Recent posts

#81

Virtualization / Re: Previous for Mac OS X 10.1...

Last post by wmlive - Oct 27, 2025, 05:15 AM

Does anyone have any advice on how I might make a mirror of this website? I have never tried to script something like that:

http://143.198.135.172:80

I'd try it with something like:

Code Select Expand

wget --no-parent --recursive --timestamping --level=inf --no-cache --continue http://143.198.135.172:80

#82

Virtualization / Re: Previous for Mac OS X 10.1...

Last post by jeffburg - Oct 27, 2025, 04:03 AM

OMG. I think I found a solution. This person is hosting an unofficial macports for 10.5 Leopard and it has Darwin 9 binaries for PPC which is what I need. I did a quick search and it had CMAKE and libSDL so it might work. I will try it this week

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unofficial-macports-10-5-binary-repo.2376248/?post=31879173#post-31879173

Does anyone have any advice on how I might make a mirror of this website? I have never tried to script something like that:

http://143.198.135.172:80

#83

Virtualization / Re: Previous for Mac OS X 10.1...

Last post by jeffburg - Oct 27, 2025, 01:19 AM

Just to give an update, I was gonna try to install Previous on my iMac G4 1.25GHz. Macports does have a version for 10.5 Leopard. However, it basically has no binaries so it means everything gets built from source. I thought this was OK because I was able to install modern openssh and modern git. It took about 10 hours of source code compiling but it worked.

But when I did port install libsdl2, it started by trying to build "gcc10-bootstrap". After a quick google I realized this was building THE ENTIRE GCC COMPILER. This can take several hours even on a good intel computer with 16GB+ of RAM in 2015-ish timeframe. So given that my computer is from 2003 with 2GB of RAM, I decided to abandon that.

I might pick up the project again, but I would need to find 10.5 PPC binaries for all of the dependencies online and I am not sure how easy or hard that would be.

#84

Virtualization / Re: Commit number in „About“ w...

Last post by andreas_g - Oct 26, 2025, 12:40 PM

I don't know how to automatically put the revision number into the source code. Maybe someone else knows how to do that in a sourceforge repository?

[Aek@-SFP^-yBpU-dZ6M-JpYQ-]upc]

#85

Software / LatinByrdIII community license

Last post by Rhetorica - Oct 26, 2025, 11:20 AM

As previously noted in a now-deleted thread elsewhere, Stefan Schneider was kind enough to respond to a request for a community license for the LatinByrdIII RTF-to-HTML converter. LatinByrd rather incredibly still has a website, and was a staple for a short window in the late 90s and early 2000s for making NeXT documentation web accessible. (I still plan on making a spiffy new NeXTanswers site using it.)

Here are some of the emails we exchanged at the time:

Hi Stefan,
 
I'm working on a project to restore an online, searchable copy of NeXTanswers based on amalgamated datasets from 1997-1999. This work would be greatly expedited if I could use LatinByrd for the heavy lifting, as I want to make the new site as authentic as possible.
 
Since it has been a long time since the machines running LatinByrd were last commercially important, would you be willing to consider releasing a free license to the nextcomputers.org community? LatinByrd is a small but important part of the history of the platform, and releasing a license like this would allow us to preserve it for future generations.
 
If not, I would be eager to obtain one of the limited-time trial licenses mentioned on the LatinByrd site, if it is still possible to generate them.
 
Thank you,
 
Samantha

His reply:

Hi Samantha,
I have found an unsold academic license key which should fit your requirements:
[...]
I'm not sure whether my OCR scanned the key correctly, it might instead read like this:
[...]
(If you encounter any problems, please let me know.)
best regards,
Stefan

That particular key ended up not working, so we went back and forth a few times before he found me one that was valid:

Hi Samantha,

my apologies for the inconvenience! It might be that this key was too old. Here is the latest key I could find:

Aek@-SFP^-yBpU-dZ6M-JpYQ-]upc

Please try this one and tell me whether it works.

best regards
Stefan

(I did reply to him to confirm that it worked and give him my thanks. I also asked him if he had any parts of his old website from noir.com/sss archived, but he never got back to me.)

So, there you have it: our key is Aek@-SFP^-yBpU-dZ6M-JpYQ-]upc

Relatedly, my master spreadsheet for NeXT software preservation, which includes this key and a few others, can be found here. I haven't worked on it at all in recent months (very busy with RL stuff still) but what's there should be accurate and of value nonetheless.

#86

Virtualization / Commit number in „About“ windo...

Last post by kokomuck - Oct 26, 2025, 10:25 AM

Hiya,

Would it be possible to include the latest commit number  of a particular build in the ,,About" window?

So far, the ,,About" window displays the Version number.

Yet, it would be handy to include the commit number as there are various sources for the Previous app, e.g. download from the website, compilation via MacPorts.

Not sure if it's too much hassle.

All the best,
Kokomuck

#87

Virtualization / Re: Previous for Mac OS X 10.1...

Last post by jeffburg - Oct 24, 2025, 03:38 PM

@andreas_g thanks I will give it a try and report back!
@kokomuck no worries at all! Apple really f'ed up by not switching to macOS 11 after 10.10 Yosemite. Instead they went all the way to macOS 10.15 before switching to macOS 11 ::facepalm::

#88

Virtualization / Re: Previous for Mac OS X 10.1...

Last post by andreas_g - Oct 24, 2025, 03:26 PM

Great find! I didn't know Previous was available through MacPorts.

I am using 10.13 as a limit because my build system is set up for that. It might be possible to compile the SDL2 variant of Previous on/for older systems. Feel free to try it. The starting point is changing the deployment target in line 11 of CMakeLists.txt.

#89

Virtualization / Re: Previous for Mac OS X 10.1...

Last post by kokomuck - Oct 24, 2025, 02:12 PM

Oops!

I got confused between Mac OS X10.13 and macOS 13.
Sorry about my previous feedbacks 

#90

Virtualization / Re: Previous for Mac OS X 10.1...

Last post by kokomuck - Oct 24, 2025, 09:41 AM

I just compiled Previous via MacPorts on a VM running macos 12 Monterey, and the compilation succeeded. I launched the app and that part worked fine, too.
I will check at home with the iMac 2015 (running Monterey) with some hard drive images.

All the best,
Kokomuck