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Mac System 6.0.8 for PowerBook 140, 145, and 170

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Download pb170sys6.sit (578.60 KB)
For System 6.x
Emulation
Guides on emulating older applications

The PowerBook 140 and 170 shipped with only 2 and 4 MB of RAM, respectively—barely adequate for their minimum operating system of Mac OS 7.0.1. While Apple insisted to western customers that only OS 7 could support the new machines' hardware features, delays in localizing it forced them to release these laptops in Japan with a hastily modified Kanji 6.0.7. Of course, users elsewhere immediately reverse-engineered this system to work in English, giving their laptops a substantial boost in speed and available memory.

The disk image here was created by basalgangster, inspired by the work of jimbauwens in 2011 and Jay Lieske in 1992. His goal was to identify "the minimum set of resources from the Japanese system required to make the regular English version of System 6.0.8 work on my PowerBook 170."

I suppose there may be some things that still need to be moved that I haven't encountered yet. I have been using my PowerBook 170 with this system for a while now though. It puts itself to sleep and wakes up ok, and even puts itself to sleep when the battery is too low. There isn't any message though, telling you that you are almost out of battery, etc. as there is in OS 7.

  — basalgangster

If you can test this system on a PowerBook 140 or 145, please update this page with your findings! (It is not expected to work on any later Macs—not even the 145B.)

Compatibility
Architecture: 68k

Comments

by Mk.558 - 2014, September 28 - 3:22pm

Perhaps I failed to elaborate correctly.

The desktop background on a default install of System 6 is plain...checkboard. When Chooser is first opened on a default install of System 6, there is no machine name set. SuperClock does not come on a standard install of System 6. And others. They're all minor things, but just saying for the purists.

IIGS_User's picture
by IIGS_User - 2014, September 27 - 4:14pm

Owned the 145B in the past, but can't remember which OS version was installed on (probably 7).

MikeTomTom's picture
by MikeTomTom - 2014, September 26 - 10:04pm

"Just a caution, it's not a virgin setup of System 6"

Its because its a custom build of this particular SSW (using specific resources/files from a Japanese system). Read the Description above for more info.

by Mk.558 - 2014, September 23 - 11:44pm

Just a caution, it's not a virgin setup of System 6. Someone set the computer name, changed the default background, among a few other minor things.

by deltroid - 2012, October 7 - 4:13am

This works on my powerbook 170. Its much faster then 7.0+ and superfast when booted on a ramdisk. I used to (family) have a powerbook 145 and maybe using wish i were (does run on ss6?) or changing the gestalt using resedit would work? Thanks for posting.

by theos911 - 2012, October 3 - 1:58am

Excellent, thanks for getting this gem finally preserved!