Saturday, October 14, 2006

Old school tricks gone forever. Or not?

In the days of yore, we had OS 8 on our Beige PowerPCs and we liked it. If you are too young to remember those glorious days of Mac tradition, when MS Windows was really, REALLY bad, and
when Napster was the bomb, then open your ears and listen up. If you are one of those old Mac users, maybe this will bring a tear to your eye, nostalgia for the long gone era of Classic.

Back in the age of Classic, the average electronics student/Mac user had a few tools to survive a day of hacking. If, like me, you had a classic EE/CpE course track, you may or may not have used these Apps, and then sadly see them fall in the void of non-support.

Logic Sim (Shareware) by Arnaud Masson
http://archives.math.utk.edu/software/mac/logic/LogicSim/
This software was awesome for the Intro to Logic and Computer Architecture class. It was possible to make logic functions, counters, memories, and user-defined modules. The only equivalent in the PC world was MultimediaLogic (another great app), and it was rather easy to design and test in real time.

As11/Sim68 (Free) by Motorla/Tomaso Paoletti
http://www.cs.uml.edu/~fredm//cher/projects/miniboard/mac/
Great for the Intro to Assembly and Computer Architecture courses. One program to assemble, one to simulate, in continuously or step-by-step. Catching instruction bugs was a breeze with Sim11, reducing those all nighters to 3 hour sleeps :)

However, with the coming of Intel Macs, Classic apps become completely unsupported by Apple. Could this be the end of these tools? It may not be, as much as Steve wants OS 9 gone forever. There is this little Classic replacement that has been lurking the Mac underworld since the days of BeOS: SheepShaver. This webpage shows how to get your Virtual Classic machine on your Intel Mac. Just be warned: it crashes a LOT, a lot more than OS 9 in old Apple hardware.

There must be many more resources that the two I used most heavily. Anyone else had a way to make Classic work in their engineering career?

Related links

Classic 68hc11 resources: http://frank.bol.ucla.edu/machc11.htm
More educational classic software: http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/Archive/sci/

LogicSim screenshot taken from Dan Stone's webpage.

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