Seshan Ravikumar

aka. Seshpenguin

title: Running Classic (Mac OS 9) Finder “Full Screen” on Mac OS X! author: Seshan Ravikumar type: post date: 2020-08-15T16:00:00+00:00 url: /2020/08/15/running-classic-mac-os-9-finder-full-screen-on-mac-os-x/ classic-editor-remember:

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From Mac OS 10.0 to 10.4, Apple shipped “Classic”, a way to run classic Mac OS apps on OS X, by booting a Mac OS 9 environment. This works pretty well (compared to the “Blue Box” used during the development versions of OS X, which was much more virtual machine like, using a disk image and was completely full), since Mac OS 9 windows integrated with OS X windows.

While you can’t get access to the OS 9 Finder by default in Classic (and thus the amazing About This Computer window), you can actually get it to work with a bit of modification! These instructions are adapted from this MacRumors forum post: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/full-screen-classic-on-tiger.2106826/

• Make sure you have a functioning Classic Environment
• Download ResEdit
• Go to the OS 9 System Folder, right click on “Finder” and hit Duplicate.
• Rename the duplicate to “Finder (Classic)” and move it to the OS 9 Applications folder
• Open ResEdit and open your copy of Finder
• On the top bar, under “File”, go to “Get Info for Finder (Classic)”
• Change Type to “APPL” and Creator to “aplt”
• Save and exit ResEdit.
• Done! You can launch Finder!

It’s worth mention that while this is pretty fun to play around with, it’s also really unstable and likes to stop existing randomly (even when it’s just sitting there doing nothing).