System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

Summary

(And Mac OS 8!)Hey, guys!Surely y'all know and have enjoyed Mac OS 9.2.2 booting and beautifully-running on all four Mac mini G4 models for close to 8 years now. (Wow!)Well, that was one massive revolution...... But most of us did not think we would live to see the day New World ROM machines, even more so the likes of the Mac mini G4, to NATIVELY boot System 7:(Gotta love it trying to display 1 GB RAM capacity.)Before your eyeballs leave your eyesockets completely, I ought to warn that there's still much to be sorted out in this, especially sound, video and networking (the usual suspects). In other words, your mileage may vary, so keep expectations in check!========================================================OK, so HOW in the WORLD is any of this possible?========================================================It turned out "New World ROM" Macs had a cousin born out of the clone program (until the usual villain, Steve Jobs, came and killed it), which was an architecture called "CHRP" (pronounced "chirp"). It was the successor to PReP, but, unlike PReP, Mac OS was also going to be officially-bootable on it. Close to no CHRP machines ever saw the light of the day, thanks to Jobs' return. Nonetheless, Apple internally developed Mac OS 7.6 ~ 8.0 for CHRP systems before it got axed. It's just that they never released it, but the development was done regardless. On October 2025, it turned out someone preserved some of these Mac versions, which were then acquired and preserved and shared with the world. (Macintosh Garden link, archive.org link.)Although CHRP was left to die, the so-called "New World ROM" Macs inherited much of its architecture and design. As you probably know, these Macs rely on an extra system file called "Mac OS ROM", whereas "Old World ROM" Macs do not need it, and can use their own actual ROM to get Mac OS going. This meant any Mac OS version unaware of the concept of a Mac OS ROM file could not just simply boot in a New World ROM Mac normally. Peo...