I wanted to too how far I could get porting an old Macintosh application to run on a modern Mac.
The Computer History Museum released MacPaint's original source code years ago (Pascal + 68k assembly). I pointed Claude Code at it with a feasibility plan built in Gemini, and let it go. I didn't write or read any of the code it produced.
My favorite moment: it needed the tool icons, which live in the resource fork of the original binary. The disk image was MFS — Apple's pre-HFS filesystem from 1984. Nothing reads it. So it wrote an MFS parser, decoded the resource fork, and pulled the icons out.
And after one or two bug reports, I got the original screen up and running.
I know this isn't super exciting news for anyone, but as a senior software engineer, I've been feeling the same waves of excitement and existential dread over the improvements of coding models. This little side project made me smile.
The whole thing runs on iPad now. My kids use it every day and fight over who gets to print next.
TacticalCoder•1h ago
> The disk image was MFS — Apple's pre-HFS filesystem from 1984. Nothing reads it.
There are plenty of Github project reading (and writing) MFS disks. There are also, if I'm not mistaken, Github project basically reproducing MacPaint.
minorbug•1h ago
I wanted to too how far I could get porting an old Macintosh application to run on a modern Mac.
The Computer History Museum released MacPaint's original source code years ago (Pascal + 68k assembly). I pointed Claude Code at it with a feasibility plan built in Gemini, and let it go. I didn't write or read any of the code it produced.
My favorite moment: it needed the tool icons, which live in the resource fork of the original binary. The disk image was MFS — Apple's pre-HFS filesystem from 1984. Nothing reads it. So it wrote an MFS parser, decoded the resource fork, and pulled the icons out.
And after one or two bug reports, I got the original screen up and running.
I know this isn't super exciting news for anyone, but as a senior software engineer, I've been feeling the same waves of excitement and existential dread over the improvements of coding models. This little side project made me smile.
The whole thing runs on iPad now. My kids use it every day and fight over who gets to print next.
TacticalCoder•1h ago
There are plenty of Github project reading (and writing) MFS disks. There are also, if I'm not mistaken, Github project basically reproducing MacPaint.