"Vintage" macs and their use with MIOS

[dcer10]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to see if I was the only oddball out there still using mac classic ie OS 9.2 or earlier in their workshops and studios?

I am using a beige G3 and a 9600/350 with OMS and an Opcode Studio 4. Im my opionion you cant beat that for midi. I have several high powered PC's with all the latest HW/SW for audio/midi but I still get more out of OMS and the studio 4, especially when using studio patches.

What im asking is, if people out there are using old macs still, what tools if any have you found are useful when working with your midiboxes? I have used a program simply called sysex which is a sysex librarian, it however seems to not load up the transfers easily to the midiboxes. I would like to use MIOS studio or similar to dump hex files, is ther an alternative? Even loading up .syx files from the midibox site doesnt work well because of the mac file translation problems it wont see it as a system exclusive file, but it does see it as a PC simple text document. If someone out there wanted to they could stuff some .sit files with .syx files made on macs for use with midibox gear and then everyone using old classic macs could talk to their midiboxes :}

I know that a lot of pro studios still use OS 9 with pro tools, and with OMS, I know its old, but its tried, tested, trouble free {as much as a computer could be!}, cheap, and easily obtainable, all things I thought MIDIBOX users like!

Perhaps other users could comment on their experiences using older mac OS's with midiboxes??

Thanks,

John

[adamjking]

Hi John,

While I am toying with the idea of making MIOS Studio backwards compatible with Java 1.4 (and therefore older versions of OS X), this will not be of any use to OS 9. From the Apple FAQ:

The latest Mac OS Runtime for Java on Mac OS 9 provided a 1.1.8 Java VM. There are no plans to bring any versions of J2SE to Mac OS 9. If you are looking to make use of certain extension APIs on Mac OS 9, such as Swing, JavaHelp, or the newer Collections API, keep in mind that you can download 1.1.x versions of these libraries from http://java.sun.com.

Java 1.1.8 is just far to old to try and be backward compatible with, so you're gonna be out of luck trying to use MIOS Studio.

Cheers,

- Adam

[dcer10]

Hi Adam,

Whats the possibility of porting the software to a non java platform? Are there enough people still using os 9 to make it worth while? I would like to keep using it as long as possible even tho I have many more powerful options, simply because of OMS and the cheap multi port interfaces.

All the best,

John

[Jidis]

John,

I'm the same way with 9 (since I can't run 7.6 ;D). My G4 never went to X, even though it came with it, and if it's doing audio at all now, it's got a Core2 card which can't do X.

Take Care,

George

PS Adam- they had a thread recently in the MOTU forums about the cessation of MIDI support in Java. Couldn't help but wonder if that was something which would affect you (us) in some way??

[adamjking]

PS Adam- they had a thread recently in the MOTU forums about the cessation of MIDI support in Java. Couldn't help but wonder if that was something which would affect you (us) in some way??

Thanks for pointing this out George. I've obviously been out of it for a while as I wasn't even aware of it, but a quick glance at the JavaSound mailing list (which I used to subscribe to) shows you are right. It doesn't look like anything is certain at the moment, so am not sure of the future of MIDI support in Java. Hopefully, if they do remove it from the core runtime, it'll be just a matter of downloading a separate library - similar to what Mac users do with Plumstone.

As for porting to another language, it is unlikely to happen from my end. For the most part Java has been ideal and allows me to write a program once that bahaves uniformly accross all versions of Windows, Linux and newer versions of OSX without having to worry about GUI toolkits, threading issues, MIDI drivers, etc. All the source code is available if anyone feels like porting it to another language/platform.

Cheers,

- Adam