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Title: Fresh Tools That Keep Vintage Macs Online and Weirdly Alive

Link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/04/18/224...

With macOS now 24 years old and Apple officially designating all Intel-based
Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," The Register takes a look at new
internet tools that help keep vintage Macs online and surprisingly relevant:
Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally. His retro computing
interests are broad, and we've mentioned him a few times on The Register,
such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer, and his
evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance. Back in 2020, he revived the
native Classic Mac OS port of the Lynx web browser, MacLynx. Earlier this
month, he came back to it and has updated it again, including adding native
Mac OS dialog boxes. His account is -- as usual -- long and detailed but it's
an interesting read. He also maintains some other web browsers for elderly
Macs, including TenFourFox for Mac OS X 10.4 and Classilla for Mac OS 8.6 and
9.x. If you're not up to git pull commands and elderly Mac OS X build tools,
then there is a fork of TenFourFox that may be worth a look, InterWebPPC.
It's not current with the new batch of patches, but we can still hope for
another build. In other "Classic on the internet" news, although it's not a
huge amount of use on its own, there's also a newly released Classic Mac OS
version of Mbed-TLS on GitHub. This ports the SSL library -- also used in the
super-lightweight Dillo browser -- to the older C89/C90 standard, so that it
can build in CodeWarrior and run with OpenTransport from Mac OS 9 right back
to later versions of Mac OS 7. Modern macOS is UNIX certified and as such
it's not all that dissimilar from other Unix-like OSes, such as Linux and the
BSD family. Classic Mac OS is a profoundly different beast, which makes
porting modern code to it a complex exercise -- but equally, it's a good
learning exercise, and we're delighted to see 21st century programmers
exploring this 1980s OS. That may be part of the motivation behind the newly
announced and still incomplete SDL 2 "rough draft" that appeared a week ago.
It builds on the existing SDL 1.2 port, but so far, it's less complete -- for
instance, there's no sound support.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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