The Macintosh Application Environment on a PA-RISC laptop

[ClassicHasClass]

I decided to fire up MAE on my RDI PrecisionBook 160, a 160MHz PA-7300LC with 512MB of RAM and HP-UX 11. While I'm not game enough to possibly pollute my kernel with HP-UX 10.x AppleTalk drivers, not only does MAE run, it runs very well. I could even play Wolfenstein 3D on it better than my 540c, and Ultimate Doom played okay, with some graphical issues.

Turns out there is a hidden binary in the main executable to run a mysterious Midnight Emulator. I'm going to have to dig into that more, but anyway, MAE is great on PA-RISC and I really want to try it on my big dual PA-8900 C8000 now.

A real PowerBook: the Macintosh Application Environment on a PA-RISC laptop

I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...

oldvcr.blogspot.com

 

[thecloud]

Thanks for your deep dive into MAE! I see that you were not willing to install AppleTalk drivers on real hardware, which is understandable.

I've just recently managed to get MAE running in a virtual instance of Solaris 2.6 under QEMU... and with AppleTalk networking, so it can mount AppleShare servers on the GlobalTalk network! Attached is my first attempt at a setup guide.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Good to see it works. My issue wasn't running the AppleTalk drivers on real hardware: it was running it on the wrong version of the operating system. This PA-RISC laptop runs HP-UX 11.00, not the 10.x or 9.x that MAE is expecting. Since these are kernel modules, I didn't want to make the machine inadvertently unbootable.

I do have a HP-UX 10.20 disk around somewhere for the SAIC Galaxys, so I might try it there first.

 

[robin-fo]

Cool! I like MAE is getting some attention...