Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing
I can't speak for cross-compilation, but I was a serious Mac developer on System 7 - MacOS 9 back in the day, and Metrowerks CodeWarrior was my tool of choice for C/C++ . A thread on 68KMLA from a few years ago has an extensive discussion of CodeWarrior: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/metrowerks-codewarrior-best-version-and-updates.42338/
Bravo for keeping this great old software and hardware going (System 7 is perhaps my favorite OS of all time). Let us know what you build!
There absolutely is a vintage Mac 68K and PowerPC development community, if you allow me to be loose with the word community. To my knowledge, there isn’t a single, centralized space for people discussing and sharing tips and projects for vintage Macs. Instead, there are a lot of different people and mini communities spread all over the place, not all of which are specific to development.
First of all, there’s MARCHintosh and the wider community of vintage Mac retrocomputing enthusiasts, including Ron’s Computer Videos and Mac84.
Next there’s the 68KMLA forums which, despite the name, also include PowerPC Macs for discussion. There’s also the MacRumors forums which have numerous sections for earlier Macs.
Now, for cross-compiling, the main project I’m aware of is Retro68 which supports 68K and PowerPC targets. I’ve never used it though so I can’t vouch for it.
If you’ve never developed software for Mac before, you’re going to want some documentation. Thankfully, there’s a nice library over at Vintage Apple! Also be sure to check out the various collections over at Internet Archive (the filtering options on the left are extremely powerful).
To get more specific you’ll have to provide more specifics about the type of development you’re interested in. Is it Mac OS 9 or X? I assume you have an iMac G3 and you’ll want to run software on it. Have you serviced the machine to avoid damaging it with leaky capacitors or batteries? Have you replaced the mechanical hard drive with an SSD using an IDE/SATA converter?
These are all things to consider if you want to keep your iMac going as a long term hobby!
You are a gentle person and a school girl.
This forum and Macintosh Garden would be worth taking a look.
Back in the day, an easy programming tool for Mac was called Real Basic. Like VB but on a Mac.
I don’t have any PPC hardware anymore, but now I kind of wish I did lol.
Hope this points you in the right direction.
Check out T2 Linux.. I see it supports lots of hardware.
Edit: ahh g3 is a little too far. G4 minimum I think for T2
Are you putting Linux on it, or are you looking to run MacOS?
If you're doing Linux, doing a GCC cross tool chain (with a tool like crosstool-ng) should be a good start.
Don't have an answer but I'd like to see what you're cooking
The Yocto project supports PowerPC as a compilation option so you could build a lightweight distribution from source that way
That’s pretty badass getting more value out of such old hardware!
