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#1
Virtualization / Re: What Needs to be done for ...
Last post by andreas_g - Today at 07:52 AMYes, all is well. Great to see you here!
I have been less active during the summer but the next release of Previous is already in the works.
I have been less active during the summer but the next release of Previous is already in the works.
#2
Virtualization / Re: What Needs to be done for ...
Last post by t-rexky - Aug 27, 2026, 11:23 PMHey @andreas_g, I just made it here... hope all is well 
#3
Virtualization / Virtual OS Museum via UTM?
Last post by kokomuck - Aug 27, 2026, 09:17 AMHiya,
I would like to try out NeXTSTEP via the Virtual OS Museum. I downloaded both UTM versions, the full and lite ones, but in both I encounter the same error.
The underlying Debian system of the Virtual Machine stops booting, because it presents a RETBleed warning: "RETBleed; WARNING: Spectre v2 mitigation leaves CPU vulnerable to RETBleed attackes, data leaks possible!".
Did someone else try the UTM version of the Virtual OS Museum and ran into the same issue?
Is there a way to fix it?
Thanks in advance for your input!
All the best,
kokomuck
I would like to try out NeXTSTEP via the Virtual OS Museum. I downloaded both UTM versions, the full and lite ones, but in both I encounter the same error.
The underlying Debian system of the Virtual Machine stops booting, because it presents a RETBleed warning: "RETBleed; WARNING: Spectre v2 mitigation leaves CPU vulnerable to RETBleed attackes, data leaks possible!".
Did someone else try the UTM version of the Virtual OS Museum and ran into the same issue?
Is there a way to fix it?
Thanks in advance for your input!
All the best,
kokomuck
#4
Off Topic / Strappy AI: Like Siri AI for R...
Last post by jeffburg - Aug 27, 2026, 05:40 AMHello everyone, sorry I have been away for so long but work has been crazy lately and in my spare time I have been working on Strappy AI for my iPhone 5. But before I get started let me say: AI Disclosure: Strappy has been lovingly crafted for retro Apple devices by me. Also the writing in the Github README and associated blog post is 100% written by me. That said, the code is 100% AI generated.
So if you want Siri AI for your retro jailbroken iPhone or a native vibe coding environment for your retro Mac, give Strappy a try. The GitHub project has downloads and installation instructions. And if you want a deeper dive into the full development story, check out my blog post. The blog post has many more demo videos, but I attached 2 to this forum post to give you a taste:
QuoteStrappy is like Siri AI for jailbroken iPhones iOS 5+ and for Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger+. Strappy is a custom harness written in C that provides a suite of tools that the model can use to query your data from your apps on your iPhone. It also includes a coding assistant. Yes, a coding assistant! So that you can vibe-code iPhone apps RIGHT ON YOUR PHONE! Strappy is built on OpenRouter, so you can control the models and the providers you want to trust with your data.This has been a really exciting project for me. Basically, while developing apps with AI I noticed that the LLM is really good at reading arbitrary data out of arbitrary SQLite databases. So I took that idea and ran with it. "What if I scanned for every SQLite database in my home folder and then gave the LLM access to them?" And thus Strappy was born. On retro versions of Mac OS X, SQLite is not as popular of a data format as on the iPhone, but since Mac OS X has better development tools, the Vibe Coding experience is better.
So if you want Siri AI for your retro jailbroken iPhone or a native vibe coding environment for your retro Mac, give Strappy a try. The GitHub project has downloads and installation instructions. And if you want a deeper dive into the full development story, check out my blog post. The blog post has many more demo videos, but I attached 2 to this forum post to give you a taste:
- https://github.com/jeffreybergier/Strappy-Cocoa
- https://jeffburg.com/unenshittification/2026/08/10/Strappy.html
#5
Hardware / Re: World's fastest and most c...
Last post by Rhetorica - Aug 25, 2026, 08:30 PMQuote from: ZombiePhysicist on Aug 25, 2026, 06:40 PMSuper cool. Does the driver work under emulators? That would give it a heck of a kick.My shot was from VirtualBox (i386 guest—or, well, I guess it's an i686 guest now!) on an amd64 Windows PC, so there was no slowdown due to CPU emulation. The guest definitely has to be white hardware since this is a Pentium CPU feature being hacked into an i386 driver. I am not sure what turbolent used; you may have to find out for yourself how it behaves under 86box.
#6
Hardware / Re: World's fastest and most c...
Last post by ZombiePhysicist - Aug 25, 2026, 06:40 PMSuper cool. Does the driver work under emulators? That would give it a heck of a kick.
#7
Hardware / World's fastest and most curre...
Last post by Rhetorica - Aug 25, 2026, 07:10 AMRemember this thread? Well, @turbolent released an enhancement for the VESA VBE 2.0 graphics driver that ships with OPENSTEP 4.2, and the results are insane.
BEFORE PATCH:
AFTER PATCH:
For clarity, the previous record for a performance beast was Apple2guy's 'mordor' machine, which got a blistering 20.715, beating my brief lead of 18.510. But with turbolent's patch, a VirtualBox VM went from a respectable 10.318 to an absolutely face-melting 206.642!!! The magic depends on a slightly newer CPU feature, memory-type range registers, which were introduced in the Pentium Pro. Basically, all the draw commands that comprise a screen update are being sent in a burst over the bus instead of in tiny chunks, which was a major bottleneck specifically for the VBE driver.
Needless to say, this far outstrips the performance of all other available drivers for NeXT graphics. The same machine I used to set 18.510 now gets 264.360, which is an absolutely absurd number that theoretically means it's as fast as 264.36 stock 030 NeXTcubes (though I have my doubts about such a comparison.)
Alas, the VBE driver is still vintage 90s tech, so it only has support for 4:3 resolutions, up to and including 1600x1200. I am keenly awaiting for turbolent to get back to me to see if we can squeeze 1920x1080 onto the list somehow.
In the mean time, go compile and install it so you can get a new high score! It's pretty painless under VirtualBox; you don't need to mess with the VM's hardware configuration, just swap out the drivers that the guest machine uses, and follow the instructions in the project's README.md. After rebooting I also needed to bump up the resolution from undefined (640x480x8, it seemed) to 1280x1024x32. (Reminder: Workspace Manager stores your dock contents on a per-screen-resolution basis, so don't freak out when you log back in and everything is missing...)
I have attached a prebuilt copy of the .config, but you'll still need to run the patcher as root and edit Instance0.table to actually ensure FramebufferWC is loaded properly.
BEFORE PATCH:
AFTER PATCH:
For clarity, the previous record for a performance beast was Apple2guy's 'mordor' machine, which got a blistering 20.715, beating my brief lead of 18.510. But with turbolent's patch, a VirtualBox VM went from a respectable 10.318 to an absolutely face-melting 206.642!!! The magic depends on a slightly newer CPU feature, memory-type range registers, which were introduced in the Pentium Pro. Basically, all the draw commands that comprise a screen update are being sent in a burst over the bus instead of in tiny chunks, which was a major bottleneck specifically for the VBE driver.
Needless to say, this far outstrips the performance of all other available drivers for NeXT graphics. The same machine I used to set 18.510 now gets 264.360, which is an absolutely absurd number that theoretically means it's as fast as 264.36 stock 030 NeXTcubes (though I have my doubts about such a comparison.)
Alas, the VBE driver is still vintage 90s tech, so it only has support for 4:3 resolutions, up to and including 1600x1200. I am keenly awaiting for turbolent to get back to me to see if we can squeeze 1920x1080 onto the list somehow.
In the mean time, go compile and install it so you can get a new high score! It's pretty painless under VirtualBox; you don't need to mess with the VM's hardware configuration, just swap out the drivers that the guest machine uses, and follow the instructions in the project's README.md. After rebooting I also needed to bump up the resolution from undefined (640x480x8, it seemed) to 1280x1024x32. (Reminder: Workspace Manager stores your dock contents on a per-screen-resolution basis, so don't freak out when you log back in and everything is missing...)
I have attached a prebuilt copy of the .config, but you'll still need to run the patcher as root and edit Instance0.table to actually ensure FramebufferWC is loaded properly.
#8
General Discussion / Re: NeXT and the US government
Last post by ZombiePhysicist - Aug 22, 2026, 11:43 PMAs alluded to here
https://nextcommunity.net/forums/index.php?msg=180
Folks may speculate that NeXT sold a good bit more than the 50k units they sold. What's important to note was at the time, the dsp and ability to do on the fly ocr on the machine, as well as its ability to record telephony, it was an ideal platform to build something like echelon.
Early text to speech also was available. Capturing Fax, voice, digital information all in one spot and index it all with tools akin to digital librarian. The rapid dev environment made it unique platform at the time for that project.
https://nextcommunity.net/forums/index.php?msg=180
Folks may speculate that NeXT sold a good bit more than the 50k units they sold. What's important to note was at the time, the dsp and ability to do on the fly ocr on the machine, as well as its ability to record telephony, it was an ideal platform to build something like echelon.
Early text to speech also was available. Capturing Fax, voice, digital information all in one spot and index it all with tools akin to digital librarian. The rapid dev environment made it unique platform at the time for that project.
#9
Software / Re: Plan 9 from NeXT Software
Last post by Rhetorica - Aug 22, 2026, 12:12 AMSnooping around NCommander's Discord, I determined that this was, in fact, a very recent development on the QEMU front: https://github.com/blanham/qemu-NeXT/
QEMU-NeXT seems to be specifically focused on NeXTstation emulation at present, with major attention spent specifically on this Plan 9 feat; it lacks DSP, MO, or printer support, but does have some facilities specifically for helping with the 9p netboot procedure. I am unclear on exactly what this entails; it might be as simple as letting another service punch through SLiRP.
QEMU-NeXT seems to be specifically focused on NeXTstation emulation at present, with major attention spent specifically on this Plan 9 feat; it lacks DSP, MO, or printer support, but does have some facilities specifically for helping with the 9p netboot procedure. I am unclear on exactly what this entails; it might be as simple as letting another service punch through SLiRP.
#10
Software / Plan 9 from NeXT Software
Last post by Rhetorica - Aug 22, 2026, 12:02 AMThis has been mentioned once or twice by community members. Last night it seems NCommander actually tried it, following this ancient guide.
Watch (in horror?) here:
(Spoilers: he uses QEMU rather than Previous. Boo! But maybe the results could be useful as a starting point for bringing similar work to Previous.)
Watch (in horror?) here:
(Spoilers: he uses QEMU rather than Previous. Boo! But maybe the results could be useful as a starting point for bringing similar work to Previous.)