Last year we were playing around with the Macintosh Classic, thanks to Pendleton115. We wanted to get it internet ready but were having issues with the HTTP/0.9 limitations on the modern web. The MiSTer has a Mac Plus core, which is pretty similar – Motorola 68000 at a whopping 8MHz, 4MB RAM, with a maximum OS of System 7.5.5.
You can see more of the browsing experience on the MiSTer in the above live stream from McRetro Gaming. Thanks to the MiSTer settings, we are able to bump the system up to a Macintosh SE running a 68020 at 16MHz… with the same 4MB of RAM. We were still limited by the paltry hardware of the Mac itself though. Maybe we were asking too much… then again, that’s half the fun.
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. Anything too complicated, i.e. greater than HTML1.0 and it just doesn’t know what to do. That said, at the time retrojunkie.net was configured to not 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 to erase drives randomly on boot. We may have been using a drive that was too large for the system at the time or something along those lines. Big Bob will be missed but lives on in our hearts. ❤️
since sometime in the mid-1990s. We are powered by a 