Last year we were playing around with the Macintosh Classic, thanks to Pendleton115. We wanted to get it internet-ready, but the old browsers were fighting my modern hosting setup. At the time I blamed HTTP/0.9; later testing showed MacWeb, Mosaic and Netscape reaching Apache as HTTP/1.0. The MiSTer has a Mac Plus core, and the original Plus gives us the right sort of starting point: Motorola 68000 at a whopping 8MHz, up to 4MB RAM, with System 7.5.5 as the last supported system version.

You can see more of the emulation settings in the above live stream from McRetro Gaming. Thanks to the MiSTer settings, we can switch the core to the Macintosh SE ROM and select a 68020 at 16MHz, with the same 4MB of RAM. That is a MiSTer configuration rather than a stock Macintosh SE specification, but it gave the old software some extra legs. We were still limited by the paltry hardware and contemporary web browser support. Maybe asking a 1980s computer architecture to browse the 2020s web is a little unfair!

Another alternative is to run System 7.5 through the Amiga core and ShapeShifter, which might sound familiar to some. However I (mis)recognise it best from SheepShaver. Turns out they were both initially created by the same person, Christian Bauer. However, I didn’t know the ins and outs of AmigaOS well enough to get it to dial-out. That said, there’s definitely potential there.

Here’s a closer look at the TradeWave MacWeb 2.0 browser. It can load websites provided they are very basic. I was being too harsh when I called anything beyond HTML 1.0 too complicated: MacWeb had forms support in 1994 and even supported HTML 2.0 image inputs during development. Modern pages were still far beyond its comfort zone. That said, at the time retrojunkie.net was configured not to use any proxy or CDN through Cloudflare and it worked OK. I was impressed I was able to work that out on my little Apache web server!

The MiSTer, powered by the DE10-nano, is great for being able to output to HDMI and VGA using the analog board add-on. This way I can enjoy the VGA screen resolution on a 5:4 screen with a giant System 7.5 staring at me in the, not-far-away-enough distance. But why do I only have one hard drive mounted with the option for two drives to be mounted?

Enter Big Bob. Big Bob was a great hard drive image we made up for the Macintosh Classic. However, the Mac Plus core at the time seemed to like corrupting drives around reboot. I wondered if we were using a drive that was too large for the system or something along those lines. Interestingly, a 2025 MiSTer issue later documented VHD corruption after reboot when using the SE ROM with 68010 or 68020 CPU modes. That is very consistent with what I was seeing here, although it does not prove that was the exact cause of Big Bob’s demise. Big Bob will be missed but lives on in our hearts. ❤️

Sources