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Asked: 2026-05-15T01:16:52+00:00

I recently got bored and fired up my old Mac OS Classic emulator, and

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I recently got bored and fired up my old Mac OS Classic emulator, and then got nostalgic for writing old-school applications for the system. So, my question:

  1. Where can I get dev tools that can still target Classic? (Ideally free, since this is just for fun, but if grabbing a used version of CodeWarrior on eBay is the best way to go, so be it.)
  2. Where can I get at least reference materials so I don’t have to guess-and-check my way around Carbon/the System Toolbox?
  3. Are there any forums still running that would be open to answering old-school Mac questions for when I get stuck?

This is purely for fun, so don’t worry about how impractical this is. I know.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Where can I get dev tools that can still target Classic?

    You can get Apple’s command-line (yes, for Classic) developer environment, MPW, from their FTP site: ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_Mac_OS_Tools/MPW_etc./MPW-GM_Images/MPW-GM.img.bin .

    The shell is fairly UNIXish, except it uses a completely different punctuation alphabet. Your backslashes, bangs, and angle brackets are no good here. You generally should use Commando instead of trying to forge command lines yourself; type a command like “make” and hit option-return to get a GUI for it.

    Note that you will have to run MPW inside your Classic environment; there is no native Mac OS X version. NeXT’s Project Builder (now Xcode) replaced it in the move to Mac OS X.

    Where can I get at least reference materials so I don’t have to guess-and-check my way around Carbon/the System Toolbox?

    Google search for site:developer.apple.com "inside macintosh. Good luck—they’ve started burying this stuff. Currently, Inside Macintosh matches will be nothing but PDF and will have titles like “IM: Text”.

    There used to be web versions of Inside Macintosh, alongside the PDFs, but I think those got trashed/concealed-too-well-to-find in the last shuffle of the documentation on the site.

    Carbon documentation is more available than Inside Macintosh, which refers to the old Toolbox documentation. Carbon docs will usually say whether something is only available on Mac OS X or not. If the docs don’t say, the headers will. Note that Carbon requires CarbonLib on Classic, and the last version of that was 1.6.1, IIRC.

    Are there any forums still running that would be open to answering old-school Mac questions for when I get stuck?

    You could always ask on Stack Overflow.

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