68k vs PowerPC stability

[MHaensel]

Back when I first my bought my iMac G3/233, it was a revelation. I loved MacOS 8 and the speed of the thing. But it crashed on me, a lot.

 

I later bought a PowerMac G4/450. It was a rocket in classic MacOS! But it crashed even more than the iMac.

 

At the time I used my Macs pretty hard, for everything from internet to programming to 3D games. i spent lots of time trying different combinations of extensions to make things more stable.

 

Now I'm considering getting a classic Mac for light duty: writing, speech synthesis, Kaleidoscope, After Dark, and maybe a small game or two. I like speed but stability would be better. Would a 68040-based Mac crash less than a PowerPC one under classic MacOS? Do board members have experience here?

 

 

 

 

Edited August 9, 2020 by MHaensel

[MHaensel]

Just to follow-on my original post:

 

I didn't have much experience with 68K Macs. My PowerPC Macs were speed demons in MacOS classic, but also crashed a lot.

 

In emulation, Basilisk II has been very stable. SheepShaver crashes a lot until I learn what programs I can or can't run. Since that mimics what I remember from real hardware, I'm not going to fight too hard. I'll keep Basilisk II around for smooth operation and fond memories. The Simpsons screen saver always makes me smile!

[wierd_w]

Basilisk II emulates a 68k flavor mac.  The PC version can also do scsi pass-through. (you will need an older version of the GUI to set that up. Recent versions do not expose the options, but they *are* still there in recent builds of the emulator.)  If you hook up an old win2k machine on your network, it can serve as an appletalk protocol domain server, and manage an appletalk network (which instances of basilisk II, and real macs with ethernet cards in them can utilize for fun and profit).

 

Aside from aging hardware, I think the 68k macs are going to be more stable.  PPC based macs used a proprietary 68k emulator called Rosetta, to provide 68k application support. Its utility is hit and miss.

 

 

[Bruce Tomlin]

Don't use 8.0 with PPC. Just don't.

 

When I got a Power Computing tower, it came with 8.0 and it would randomly freeze up. The mouse cursor would just freeze and I had to reboot. And that was so much fun because this was years before HFS journaling so I would be listening to that clackety-clack for a few minutes each time.

 

So I went back to the last 7.5.x. When 8.1 came out, it worked fine.

 

Otherwise I never had any particular problems with the most up-to-date of any line (7.0, 7.5, 8.1). Except maybe 9.2.2, I seem to recall that it was just an updater and I couldn't install more packages from the OS install disk because now it was a different version. So stick with 9.2.1 for that.