I could of course not resist the temptation to check out how my Mac museum is doing, and if I can create patch packages without BasiliskII. The museum seems fine, my Pismo PowerBook booted nicely, the batteries seem now finally dead, but otherwise it was working well. Same with my former workhorse, the G4 Cube, its only problem is that my current monitor doesn’t like the low resolution the stock graphics card produces.
Neither machine was however in the end used to work on an updated Y2010 patch, that honor does indeed go to BasiliskII. Resource forks are as usual a challenge to move across platforms, so resorted to moving StuffIt archives around, but all pieces for the patch are in place.
It took a bit to figure out how the patch package is put together, I’ll document that later, same with the actual patch approach, but the good news is that my dear development Newton JE7420LHAYL is now reporting patch version 711999, and comes alive just at the end of 2023, December 31st 11:48 to be precise. I’ll still do some more testing and then start a proper release.
The sad part is that this will be the last patch for the Y2010 problem. By 2040, the NewtonOS low level time functions will overflow, and that is a much harder problem to fix.