Mac OS 9.1 Updater Installation & Tips

As we noted yesterday, the long anticipated Mac OS 9.2.1 updater to Mac OS 9.1 and 9.2 was released by Apple. It is a huge updater, 82 MB or six segments that combine to the updater, and not a full install. This means that you need 9.1 or 9.2 (summer 2001 Macs) installed before running the 9.2.1 updater. The ReadMe states that it only works with Macs that are supported on Mac OS X (Beige Power Mac G3's and later, iMacs, iBooks, PowerBook G3 Series and later). We have not yet tried it on an earlier Mac with or without a G3 CPU upgrade.

We downloaded the single file of the updater because we fortunately have broadband internet via cable modem. We had no trouble getting the updater and the download rates ranged from 56k/sec to 148k/sec. All downloads gave a "Shrinkwrap Error -60" message as they decoded but we just dismissed it with no apparent effect. During installation Dana Baggett got a "BigSystem Morsels error" that continued to appear on successive attempts so he created a new installer that worked fine (see TIL #25222).

We installed Mac OS 9.2.1 updater on a G4 Cube, iBook (Dual USB), PowerBook G4 and Power Mac G4 533DP. We've updated Mac OS 9.1 alone on partitions or disks and Mac OS 9.1 on partitions with Mac OS X 10.0.4. All work fine after installation.

Virtually every 9.1 control panel and extension was updated. The exceptions were AirPort, Apple DVD Player software and MacOS RunTime for Java (MRJ). Apple Remote Access 4.0.2 and ColorSync 3.0.4 are also installed. [Reader Tip: If you first need to clean install 9.1 (like you somehow have one of the late 9.2 betas installed) and have a DVD-ROM drive be sure to update the extensions to v2.7 after clean installing 9.1 and before installing the updater. If you try afterwards, the DVD software installer will not work.]

There are, of course, new ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers. The NVIDIA version is 2.3, up from 2.1.1. The new NVIDIA drivers dramatically improve the visual quality of Unreal Tournament on our GeForce3. UT runs on RAVE rather than OpenGL (updated to v1.2.2 with OpenGLRendererATI at v1.2.5), although there is an older OpenGL version of UT, and the visual quality of RAVE has been less than spectacular. That changes with the new NVIDIA drivers, at least on our GeForce3 graphics card. If you have this card, the 9.2.1 updater is worth getting for the NVIDIA drivers alone.

With Mac OS X 10.0.4, Classic mode appears to startup faster. We timed an iBook (Dual USB) and Mac OS 9.1 averaged 61 seconds while 9.2.1 averaged 10 per cent faster at 55 seconds.

The only downside that we've found so far is that Dana's DiskWarrior extension doesn't work but Alsoft usually updates the extension soon after each Mac OS update.