I posted about this in the chat, but I thought I'd actually post the video as well. for about 150US you can get a working pc running classic mac os 7/8/9.

I'm curious how it'll run some of the heavier games. I've got one running on my laptop which has an core i3 gen 11 with 20 gigs of ram and it works, but not great. I haven't tried it with any rts or action games, mainly just with Strategic Conquest which is an old game my dad used to love.

I have dosbox working on my ryzen 5600x at home to play simtower, but this might be the better option as that version feels pretty limiting. We'll see.

I've decided I'm going to do one for different interests just as a way to remind myself about some of these things cause I have a bad tendency of thinking "shit that looks great" and then never remembering to get back to it.

Seems like a lot of sci fi romance here but the sci fi aspect of it does appeal to me.

Another antitrust case come and gone, and this time google found guilty of monopolistic behavior.

From The Verge



There's plenty more to read and I'm curious how this will effect the industry. It also begs the question why this wasn't done to Microsoft back in the day and why Apple is not a target with their appstore as well. Their walled garden mentality has to be monopolistic, at least to me.

Really in depth tutorial on how to install windows 11 on unsupported hardware. Shocking that Microsoft is actually taking a page from Apple and cutting out hardware like this. All in the name of security but to me it seems like the same reason as Apple, invigorating the pc market by forcing a lot of people to upgrade.

My experience with getting an unsupported os on my mac has been relatively painful, but this seems much easier for some reason.

Ars Technica Tutorial on installing windows 11 on unsupported hardware

What a day. This has been a long time coming but here's a basic synopsis of my work computer. I'm using an iMac14,1 21.5" from late 2013. It was a decent work computer for the time, i5 4570s @2.90ghz with 8g of ram and 1tb internal hdd.

It's been a work horse chugging along doing all sorts of things from video editing, programming, excel and word, photo editing you name in. Then I noticed a couple years ago things just started slowing down. I had read about the iPhone getting forced updates that would intentionally slow things down to save battery life a give a better end user experience but most people understand that this is actually in hopes that people would feel the need to upgrade to the latest iPhone instead of deal with a slower phone.

Planned obsolescence.

I did what I could and tried to live with it since for the most part it wasn't noticeable except for in excel of all things. But then things got slower and slower and I thought maybe my drive is dying. It's not making any noise but every day tasks just seem to take forever now. Especially booting up the computer.

I figured, let me try booting off an external drive, so bought a 500g ssd with a case and installed a new os on it, Catalina which is the last os you can put on this machine without using opencore.

The mac had new life again but we're talking about an os that is considered obsolete by this point in time so I was put in this weird place where my old apps wouldn't work - bye creative suite 3 - and the newest versions needed a more modern os like well pretty much anything after catalina. Planned obsolensce at its worst if you ask me.

Some of these apps have no business not working, like whatsapp for mac does not need the most recent os to work, what kind of shit is this?!

This went on for a couple of years with me trying to find work arounds for apps I don't use on a day to day basis.

Fastforward tome absolutely needing to edit a graphic file and having 0 luck finding anything that would work on catalina. I thought, let me get a bigger ssd, split it in 2 partitions - 1 for windows 10 and 1 for opencore mac ventura - and see how that works.

Ouf...

Opencore and subsequently Opencore Legacy Patcher aren't what I thought it would be. Originally, I thought opencore was a way to bypass apple's restrictions by turning off flags or something of the sort. It's not entirely like that.



Because Apple doesn't support these old machines anymore, drivers can be can of finicky at best and not work at all at worst. People have been salvaging drivers from older os' and they kind of work. Opencore Legacy Patcher makes the whole process really quite easy, but for some reason the bloody machine feels sluggish now. Luckily I still have catalina on another ssd.

Let's see what it takes to get windows on this thing.

Well, first problem is bootcamp doesn't want to work at all. I think this has to do with the fact that I'm using an external drive. Apparently Bootcamp freaks out with this for some reason but I'm not willing to sit through the old hdd booting to see if that's the case. No biggie, intel macs are essentially just pc's right? Boot off of usb bootable installer, that should work no problem. It recognizes the usb key but when booting into the windows installer I'd get an error "no bootable drive found" or some such thing.

This one was kind of silly, somehow in the process of creating that bootable usb key, the usb key has 2 partions and with all the other drives and opencore shit I didn't realize this. It finally clicked today and I got into the installer but it won't detect the usb ssd. Apparently you need to install a version of windows called Windows To Go on the drive using Rufos on a working windows pc.

Ok, that's good, installation successful, but I lost the opencore partition, rufos didn't like it. No problem, Catalina. Boot into fresh windows 10 but it didn't recognize anything in the mac at all. Not a single driver was found during installation.

Back to the other pc and run Brigadier to download the imac specific drivers. Install everything and now we have a working pc.


Jesus...

I have to say though, I have a pc at home for gaming and such so I'm relatively used to windows but I just prefer certain things about mac. But I'm debating actually keeping windows on my imac as my main os now. The computer just feels snappier on this than it does on catalina. I mean, I've already said it a million times, I'm never going to buy another mac. It's not because of the os, I love the os, I just can't stand apple anymore.

I wonder if I want to complicate my life even more by installing windows 11...

I wonder if we're reaching a breaking point with apple yet. I've been complaining for years about their repair stance and their soldering literally everything to the mobo.

Enter this guy who I think nails it perfectly but doesn't go deep enough.

It gets so much worse too and I'll never buy another mac because of this. Basically, mac's ssd is now soldered to the mobo and ssd's have a finite life span. Someone did a test and took 2 exact copy macbooks and unsoldered a component - I think it was a wifi antenna or the ssd - and swapped them from one machine to the other. They booted but both machines had the exact same graphical issues afterwards. Thinking it was a soldering issue, maybe he nicked something he shouldn't of so he switched the components back and the issues disappeared.

I've known for ages that apple was preparing to "security" check components through serial numbers and whatnot but this is ridiculous.

Alright, not the end of the world, simply do like I did with my imac and just get an external usb ssd and boot off of that. But hold on, it gets worse!

So this brings us to the ram now, 8 gigs is standard on all machines, even pro models. Most people won't think to upgrade before buying. The os will use up most of that on boot so the system will start reading and writing to the ssd as virtual memory and this puts wear and tear on the ssd shortening its lifespan.

I found another guy recently who killed his internal soldered storage, just wrote and deleted and repeated until the thing wouldn't work properly, you know what ssd's do. He found that even if you boot off an external drive, the system looks to the internal drive for for virtual memory. So even on my imac, the internal hdd is used even if I'm booting from my external ssd.

If your internal SSD is fried and you hit that ram limit, your mac will not work even if you boot on an external device.

People talk about how apple is a super green company, but really they are not. No one is talking about this at all. It's shocking to me. This basically means that

1. we'll have an insane amount of e waste from apple products


2. you should never buy a used mac because you don't know how long it'll last

When I had swapped out my optical drive for a second ssd in my macbook pro, I also was able to change where the os looks for the user accounts - the original storage instead of the user folder it created in the new os install on the secondary drive. There must be a way to change the virtual memory location too. It is Unix after all.

Apple finally throws its hat in the ring to take on Meta directly.

There are a lot of nice features in this over the Metaverse and the quest, but I think it's biggest issue is that it's not geared at games. Why would I wear this to run my computer and programs when I can just use the screen of my device.

And personally, while the theater aspect of it seems cool and all, I don't see myself watching a movie for hours on end and just sitting there on the couch with a head set on. I have enough trouble doing this for gaming on the quest.

Now, throw me into beatsaber for a couple of hours, no problem at all.

One thing that I don't understand is they say it's self contained, but everyone has a wire going into their pocket. I wonder if it needs an iphone or if maybe that's the battery.

By the way, price tag of 3500US. This screams apple marketing over any real substance considering there are top of the line VR headsets that cost less than this and have more sensors and capabilities.

Apple has a platform known as Apple Arcade which is very similar to the Microsoft Game Pass, Sony's Playstation Plus and Nintendo's Switch Online platforms. Hell, even Google has Play Pass.

Games as a service are here. You don't technically own anything anymore. You simply rent it for a period of time and play it while it's made available to you.

Thanks Steam for bringing us down this road. Originally, I was against the idea of what Steam was, but never thought it would get this bad.

So Apple had a bunch of games that were on this rental service and now they're removing these 15:

• Atone: Heart of the Elder Tree


• BattleSky Brigade: Harpooner


• Cardpocalypse


• Dead End Job


• Don't Bug Me!


• Dread Nautical


• EarthNight


• Explottens


• Lifeslide


• Over the Alps


• Projection: First Light


• Spelldrifter


• Spidersaurs


• Towaga: Among Shadows


• Various Daylife

The agreement between the devs and Apple was that for a period of time those games would be on the arcade and they would be available to be played for anyone subscribing to the service. The terms are now up and people who play those games will eventually - 2 weeks? be met with a message saying no longer available. The dev can decide if they want to put the game for sale for full purchase on the store after that. People who had the game through the service will need to buy the game to continue playing it.

This raises all sorts of questions regarding ownership and preservation and the like. It still boggles my mind that people are willing to do it this way.

There's this guy, dosdude1 who is instrumental in reducing the cost of new macs and bringing new life to older macs.

I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro 15" that has been an incredible machine since I got it. This thing has been to hell and back, in a sense survived floods, dead graphic cards and now had an OS that Apple specifically does not allow on this type of machine is currently running on it.

Basically dosdude1 created a tool that does most of the work for you, it downloads the Catalina installer, will install the installer on a usb key or external hard drive or even install Catalina directly onto your main drive.

Then, there's a tool that's included in the softare that patches the system to add things that were removed during the upgrade so that the older hardware will work again.

This is also the same dude that discovered that you can bypass the dedicated graphic cards in this model machine, which was notorious for kicking the bucket. I've posted previously about the workaround here.

There's one catch to all of this that I honestly have hit a dead end with. My Macbook Pro will not sleep at all. Close the lid and the machine stays on, backlight and all. Tell it to go to sleep and it will but then it doesn't wake up. Let the machines sleep timer kick in and the same thing happens.

I've tried everything I can think of to fix this, scoured the internet for any information I can find but most results come up with a bug in catalina that doesn't really apply to me as far as I can tell. Catalina has an issue with replacement nvme drives - mine can't take an nvme though I have replaced the hdd and dvd with 2 ssd. I think this might be a cause but have no real way to test it.

I have 2 more theories but won't be able to test one of them until I get back to St. Kitts.

1. The gpu work around I'm using - disabling the dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6750M - might have something to do with it. I can't enable the gpu because the bloody thing doesn't work so the machine won't boot with it.
2. Install a fresh copy of catalina and see if that'll fix it. Maybe something in the process of upgrading from Mavericks to Catalina instead of doing a clean install is the culprit. But I don't really have anything to back up onto just yet to try this.

I've thought about downgrading but I need the machine for work right now and despite the no sleeping thing, the machine is purring along like a kitten. It's actually quite surprising how well this thing runs catalina.

I've been able to upgrade all of my apps to their latest versions as well, firefox, office, thunderbird, steam, you name it. Just a pity I can't really play anything intensive with my integrated card...

I might go pick up a 1tb hard drive, there's a place selling them here for 30euros so I figure why not. If I do, I'll try backing up etc and doing a fresh install and see if that helps. I could also wipe the 2nd ssd I have but would nee to copy things over.

I'll post more as I figure things out.

They are saying this is emulation but I'm not sure exactly how it would be.
Maybe just a remote desktop to a workstation running MacOS 8? This hurts my head.

All I know is that this is pretty cool and it's able to run Civilzation 1.

Here's an interesting and somewhat unique issue that no one foresaw. Apparently if you have any M1 mac (Macbook, MacMini, iMac) and install the newest version of MacOS on it, which upgrades the firmware of the machine, the process has a special admin user that is created that impedes dual booting other OS' on the machine, even other versions of MacOS.
The real question is: is this intentional? Is Apple planning on blocking dual booting on Macs? Is this a developer preview bug?

With my macbook pro nearing actual end of life - not what Apple calls end of life, I was looking into getting another laptop and the idea of possibly getting an new Macbook did occur to me for a travel companion. But the issues just keep increasing with Apple.

Last Week on My Mac: The perils of M1 Ownership



It's an interesting little find but only the full release of Big Sur will tell us for certain what direction Apple is actually taking.

This reminds me so much of the G3's and G4's back in the day and trying all sorts of emulators to get windows running back then.



So there's a catch though. This is basically a virtual machine running Windows 10 but the Windows on ARM version. So programs for windows 10 won't run properly because there is no universal binary for windows programs like there is for mac programs. Seems like the idea of running regular Windows on Mac is going back to the emulation days rather than the more recent virtual machine route.

I am curious though, to see just how good the M1 would be at emulating an x86 architecture. The G3, G4 and especially the G5 were beasts compared to their x86 counterparts back in the day, but emulating the architecture was a slog, even on a top of the line machine.

It truly does bring back feelings of the old days.

Last week I read an article on OSNews.com regarding what I would consider a major fault with the mac os and Apple's take on who actually has control over your OS and computer.



This pretty much cemented my opinion of Apple and their crazy control over everything. I was completely against buying another mac. Keep in mind that I personally didn't feel this... outage(?)... and I was working on my imac most of the day. I have a pc at home now and the way Windows is now compared to how it was in the 90's, I'm very comfortable using windows on a daily basis. Almost more so than Mac, to the point that I think my next upgrade for the house will be a pc, not a mac. The usual suspects come into play here - gaming being the primary one. But one of the nice things about having an intel mac was always the ability to run windows, either virtualized or bootable.

Now comes the new PPC6 macs as I call them (they are arm based so why not?). At first I was thinking that this ppc6 thing would stop me from wanting a mac strictly because of no windows compatibility but the raw power of the base machines cannot be disregarded. The macbook air, macbook pro 13 and mac mini are all killing it for entry level machines, and sure they can all run ios apps natively now, but most of the real gaming is still on x86.

I'm very curious to see what they do with the pro models of their computers and how they play ball with everything. So I'm either going to go hackintosh or just flat out pc for my upgrade. We'll see.

Whatever the case, the next little while will be interesting to watch for Apple.

Just last week Sunday I got into this huge debate with a woman who owns a programming company in Edmonton that makes apps for iOS and she was saying that it's so secure and that there can't be viruses and malware on either iOS or Mac. She's been on the platform for 3 years...
How could someone who programs honestly think that any OS is secure, as in 100% secure. Just ridiculous.

Upgrading now on my Early 2008 imac at work. Wish me luck.