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Can you boot up G5 iMac in OS 9.2?
Friday, April 27, 2007 / Hardware, Mac OS 9 / Classic, Mac OS X
My husband is locked into using survey software that runs on OS 9 and was sold off to another company who dropped the line. If he were to buy a G5 iMac, would he be able to boot up in OS 9.2? Classic may not be the answer for him, as he needs to be able to run his plotter and printer while in OS 9. I am not sure if he could do this in Classic. Up to now, he has not even installed OS X.
Is Classic even shipping with the new OS X.4.2 in the G5’s? Thanks for any light you might be able to shed on this situation.
Macs introduced after the beginning of 2003 will not boot into Mac OS 9. They are OS X computers only and will only run OS 9 programs through the OS 9 emulator called Classic, which is part of OS X. A new iMac G5 will still come with Classic on discs but it will not be installed. However, you are right to wonder if your husband’s survey software will work in Classic. Some software does not run in Classic at all, or runs poorly, although other programs work well. See if you can find a friend’s computer with OS X and Classic to test it on. If it will run in Classic then you are just in time. As Apple switches all Macs to Intel processors your options to run OS 9 applications are disappearing. Intel-based Macs will not run Classic at all. Find the fastest PowerPC based system that will run that application because this will be the last upgrade for your husband’s application. Don’t fear if Classic doesn’t work for you, PowerMax still has many OS 9 booting computers just for people in your husband’s position.
September 13th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
I purchased a Quad PowerPC G5 from PowerMax a few months ago. I have it set up with OS10.4.11 on a second hard drive set up to run Classic. I have a number of Classic apps dating back to 1986, including MS Word 5.1 and Claris Draw, MacDraw Pro. All these apps run just fine in classic. The biggest problem that I find is that there are few modern color inkjet printers available today that support OS9. My HP 5MP is still running and is able to handle my B&W printing via AppleTalk. For me, color printing is more of a problem than running apps via Classic. Even running the app through the Classic emulator, the apps load and run way faster than they ever did with their native machines (early PPC and 680XX).