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Vintage Jaguar: Just Enough OS X for Classic!

Doq

Doq

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 8, 2019
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The Lab DX

*fancy logo here*

Vintage Jaguar​

just enough OS X for Classic​

​

There is a small but nostalgic appeal for Classic Mac OS. A lot of collectors, enthusiasts, and those wanting to trot down memory lane. Mac OS X, while a giant step forward for all of computing, eventually would leave behind a legacy of great games and software inside the ever-aging Mac OS 9. In the first few iterations of OS X, a bridge between this legacy software and the modern operating system was created, called Classic. Classic was present in its entirety since the very first release of Mac OS X Server, and would last until being removed from Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. There is an interest in having the best of both worlds by hacking Classic into Leopard, but that's for a different thread.

That said, Classic is just a bridge. It's little more than an official virtual Mac with special code to communicate with the host OS X system. Undeniably, the best performance, especially for games, comes with a native installation of Mac OS 9. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the PowerPC Macintosh communities, not every PPC Mac can run OS 9.

Enter Vintage Jaguar.

It's generally agreed on that Mac OS X Jaguar was the latest version of OS X to have the best version of Classic. Yes, there is this much praise of Jaguar's Classic over Panther/Tiger's and that's not even all of it. Jaguar's Classic performs just barely short of as well as a native OS 9 install, which is difficult to achieve for Panther/Tiger, especially in games.

Vintage Jaguar sets out to bridge haha the gap between the Macs capable of running OS 9-- either officially or through patched means such as the MacOS9Lives Disc-- and the Macs that are just too new to even try. This is accomplished by, instead of patching Mac OS 9 to run on hardware it's not meant to, slimming down Mac OS 10.2 so much that it becomes hardly noticeable. An OS X with just enough OS X for Classic. Vintage Jaguar is stripped bare of nearly 3/4ths of the core operating system and, with Classic restored, occupies only 550MB of storage, which is just a little bit more than OS 9 itself.

Currently, Vintage Jaguar is in a beta state, as there are a few odds and ends to patch up before it can be marked final. But it does work and does what it set out to do.

Vintage Jaguar has the following system requirements:
- A Power Mac, PowerBook, iMac, or iBook capable of running OS X Jaguar, either natively or with patches
- At least 750MB of storage

There are some quirks that come with Vintage Jaguar, listed in this spoiler box:
- SystemUIServer crashes on startup. This doesn't affect the OS, but your menu extras are gone. Shouldn't matter too much though; after all, you did come here for Classic. This will be fixed in a future revision, though.
- That said, with the menu extras being gone, AirPort needs to be configured in System Preferences, which has been left in due to some Control Panels not working in Classic.
- Displays system preference panel is non-functional. Use the Monitors classic control panel instead.

You may download a disk image of Vintage Jaguar from the below link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pAnf-ObQGJKUg7SFHPs_TFEkPrPmdP3D/view?usp=sharing Vintage Jaguar.dmg (258.4 MiB DMG file)

This file is verified with the following hashes:
MD5: 36be46e7d963fded1cc7f78901097e8f
SHA1: c11a4e98377cf36f88e770d37f267ee44048dfde
SHA256: 6eba8ec3fa9f356170d0d21617d9d50bc122c54ccd7a8bdf2f9419856f04c8ad

The above download is the generic version. As I don't have a compatible G5 in hand, there is no version based on the 10.2.8 build for G5s.

Happy computing!
 
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Doq said:
*fancy logo here*
Click to expand...
VJ.png
 
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This is nice, but sadly my DLSD won't be able to run it.. However, there is some hope on my G4 Titanium 1ghz which originally came with Jaguar(I have the original discs brand new).
 
Macbookprodude said:
This is nice, but sadly my DLSD won't be able to run it.. However, there is some hope on my G4 Titanium 1ghz which originally came with Jaguar(I have the original discs brand new).
Click to expand...
There probably won't ever be any hope for the 2005s unless patched kexts come into play. The Late '05 PowerBooks in particular are a lot closer to the Early Intel MacBooks Pros than the PowerBooks of older.

Amethyst1 said:
Can you post a checksum of your image so that others can verify their download went fine?
Click to expand...
Bet.
MD5: 36be46e7d963fded1cc7f78901097e8f
SHA1: c11a4e98377cf36f88e770d37f267ee44048dfde
SHA256: 6eba8ec3fa9f356170d0d21617d9d50bc122c54ccd7a8bdf2f9419856f04c8ad

It's also in the OP as well.

Dronecatcher said:
View attachment 1969362
Click to expand...
I thought my screen was dirty, but it was just part of the design. o_O
 
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Doq said:
There probably won't ever be any hope for the 2005s unless patched kexts come into play. The Late '05 PowerBooks in particular are a lot closer to the Early Intel MacBooks Pros than the PowerBooks of older.


Bet.
MD5: 36be46e7d963fded1cc7f78901097e8f
SHA1: c11a4e98377cf36f88e770d37f267ee44048dfde
SHA256: 6eba8ec3fa9f356170d0d21617d9d50bc122c54ccd7a8bdf2f9419856f04c8ad

It's also in the OP as well.


I thought my screen was dirty, but it was just part of the design. o_O
Click to expand...
And even if it were possible to get Jaguar running on a DLSD, wouldn't it not work right, assuming the video kexts are included with it ?
 
Macbookprodude said:
And even if it were possible to get Jaguar running on a DLSD, wouldn't it not work right, assuming the video kexts are included with it ?
Click to expand...
Of course not. It's not just video you'd need. The trackpads are also USB-based instead of the older ADB. You'll have no sleep functionality, no sound, if any of the internal components are newer those will probably also not work.
 
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Thanks, I never ran jaguar, as I never knew about it after I had to sell my Sawtooth in 2001 at the time. Never really heard of Mac OS X until 2004 when I got a G4 Digital Audio, as I was running OS 9 all that time back in 2000-2001. The very last thing I remember doing on my Sawtooth G4 350/ then 500(processor card cost me 500 dollars) is updating OS 9 from 9.1.2 to 9.2.2 and shortly after that my financial mess started that I had to sell everything, OS 9 in the box, Virtual PC new in the box 3.0, and a lot of software I had.

So, for me I very much didn't know about Jaguar, Puma or Cheetah. When I got Digital Audio G4, it came with Panther and that is where I started back up again. I am not sure even if browsing web on OS 9 was still good then either. So, Jaguar is a new experience for me. I have a Titanium which I suppose I can try it out.
 
For a Titanium, you may want to try regular Jaguar. I think the later models even came with Jag out of the box.
I mean, you can grab Vintage Jag and use it on a Titanium, it would totally work, but I wouldn't recommend it since Titaniums can boot OS 9 natively, and with just about everything being missing the OS X experience would just be not there.
 
Amethyst1 said:
Jaguar kernel panics even on the Early '05 PowerBooks (yes, I tried). It runs fine on the '04 models though.


Th
Click to expand...

Doq said:
For a Titanium, you may want to try regular Jaguar.
I mean, you can grab Vintage Jag and use it on a Titanium, it would totally work, but I wouldn't recommend it since Titaniums can boot OS 9 natively, and with just about everything being missing the OS X experience would just be not there.
Click to expand...
Ok, but would I get any boost in performance with Vintage Jaguar ?
 
Macbookprodude said:
Is there anything really useful under Jaguar to make it good to run ?
Click to expand...
Doq said:
It's generally agreed on that Mac OS X Jaguar was the latest version of OS X to have the best version of Classic. Yes, there is this much praise of Jaguar's Classic over Panther/Tiger's and that's not even all of it. Jaguar's Classic performs just barely short of as well as a native OS 9 install, which is difficult to achieve for Panther/Tiger, especially in games.
Click to expand...
 
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Seconded. Jaguar's Classic absolutely blew me away -- I ran Quake in it at full speed, maybe even faster than I remember it due to my much faster video card (a Radeon 9800P vs the Rage 128 8MB). Full Tilt! also ran at full speed, which I couldn't even get it to do in Mac OS 9. It's insane how much better it is than Tiger's.​
 
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@Doq Very interesting project you have here (which definitely does not take inspiration from some other project that some other guy did in the past). ;)

If I may make a suggestion, have you considered importing Jaguar's Classic files into Panther, and using that as a base instead? Most machines that support Jaguar will also natively boot into OS 9 anyway, so using Panther in a hypothetical scenario would extend support to a larger list of machines that would not have been able to boot OS 9 (or Jaguar) otherwise.

But if this is not doable, perhaps some of Panther's (or even Tiger's) kernel extensions could be retrofitted into Jaguar to accomplish the same goal?

Also, I would prioritize compatibility and system stability over size, as doing so will make for a better user experience in the end - especially if this is targeted for newer machines that have plenty of space to spare, anyway. To this end, maybe 700 MB or 1 GB would be more feasible guidelines instead?

Anyway, just checking that you've covered all bases before proceeding ...
 
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@z970 There is no inspiration from any other projects. None at all. Nope. No way. :)

Okay, let me see if I can address this as coherently as I can, because a lot of this is fairly fragmented.

I remember, though I might have been Mandela Effected, there being an effort to hack Jag's Classic into either Tiger or Panther with not much success and that's because a lot of the frameworks and shared code that's embedded into the OS isn't strictly compatible. It's the same idea for why hacking Tiger's Classic into Leopard has stalled. If there was a breakthrough and Jag's Classic could be hacked into Panther or (more ideally) Tiger, then this project wouldn't have its place as the hacked Classic takes over that role. It might be something I explore independently, but it's not as much of a focus compared to even the Leopard Classic efforts.

You are correct, though. Most machines that support Jaguar can native boot OS 9, but not all of them. There is a small subset of machines that can boot Jaguar either officially or through hacks that can't native boot OS 9. Off the top of my head, the first 3 generations of Aluminium PowerBooks fall into this niche as well as the first generation of G4 iBooks; though with some issues.

I did a little more research and the target for this project is rather small, and I figured it would be a narrow audience, but I didn't figure it would be that small. I explored and put together Vintage Jaguar mostly for the Companion; a machine that fits the very specific crossroads of 'machines that can run Jaguar' and 'machines that can't run OS 9'.

I might explore including patched kexts in a future version to give rudimentary support to newer 'not officially supported' machines as right now it only includes stock kexts. G5 version is also a thought, though a faraway thought as right now I don't have one of those G5s that can run the G5 Jaguar variant.

Compatibility and stability is in the cards and is even in the current build with only the SystemUIServer issue at this point. The original POC was based on a base Jaguar install with stripped Applications; though that was well over 1 GB. I feel the Charlessoft BootCD base is a welcome compromise between size and compatibility. After all, Vintage Jag isn't meant to run OS X applications at all, but the limitations of Classic mean that some OS X applications need to be included regardless. I feel that once the SystemUIServer issue is rectified that Vintage Jag is ready for primetime and improvements can then be explored, such as the aforementioned inclusion of patched kexts.

Hope this addresses all of your concerns. :D
 
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So this is a bit of a dumb question: Would you be able to have the Mac OS 9 desktop or would it just look like 10.2 Jaguar? I know there was... one build which had a full OS 9 UI? Might be remembering wrong.
 
You might be able to get very close but ultimately it'll be the Jag desktop. The root of not being able to use OS 9's Finder is ultimately the roadblock from achieving that.

The last full UI classic was with one of the 10.0 DPs (I think it was DP2) before being dropped in favour of the shared interface.
 
Doq said:
The last full UI classic was with one of the 10.0 DPs (I think it was DP2) before being dropped in favour of the shared interface.
Click to expand...
Wasn't it DP3 that had both the full OS 9 UI and the shared one for the last time?
 
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k24a1 said:
So this is a bit of a dumb question: Would you be able to have the Mac OS 9 desktop or would it just look like 10.2 Jaguar? I know there was... one build which had a full OS 9 UI? Might be remembering wrong.
Click to expand...
There's this:

forums.macrumors.com

"Full screen" Classic on Tiger

After spending a little time poking around inside the "Classic Startup.app" bundle, the TruBlueEnvironment and ClassicStartup binaries, I was becoming hopeful that I might find a secret "full screen" trigger, which could bring a virtual OS9 desktop to Tiger in the same way that Classic works on...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com
 
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