A project I’ve been playing with recently is Ogg Theora’s Cortado, a free video player designed to be able to run on an extremely wide variety of computers, including old, obsolete systems. How old, you ask?
Really old:
Screenshot of Cortado playing a video in SheepShaver
This is a picture of Cortado running on Mac OS 7.5.5, in the Macintosh Runtime for Java 2.0, playing the video from the FSF’s freedom testimonials campaign. This operating system was released in 1996. The system is emulated in SheepShaver, which makes playback far too slow to be usable. Someone will have to test on real hardware to see what happens.
Nonetheless, I think this is strong evidence regarding how serious we are about backwards compatibility and inclusive software. Serious, or at least, enthusiastic.
Just FYI, Cortado 0.2.0 ran on an even older OS – Windows 95. Against the included Microsoft 1.0 JVM. Any idea if that still works with 0.5.0 ?
7.5.5 may be newer than Windows 95, but System 7.5 was originally released in September 1994, so the OS internals might be older!
Getting things working again with the MS JVM was one of the major fixes in 0.5.0. I didn’t know the MS JVM ever ran/shipped in Windows 95, but that’s cool. Someone should make a demo.
Unfortunately, none of the developers run Windows, and the MS JVM doesn’t run under Wine. One recent accomplishment is getting Cortado working under the Sun JDK 1.1.8, which is very similar to the MS JVM but runs under Wine, so we can test it more easily.
Anyway, if you have a copy of Windows 95 around, it would be cool to see Cortado running in a Win95 VM!