Hacker News: mrpippy

New comment by mrpippy in "You can power on a Mac remotely"

mrpippy — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:49:16 +0000

My memory from classic Mac OS is that pushing the keyboard soft-power key brought up a system-modal dialog asking if you wanted to shut down, restart, or cancel, a dialog with exactly the same design as: <http://www.christianboyce.com/page25/files/tipofthedayjulyth...>

That would obviously not be compatible with a server, maybe if soft power was just constantly held down starting from boot that dialog wouldn't show up?

New comment by mrpippy in "Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter"

mrpippy — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:06:42 +0000

The author discussed this a bit on Mastodon as well:

https://xoxo.zone/@numist/116716469017975106

New comment by mrpippy in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

mrpippy — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:10:56 +0000

At this point that would be a 2018 Mac mini, which can only run Sequoia (which will be out-of-support at the same time as Homebrew drops Intel support).

If you want Intel support, MacPorts still runs back to Leopard.

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS Container Machines"

mrpippy — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:39:49 +0000

Virtualization.framework just gained USB passthrough support in macOS 27. It might be a niche feature for containers to add, but other VM software will likely add support soon.

New comment by mrpippy in "I Found a Bug in Apple's Fsck_hfs"

mrpippy — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:57:40 +0000

I would consider HFS+ to be a legacy filesystem at this point, something you shouldn't use without a really good reason (interop with pre-macOS 10.13 machines being the only one I can think of).

Fun fact: HFS dates back to the 80s, and so does the fsck code. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/hfs/blob/main/lib... still contains '#if BSD' blocks for the Mac OS X code, and classic Mac code in the '#else'.

And 'dfalib' refers to 'Disk First Aid', the classic Mac fsck application.

New comment by mrpippy in "I Found a Bug in Apple's Fsck_hfs"

mrpippy — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:49:06 +0000

Note to the author: did you file an Apple feedback for this? You should put that FB number in your post and the GitHub repo, it will ease the process for any Apple employees who see this and want to get it fixed.

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS needs its grid back"

mrpippy — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:45:45 +0000

Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger

New comment by mrpippy in "Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs"

mrpippy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:33:31 +0000

Those are still needed for the Rosetta use-cases that are sticking around (old games, Linux binaries)

New comment by mrpippy in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

mrpippy — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:36:40 +0000

I feel like that's true for early/mid-90s games where the PC version targeted DOS (+ the varied universe of PC video/sound hardware), and the Mac version could just target the much more uniform Mac platform.

But SimCity 3000 is from 1999, and the PC version was a normal Win9x game. I own (still have the CD) the SimCity 3000 Mac port, and it is not very good. Maxis didn't port it themselves, it was done by Software MacKiev. System requirements were quite high for the time, it was sluggish, often unstable, and the file open/save dialogs reused the Windows-style dialogs which was very awkward.

The soundtrack is great though.

New comment by mrpippy in "WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64"

mrpippy — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:53:37 +0000

WinCE 6 Platform Builder was based on Visual Studio 2005 I think.

Building applications for WinCE 6 was also only supported with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, which put a hard cap on available language features and development OS support. I had the thankless job of trying to port C++ code from Linux to WinCE 6 in 2014, and even then VS2008 felt way behind.

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore"

mrpippy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:12:39 +0000

See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore"

mrpippy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:12:17 +0000

Correct, that is staying around.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...:

> There will continue to be support for older, unmaintained gaming titles leveraging Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs.

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore"

mrpippy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:11:37 +0000

True, Apple's developer and support pages are not all fully up-to-date or explicit. From the macOS 26.4 release notes (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...):

> There will continue to be support for older, unmaintained gaming titles leveraging Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs.

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore"

mrpippy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:10:04 +0000

No, those need to stay (at least the ones needed to run the targeted "old unmaintained games"). What can go is all the x86_64 slices of system binaries (i.e. bash, perl, etc etc)

New comment by mrpippy in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"

mrpippy — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:09:48 +0000

Evidence that NVIDIA has even been trying? My understanding is that Apple didn’t allow 3rd parties to write graphics drivers past 10.13, but they could’ve done a non-graphics driver like this.

New comment by mrpippy in "OpenBSD on Motorola 88000 Processors"

mrpippy — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:34:54 +0000

I believe it was the first RISC that Apple prototyped building a Mac around, including a 68K emulator. IIRC from Gary Davidian’s CHM oral history, it was corporate dealmaking that led to AIM and PPC more than any technical negatives for the 88K.

https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-cent...

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal"

mrpippy — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:17:33 +0000

The report says it broke when updating from macOS 15 to 26, so not a minor patch update. I'm a bit surprised no one noticed this earlier though, since 26 has been out since September and in beta since June.

New comment by mrpippy in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

mrpippy — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:36:01 +0000

AppleScript doesn’t have any NeXT heritage, it comes entirely from classic MacOS (debuted in System 7.1)

New comment by mrpippy in "The IRIX 6.5.7M (sgi) source code"

mrpippy — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:49:21 +0000

This leak has been floating around for years, and it's not even close to everything (i.e. no GUI pieces)

New comment by mrpippy in "-fbounds-safety: Enforcing bounds safety for C"

mrpippy — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:31:12 +0000

Apple is shipping code built with this, and is supporting it for developers to use (see https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/enabling-enh...)