BeOS PowerPC: a sad tale of Apple hardware

BeOS PowerPC emulation finally become possible: BeOS? · Issue #35 · dingusdev/dingusppc · GitHub

2 Likes

Yes. I haven’t had time to test it yet but it is a big step forward.

I think a BeBox emulator would be possible now based on Dingus.

1 Like

I backed up much of BeBits and BeOS development on my old Zip drive and then to a portable hard drive. Lot of the sources of certain code was linked to a developer’s website so wasn’t local to the BeBits server. I was testing Haiku’s BeOS backward compatibility a few years ago (dang!) which is pretty good besides a few closed-source commercial games.

BeOS PPC emulator? Interesting. I was watching a video of someone running BeOS R4.5 on a G3 updated PowerMac 7300/200.

There is a Hobbit emulator called “Hobbitizer” here-

Of course that was before PowerPC BeOS but it does run Hobbit version of BeOS

1 Like

Does it actually boot?

AFAIK yes. It’s been a while since I looked at it.. I remember the author posted screenshots of it booted into BeOS but I don’t recall if I got it to boot.

You can find hard drive images for Hobbit BeBox here https://fsck.technology/software/Be/

And this site has some helpful info on restoration (an amazing archive of old tech!) http://typewritten.org/

2 Likes

Yes (tested myself).

4 Likes

Oh that looks nice!
Would you share the binaries you just made, please?

I managed to build it on Linux only. Not ported yet to Haiku. On Linux it can be built like any regular Rust program.

I figured as much, thanks!
Now to find a machine with free storage space…

I’m going to need your help a bit with it cause I I’m getting warnings all around and the resulting binary doesn’t work…and I don’t think @puckipedia is still around on the forums.

Which version of rust did you use to compile it?

Which machine are you using for emulation and which version of BeOS? Have any patches been applied to the source code?

I tried the PM7300 and BeOS 3 - the boot process stops at the floppy drive. With BeOS 5, it couldn’t find the BFS partition on the CD.

There are no BeOS R3 or R5 for Hobbit BeBox. Hobbit was already abandoned at that time. You are probably confusing it with something else.

Yes, I made a mistake. I thought it was a screenshot from the DingusPPC emulator.

It was possible to launch it, but the mouse is glitchy and the emulator crashes during disk formatting.

Have a look on one of the Mac abandonware sites. There is a pre prepared image.