Classic on Intel? Does it exist?

Before you type "No", hear me out. This has probably been discussed before, but long before the Intel switch was announced, Apple had developed "Marklar", a Intel-compatible Mac OS X port. While Intel ports of OS 10.0 and .1 seem pretty useless, did they include Classic with it at those early points? The article mentions it was "complete", and given that X did include Classic Environment at those points, I assume so.

However, besides the fact that even if it does exist, it's unlikely it will be leaked (a near-complete HL1 does exist for OS 9 but that's still MIA) and someone on Mac Garden said that if Apple wanted to port Classic Environment to Intel it would require re-writing lots of code to Intel standards (as in, Classic wouldn't just be able to take advantage of Rosetta). And at the time, Macs still even booted into OS 9.

We (should) all know of the Star Trek project, of which a prototype was developed in three months for x86 systems in the early 1990s. It looked like a Mac and had to run on very specific platforms, as well as porting for basic System 7 apps (like SimpleText), but 68k apps couldn't run on it at the time without additional porting.

Was it like that or did they truly make Classic Intel compatible?

Comments

2014, July 21 - 6:54pm

JonathanNemo

Offline

Joined: 2014 Mar 1

You might be interested in this Quora thread regarding the beginnings of Marklar. The one that starts with "Fear? I've been meaning to tell this story for a while.", in particular.

Given the lack of engineering resources that this project had in the very beginning, and the uptick in resources happened in the same year as the "death" of Mac OS 9, it's probably a very long shot.

It seems unlikely to me that the engineers that worked on Apple's Star Trek project were still at the company in 2001.

Apple has been known for some time to be a very volatile company. From the outside, the rate at which they introduce and phase out projects is most telling. Inside, their engineering workforce skews very young.