShaver to work right on OS X 10.5.4 on my MacBook Pro. I do seem to remember, though, that there were some good Mac Plus or Mac II emulators that ran under OS 9, which is where the trusty old G4 tower comes in. I’m going to work on that soon. I’ve already got 9.2.2 installed on an external FireWire HD, which isn’t so crazy until you realize that this 7 year old OS is installed on a 2.5″ portable drive that stores 160GB. I don’t think that 160GB drives were readily available at that point in time, but I could be wrong.
Anyways, this is my kind of computing nostalgia. I could try MFSLives, but I’m kinda up for the challenge. Any advice from you, my loyal readers?