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Hi Charles,
I seem to be having trouble finding and article you wrote a little while back. At least I think you wrote it. The article delt with sliming down the Classic folder in OS X. Just for kicks I'm planning on loading some of the games from the days of the Classic OS to run on my G4 iBook.
Cheers and thanks for the great writing.
Andrew Thompson
I wrote on that topic in OS X Odyssey 121. I expect the article is still somewhere on the site, but I wasn't able to quickly find a link, so here's an updated version.
Optimizing Classic Mode
Something I've been meaning to get around to but had procrastinated about is speeding up Classic startup by turning off unnecessary extensions. I don't restart whole lot, and generally just leave Classic running in the background, so the poky startup time isn't that big an annoyance, but I decided to see how much of an improvement I could realize by leaning down the extensions set.
As it happened, Classic wasn't running, so I opened the Classic preferences panel in System Preferences and timed Classic's start up with my working set of OS 9.2.2 preferences enabled. A not-very-impressive one minute, 15 seconds.
I shut down Classic again using the Stop button in the Classic preferences panel; then clicked the "Advanced" tab. The first step was to click the Rebuild Desktop button to rebuild the Classic Desktop file, which took a few seconds to complete. I then selected "Open Extensions Manager" from the pull-down menu, and clicked the "Start Classic" button (Note: you can also just hold down the space bar while Classic is starting up, which will make the Extensions Manager appear during the start-up sequence).
When Extensions Manager appeared, I selected "Mac OS 9.2 All" from the "Selected Set" pull-down menu, and then checked the "Duplicate Set" button. I renamed my new extension set "Classic Mode," and set about the weeding process
You can turn off most of the Control Panels, although the ones that still work, or partly work, in Classic Mode include:
Appearance
AppleTalk
Date & time
General Controls
Keyboard
Memory (disk cache only)
Monitors & Sound (alert sounds)
You can also turn off most of the OS 9 extensions, but you will still need to keep a few active. Don't worry about turning off too many, as OS X Classic Mode will scan the extensions set on start-up, and if something necessary is turned off, you will get a message saying: "Some Classic-specific resources need to be added to or updated in your system folder..." Just click OK, and Classic will turn anything it needs back on. Stuff that needs to be enabled includes:
Apple Guide
Carbon Lib
Classic RAVE
Open Transport
Open Transport ASLM Modules
SOM Objects for Mac OS
Classic Support
Classic Support UI
ProxyApps
Once the turn on/off check boxes for everything else were unchecked, I clicked the "Continue" button and Classic finished booting up. A shutdown and timed startup from scratch showed that Classic startup time had been shaved from 75 seconds to 25 seconds -- not too shabby a result for 10 minutes work.
If you need to reboot directly into OS 9.2, remember to hold down the Shift key on startup and re-select your working set of extensions from Extensions Manager.
Charles W. Moore
Tags: Blogs ď Hands On Mac ď
