
Exploring the Apple Pippin ROM(s), part 7: A lot to digest - beefhash
https://blitter.net/blog/2019/05/04/exploring-the-pippin-roms-part-7-a-lot-to-digest
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scarface74
On a mostly unrelated note. The Pippen was a badly designed and underpowered
even by 1996 standards. MacOS itself wasn’t completely PPC native and had a
large amount of 68K code in it. To make matters worse, the 603 had a smaller
slower cache than the older 601 and that made Apple’s built in 68K emulator
perform even worse than the 601. The 601-66Mhz processor in my PowerMac
6100/60 was already slower running 68K programs than my older LCII with a
68030-40Mhz accelerator card.

Add on top of that the increased memory requirements of the PPC based Macs,
the horrible memory management of Classic MacOS and the amount of memory in
the Pippen. Mac users knew that this thing was a turd. I remember
conversations on Usenet about it.

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leshokunin
Funnily enough, I remember the gaming press being cautiously optimistic about
the Pippin. It was touted as a multimedia console hybrid. Back then, something
being Multimedia was a big marketing buzzword (think a bit like cloud or
blockchain). The general feeling I recall is similar to when Windows CE came
to the Dreamcast, or when the original Xbox launched.

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tinus_hn
Pretty scary how the encryption is completely cracked. Even though it uses key
sizes known to be insecure I don’t think it is well known an attack is this
easy.

