I made a drop-in MacTCP replacement

[matthewmrichter]

GitHub - matthewmrichter/mooftcp: Drop-in MacTCP replacement for System 6 / 68000 Macs

Drop-in MacTCP replacement for System 6 / 68000 Macs - matthewmrichter/mooftcp

github.com

I spent the summer refurbishing this Mac Classic I got off Marketplace, and now that it's in good shape I have actually been getting practical use out of it for managing LLM agent sessions via BlueSCSI wifi, Telnet and tmux. Shout out to Jeff Geerling and the other content folks out there who made some really nice videos about bringing a 68k Mac online (kicking and screaming).

I decided that rather than rely on a TCP/IP stack that hasn't been supported for 35+ years, I would see if AI could build something newer and better. This is not a reverse engineered project, but it's a spec-driven greenfield replacement. Definitely not a one-shot prompt!

Hard performance metrics are a bit tedious to get, since there is a lot of back-and-forth reconfiguration and file tranfer between the physical mac and the modern dev station, so I eventually stopped measuring and cut a V1 release. But I can say subjectively that latency feels lower in a terminal (Flynn) setting, and that the install and configuration process is friendlier than MacTCP (it supports DHCP, so less worrying about static IP's etc).

I think there's room for further refinement, excited to see what else we can wring out of it. I'm working on a fit-for-purpose replacement for the Daynaport driver next..

 

[fogWraith]

While MacTCP isn't too hard, it is inconvenient - this, on the other hand looks delightful and easy to use.
I haven't delved into the source just yet, so a quick question; does it support more than one DNS server?

 

[matthewmrichter]

I don’t think so in this release but that should be pretty easy to add. It needs to support more domains like the OG mactcp too. Thanks for the feedback and stay tuned!