[Kaps]

I'm helping a friend out and after installing Panther, we've been having a bunch of problems with Classic. Here are the relevant details.

Initial Setup (before the install): She was running OS X (10.1.5) and 9.2.2. Most of her programs are OS X, but she was using Quark in Classic. She rarely booted in OS 9. She also uses Suitcase and she has a lot of fonts. She had this setup for a while, and everything was working normally.

Installation: We installed Panther (10.3) and ran Software Update which updated several things (I don't remember exactly). It upgraded 10.3 to 10.3.1. We then started up in OS 9 and ran Software Update. That also had some things to update (but I don't remember). At some point, due to an error message that the version of Quicktime was not optimal for the System (I forget the exact message—I think we got the message when we started up Classic), we updated Quicktime in OS 9.

The Problem: After the installation, naturally, we just wanted to run her usual programs to make sure everything was working. We started with Quark but Classic was giving us problems. At the beginning, it sometimes froze at the very end of the start up process or it took a very long time to load Quark and the document. That I think we fixed. But Classic is still behaving strangely. It is slow in responding (e.g. double clicking on a word will take about a second to select the word as opposed to instantaneous like before). Sometimes the tool palettes just disappear. Sometimes the titlebar of the window turn white (i.e. no close box, title, or zoom box) but text can still be selected in the window itself. Sometimes it just freezes. In this condition, it is not usable.

Things We Tried: The problem seems to only be when working in Classic. (We started in OS 9 and things worked without any problem.) We rebuilt the desktop from the Classic preferences; trashed the three Classic extensions in OS 9 (running Classic reinstalled new copies). We tried a clean install of OS 9, that didn't help. To see if it was Quark related, I tried running Simple Text (after the Clean Install) and that had the slow responsiveness as well. I read somewhere that if there was an alias in the Recent Servers folder, that might cause problems, so, through Apple Menu Options control panel I set recent servers to "0". We ran Disk Utility. After all this, the problem still remains.

Anyone have any suggestions of where to go from here.

Thanks!

[pbjudge]

Recently, I upgraded to Panther on my old iBook 600. I did a clean install. After that, I did a system update to bring it up to 10.3.1.

Panther seems to work fine, but when I tried to get into classic, it said that the system did not have a working copy of OS9 that was compatable with classic. I don't ever need to boot into OS9 anymore, I just want to use classic from time to time for some apps.


Someone told me to reinstall, making sure to check the option (which I did not see the first time) to install OS9.

Anyway, I tried to resinstall, but the install app said that because the OS in the system (10.3.1) was higher than the installation discs (10.3.0), it would NOT let me reinstall.

How can I get around this? I need to start all over again, but I cannot get it to install.

Help!!

[chomi]

The problems described by Kaps are the same I have been having, ever since updating to Panther. With Jaguar, my Classic applications (mostly games) played fine on my G3 iMac 500 mhz. But with Panther, the Classic environment has become extremely slow, while booting up in 9.2.2 solves all problems.

I am sorry for not being able to provide a solution, Kaps, as I too tried pretty much the same troubleshooting routine you did...I even went and bought some more RAM, for a total of 768, but it didn't help at all.

I read that Classic, in Panther, now uses "double-buffered windows", which supposedly speeds things up and makes everyone happy. Perhaps on some older computers (including my G3), it has the opposite effect?

I don't want to have to downgrade to Jaguar, but I fear this is the only solution...Hopefully someone can provide any insight on this problem.

[bowwowman]

Well......

Two things that stand out in Kap's post:
A. Quark
B. Fonts


Quark has always had problems with classic, and has never been a 100% stable program, even under OS 8 & 9

And since it installs a gazillion fonts, that just adds to the problem.

All the things that Kap listed point to the font issue, either corrupted ones or some that are incompatible. IIRC, there was an app called "Font Agent" that will help, but that was a long time ago. It should still be on versiontracker....


Even though I dont have Quark, since installing panther I have had Ø problems with classic, or anything else for that matter. And my system runs way faster than it did with all previous versions of OS X.

I run a rev2 B&W, upgraded to a G4/650 w/1GB ram, and all kinds of apps, periphs, haxies and utilities.

Everything I do works great, whether in X or classic. And I have some apps dating back to the early 90's that still work too

Is classic slower than OS 9? YES, but it IS an emulation, and like VPC, it is not and never will be 100% perfect, but it does work.

[Brass]

Originally posted by bowwowman:
Well......

Two things that stand out in Kap's post:
A. Quark
B. Fonts


Quark has always had problems with classic, and has never been a 100% stable program, even under OS 8 & 9

And since it installs a gazillion fonts, that just adds to the problem.

All the things that Kap listed point to the font issue, either corrupted ones or some that are incompatible. IIRC, there was an app called "Font Agent" that will help, but that was a long time ago. It should still be on versiontracker....


Even though I dont have Quark, since installing panther I have had Ø problems with classic, or anything else for that matter. And my system runs way faster than it did with all previous versions of OS X.

I run a rev2 B&W, upgraded to a G4/650 w/1GB ram, and all kinds of apps, periphs, haxies and utilities.

Everything I do works great, whether in X or classic. And I have some apps dating back to the early 90's that still work too

Is classic slower than OS 9? YES, but it IS an emulation, and like VPC, it is not and never will be 100% perfect, but it does work.

Well, I've got the same problem with Classic in Panther, and I can tell you that it's definitely NOT Quark (because it's not installed) and it's definitley NOT fonts (because the machine doesn't have many, either in Classic, or in OS X.

I have two Mac of my own, both of which have NO problems with Classic in Panther. However, my father's 15" titanium PB runs Classic applications exceptionally slowly. So slowly as to be almost unusable. And this is just with a simple application (eg, we've been testing with the "Notepad" utility).

So whatever the problem is, it clearly doesn't affect all Macs, and it does affect at least some new-ish macs.

Let's hope Apple can identify and fix it in 10.3.2!

PS. Classic in OS X is NOT an emulation. Certainly not in the VPC sense! It does not actually emulate anything (such as Intel chips, etc). It simply runs the ACTUAL Mac OS 9 processes within Mac OS X (albeit modified versions of the programs in some cases). For that reason is should NOT be significantly slower than booting in Mac OS 9, and I find that when it's working properly, it actually runs at the same speed (and in one case considerably faster) than booting into OS 9.

[Kaps]

The problem seems to be as Brass described it. We tried a clean install of OS 9 for testing purposes, so there were no extra fonts or extra extensions. Our test program was SimpleText which run sluggish. OS X programs ran fine, booting up in OS, everything worked fine. Just running Classic was the problem. My friend has a G4 Power Mac (off hand I am not sure what model/speed). One thing that I thought may be the problem was that my friend was running Suitcase in OS X. Following is from the Extensis web site:

Mac OS X Panther, Adobe CS and QuarkXPress 6
Extensis is currently investigating compatibility
of our products with Mac OS X Panther, Adobe CS and QuarkXPress 6 products and will be posting compatibility updates as necessary.

Updates to the following products to address Mac OS X Panther compatibility are currently in development:
Suitcase X1
Font Reserve 3.1
Font Reserve Server 1.6
Portfolio 6.1


But from what Brass is saying, it seems like that is not the culprit.

[Brass]

Originally posted by Kaps:
One thing that I thought may be the problem was that my friend was running Suitcase in OS X.

...

But from what Brass is saying, it seems like that is not the culprit.

That's right, certainly no Suitcase running on my father's machine.

[JohnnySkeeky]

I, also, cannot run Classic, a major nuisance since very little of my software is OS X native, and none of my work can get done. I never use Quark. I'm getting the following dialogue: "There is a problem with updating the Classic-specific files. Classic was unable to update its files in 'System Folder' on [your hardrive]."

Panther looks great - I, too, was not won over by earlier versions - except for the fact that, apparently, I can't make any use of it.