Trials and tribulations with the Mac OS 8.2 aka Snowman

[pacmania1982]

So whilst having some issues with my BlueSCSI and CD-ROM images, I was chatting with a fellow enthusiast (PiperTheGreat) about a the beta firmware - but we got our wires crossed mainly as he thought when I said beta I was referring to an unreleased version of Mac OS 8.2 - codenamed Snowman, which later became Mac OS 8.5. He was under the impression that it worked on 68K due to a listing error on WinWorld PC, so I gave it a try in BasiliskII. https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-8/82-beta

erichelgeson (the genius behind the BlueSCSI project) suggested that some of you may find what I found interesting.

Mounting the image in BasiliskII and attempting the install resulted in a failure as it doesn't recognise which model machine I'm running. FYI - I'm emulating a Quadra 900 with a 60040 CPU. As 8.5 was PPC only, this would make sense.

 

[pacmania1982]

Next - SheepShaver.

This time I was a little more successful in actually installing the OS onto a spare hard disk image. The first attempt failed as under the installer options, there's a tick box to update the Apple hard disk driver but it couldn't find disk copy. No worries, untick this option to start the installer going.

I've never seen this install before, so figured I'd share the screenshots of what's shown during install. First is the installer starting.

 

[pacmania1982]

Here are the other images - notably they all seem to rhyme with Mac OS 8....

 

[pacmania1982]

I customised my SheepShaver VM and changed the boot order. Unfortunately SheepShaver crashes immediately. I fiddled with the options for ignoring illegal memory accesses and enabled the JIT compiler, which have helped before in the past, and the next time I launched SheepShaver I at least got the Mac OS boot splash screen. However SheepShaver promptly quit. Reopening just goes into a loop. You get the splash screen, it crashes, reopen it, splash screen, crash etc.

If I were that interested in seeing it - I'd get out my beige G3 tower and try it on physical hardware - but it's getting towards bedtime and I don't have the time/patience to look into this further.

I hope you enjoyed the screenshots.

 

[PiperTheGreat]

If I may interject

Yes initially when he said firmware, I thought through whatever pathways in my brain, (which in my defence may have been dulled my recent colds lol) that he was talking about MacOS 8.2, though we cleared that one up rather quickly, he had said, "I found a bug that's been looked at and fixed in 8.1", of course that lead me to think it was a macOS bug, but it wasn't per se

It was actually a separate but interesting side note that I had wondered about why my 8.2 ISO would not load on my 475

I had seen some indication from WinWorld PC (where I got the ISO), that it was indeed 68k compatible. I was excited at this, as rare/leaked betas of old OSs are intriguing

WinWorld indicated that this was 68k compatible, via my screenshot..... However as we know, it is most definitely not. When you mouse over the Motorola logo, it says 68k

Liars!

 

[pacmania1982]

Ah yes - I was close, but it's late here. I should get to bed

 

[retr01]

Is this macOS 8.2 version the same as this one?

Mac OS 8.2d8 (CD) - Macintosh Repository

Mac OS 8.2d8 (CD) (Mac abandonware from 1998)

www.macintoshrepository.org

 

[PiperTheGreat]

Well, I have done some experimentation, and here are my findings:

I wanted to see if the image file would be the same size, if so, then likely it would be, the name on the one I had is the same. It comes as a .sit file, and I loaded it onto my Performa 475 to un-stuff it. It then produced a .img file, this can load through disk copy

Compared to my previous experiences, where the file was an ISO, this was it, everything in the .img was what there was

I of course could not do much with that, so I booted off a MacOS 8.1 ISO on my ZuluSCSI, and used that environment. In the end what I had to do was make a new disk image to house that .img file, as I couldn't run, and install to the same drive. Disk Copy again mounted the file, though here it took 2 goes.

Now for the installation, it had issues, but it actually launched.... I couldn't believe it, I thought, could this actually be a 68k version of 8.2?

The installer did have problems, but seemed to allow it after I took off the option to update the disk drivers, and actually started to proceed, it installed a bunch of components, and seemed to complete quicker than quoted. Once it was done I restarted

Now, this didn't seem to work, as I got my regular 8.1 install coming up, and I couldn't really tell what was different if anything

So, to test this once and for all, I just created a blank disk image, did the same things, and tried to install into that... Sadly this did not work, even with the above tricks, it kept telling me that this system was not recognised or something to that effect

So really, I am now unsure if this error is actually because this is only PPC as we previously thought, or this particular copy is 68k but this system is not on the list of machines that are allowed. Probably the first one

Well, I tried!