Coming to grips with the demise of Classic mode

I was doing some trouble-shooting yesterday about difficulties one of our researchers was having printing from Classic mode. In that case, opening the Chooser was sufficient to prod the printing sub-system into working again. But that got me to thinking. In the Mac world as a whole, there have always been killer apps that either didn't get issued for new hardware, or whose delay in upgrading kept users with outdated hardware. There are programs, such as Adobe Premiere, that never came out in OSX versions, perhaps in part because of Apple's own video editing software, Final Cut Pro.

Of course, OSX had a built-in emulator for the pre-OSX environment, and many of our niche programs run just fine in that, though there are sometimes quirks regarding printing or sound-playback. This hasn't been a problem. But it will be. The Intel-based OSX has no Classic mode. This means that, as our users upgrade, they'll have to adjust.

Here are some programs that will cause problems.

One researcher has a huge amount of class-demonstrations written in True Basic. A FAQ on the True Basic web site, which seems not to have been updated in several years, promises that an OSX release of True Basic is forthcoming. But, I'm not holding my breath. Now, there are other Basic programming environments (and for what this is used for, there's no reason to send her off to learn some variant of C+ or for her to rework all of her examples in Matlab), but she's got her library in this one. So that's a problem.

Even though the statistics programs SuperAnova and StatView haven't been supported, or even sold, for years, they still run just fine in Classic mode. Granted, SPSS, which runs in OSX (including on Intel-based machines) is far more powerful, it, not surprisingly, has a much steeper learning curve. There's a niche for a basic, menu-driven statistics package, so I'm going to have to renew my search.

We also have a few users with legacy files in SoundScope, a sound recording and analysis program. This program runs fine in Classic mode, but their web page, copyright in 2005, simply states that the program does NOT run in OSX native mode. These folks are also using Praat and, I hope, will be receptive to switching over. I think the only thing SoundScope will do that Praat won't do is produce an on-screen oscilliscope display.

All is not lost, however, even if replacements for these (and other) programs can't be found.

Enterprising sorts have worked out an open source Classic emulation mode called SheepSaver that will run on the Intel Macs. Because it comes from Unix-land, installation is anything but straightforward, and involves, among other things, locating a ROM file from a Mac that will run OS9 (or earlier) and a valid pre-OSX System Folder. Looking at the documentation and help files for this, however, makes it clear that installing and running this environment is a non-trivial task, and it might not be a worthwhile use of time and effort to make it work. But it is a possibility.