8.1 on a LCIII

How well does it run? Seems like it would be a little constrained.

Thats weird. I Wonder if I can get this on my 68020 LC. Except I only have 40MB Hd...

Well it does run quite sluggish as you'd expect (7.1 is much nippier). But it seems stable enough so far. I don't need 8.1 on this for anything in particular, I just did it for the hell of it.

I'm not sure if it would run better with more RAM or more VRAM, or if it's the 030 that's making it run slow. I would like to figure out how to get System Profiler to work. I'm sure it's a string somewhere that needs editing.

I don't think an 020 could handle it though.

It's probably the Appearance Manager (Platinum interface) that slows everything down and eats into your memory. I've consistently heard recommendations to not install it when running 7.6.1 on old hardware. Even old PPCs. Although, some 040 owners are content with 8.1. YMMV.

Unfortunately, I don't think you can turn it off in 8.1.

8.1 on a 020 would probably be extremely painful, even if you could find some way to hack it on.

Even if you did get it to work, the LC/LCII top out at a maximum of 10MB of RAM...OS 8 needs a minimum of 12MB from memory (and you really want 20MB at the bare minimum, more is better)

One of the most interesting uses of booting pre-040 Macs into 8.1 would be access to HFS+ volumes. Are there other options, like loading a HFS+ driver using System 7.1?

To my knowledge, no. System 7 simply won't recognize HFS+.

If you try to mount a HFS+ volume under System 7 you simply get a tiny locked volume with a read-me file called "Where_have_all_my_files_gone" explaining the difference, and that you need OS 8.1 or later. I've never heard of anyone developing a driver that allows HFS+ access on System 7 - I only wish such a thing existed.

That is what I meant: a driver should allow the system to handle something, like a HFS+ volume. A few years ago some "driverguru" posted interesting notes on this board. A lot things should be possible for one how knows about putting bits in the appropriate order -

I benchmarked the LC III earlier comparing 7.1 with 8.1 using Speedometer 4.0.1. Here are the results (winning scores are bolded):

7.1

CPU: 0.432

Graphics: 0.376

Disk: 1.827

Math: 1.498

8.1

CPU: 0.431

Graphics: 0.371

Disk: 1.771

Math: 1.503

In 8.1 math was slightly faster but disk performance was down. Which was surprising as the article that inspired me to run the Speedometer tests said it was up to 30% faster in 8.1. But then they were comparing it to 7.5.5 and not 7.1.

Still there isn't that much between them after all.

The "faster disk access" thing advertised in 8 seems to be BS. If you go over to System 7 Today, they reached the same conclusion when benchmarking a PM8600. The minor increase in FPU might be a fluke. There's almost always minor variation between benchmark runs, even under the same conditions.

In all, that's not too shabby, but more RAM would definately be a nice thing.

I should have mentioned that thanks to a kind donation the RAM is now maxed at 36MB (and was for those tests). I also got to add an ethernet card (but no FPU).