Coincidentally a couple of weeks ago I got annoyed my 512Ke couldn't go online and had Claude build talkip[1] which was fun and works surprisingly well.
with a few simple modifications to minivmac, i have access to my host machine through toolbox calls.
It's pretty tedious to compare - Have to run diags, take screenshots, set up watchers on a modern machine, run comparisons on the classic mac hardware, and then transfer those back from the mac to the modern machine (I haven't set up a network share solution for the mac yet, so each transfer is power down and transfer via SD card), run thru agent for validation and feedback, and repeat for each iteration.
I went thru a few rounds of this (about 4 release candidates) before i decided that what I had was Good Enough and published it. I have noticed that Claude tends towards this "circumcizing the moquito" sometimes in the qa/validation phase.
Here's what I was able to measure from the test log data that I did transfer across:
| Measure | MoofTCP | MacTCP 2.1 |
|---|---|---|
| ACK of an echoed keystroke (median) | 2.8 ms | 4.5 ms |
| ACK of an echoed keystroke (worst case) | 16.8 ms | 17.6 ms |
| Delayed-ACK stall on interactive data | none | none |
| Wikipedia Reader, follow a link | 51.7 s | 53.2 s |
| Fetch 10 MiB over TAP | about 47–49 KB/s | about 49 KB/s |
| Advertised TCP window | 8,192 | 4,220 |
| Transmit stalls and retransmissions on the real Mac | 0 | not measured |
It works so well I had Claude make vcctrl[1] with a full set of skills and an MCP server to fully automate deployment and testing. No more sdcard swaps.
Our family Mac was the first machine I loved. Unfortunately I never got to use with so much as a modem, so I have no first hand experience with using MacTCP.