Thought I'd start a thread on one of the coolest pieces of software for System 7+ in my opinion: Professional MachTen.


It's 4.3BSD running on top of your System 7 machine and doesn't require an MMU (I've even run it on my Plus). It supports networking through ethernet/PPP/supposedly MacIP gateways (but I've never gotten that to actually work... any ideas?), comes with your choice of X11R5 or X11R6 and has GCC out of the box. :)

You can run https://github.com/classilla/cryanc on it, combine that with MacLynx, and access TLS encrypted sites natively on your Mac (probably not going to happen on 68000 machines :) ).

I believe Tenon may have shipped a broken version of ManTen (Hypercard man page viewer) with MachTen 2.3? If you don't know about MachTen, then basically you have a "MachTen" root folder somewhere on your disk, and then within it is MachTen's filesystem with the folders you expect (var, usr, etc.). Running ManTen with this setup results in the man pages have not been installed error pictured below, but moving MachTen's usr folder to the root of the actual Mac disk allows them to be loaded. Is this a mistake in the stack or am I missing something here?

Amending the path to :MachTen 2.3 Root:usr:man:Man for each button does fix the issue as well.

Ideally, I'd like to make this a relative path. ManTen sits in a folder deeper than where usr is, but changing the path to ::usr:man:Man didn't seem to fix it. Any ideas? I've never messed with HyperCard at all before this really.

Oh wow, I remember this! I remember playing with it on my 9600 - Power MacTen which is BSD 4.4 on PowerPC.

Looks like the latest doesn't have any license info.

>> eric said:

Oh wow, I remember this! I remember playing with it on my 9600 - Power MacTen which is BSD 4.4 on PowerPC. Power MachTen 4.x - Macintosh Garden MachTen is a Unix-like operating system from Tenon Intersystems. It is based on 4.4BSD and the Mach kernel, and features the X Window System and GNU programming tools. It runs only as a classic Mac OS application program (in a virtual machine) on Apple Macintosh computers. macintoshgarden.org Looks like the latest doesn't have any license info. Click to expand...

Indeed, and Tenon is unreachable at this point. I've even gone so far as to actually mail a letter to their current address. However, you can supposedly pretty easily get around the license check with a hex edit (see nn99's comment on that Macintosh Garden page).

Also, Professional MachTen has no license check.

>> larbob said:

hex edit (see nn99's comment on that Macintosh Garden page). Click to expand...

I am trying this right now :) Just resedit for hex editing or does it need to be done in the nix env?

>> eric said:

I am trying this right now Just resedit for hex editing or does it need to be done in the nix env? Click to expand...

I haven't done it myself, but I'd assume it'd work either way.

Well I dont see a way to edit it in BSD - not quite sure what hex editor I could use in BSD here. (also resedit wont work as it's editing resource forks which dont exist, donno what I was thinking)

>> eric said:

Well I dont see a way to edit it in BSD - not quite sure what hex editor I could use in BSD here. (also resedit wont work as it's editing resource forks which dont exist, donno what I was thinking) Click to expand...

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/hexedit-107 perhaps?

On the MachTen side, you could try compiling some version of vim and using xxd or something.

Ok, I was able to edit the file by copying `cd /hfs` then up a directory (as it's a symlink) `cp /sbin/init ./init` edit with HexEdit, copy it back. Moved the date in the future and it expired and wont let me continue. Doesn't seem to work.

Ok, I got it! Uploaded the patch to the garden. Power MachTen 4.1.4 is now usable!

Thanks for the memories and now a working 4.1.4 to play with.

>> eric said:

Ok, I got it! Uploaded the patch to the garden. Power MachTen 4.1.4 is now usable! Thanks for the memories and now a working 4.1.4 to play with. Click to expand...

I set up 9.2.2 in QEMU to try for myself (can't access my PPC Macs right now) and the route I went was compiling vim 5.8 and editing /sbin/init directly using vim and xxd. That also seemed to work; I set the date to 11/03/2022 and it didn't complain.

You should try out cryanc/carl + Classilla! You can connect to TLS 1.2 encrypted sites on your machine that way on Classic Mac OS. :)

Awesome! Any other must have software here? I'll start compiling :) Looks like I need to find a Gopher client to download carl too.

I wonder if it'll compile circle mud easier then on a/ux @Action Retro :)

>> eric said:

Awesome! Any other must have software here? I'll start compiling Looks like I need to find a Gopher client to download carl too. I wonder if it'll compile circle mud easier then on a/ux @Action Retro Click to expand...

I'm not sure, I haven't actually messed with Power MachTen much, definitely the 68k version moreso. I wonder how bad it'd be to get GCC 2.95.3 or similar up on it...?

It's definitely something I want to mess with more eventually. Now that we know the patch works I'll have to get out my G4 when I can.

>> eric said:

Awesome! Any other must have software here? I'll start compiling Looks like I need to find a Gopher client to download carl too. I wonder if it'll compile circle mud easier then on a/ux @Action Retro Click to expand...

If I could run a CircleMUD server on a Mac Plus, I'd be quite happy! :)