FOSS Fest Friday Emulators make it easy to run old software in a window on a modern machine, but without expert knowledge of outdated systems it can be difficult to do much with them. It turns out, unexpectedly, that a good answer to this is…run them in a browser.
MacOS9.app is the latest, and in some ways the most impressive, version of “The Infinite Mac”, a series of five classic Macintosh computer web emulators. It adds a MacOS 9 version to the existing System7.app and MacOS8.app emulators. This involved changing the emulation engine, since MacOS 9 is PowerPC only. All load in a web page, but run on your local computer; their storage is online, streamed on demand, and comes preloaded with a host of apps and games… but even so, they’re configured to allow you to load and save files from your local drive, and they can even be networked with other instances of themselves.
Emulation is fun. Even a low-end 21st century computer is so much faster (and roomier) than a computer from 25 or 30 years ago that it can not only easily run a full-speed emulation of the old machine, but you can also do stuff like run emulators inside emulators. There are issues though: where do you find the old operating systems to run on the emulated machine? And the applications or games to run on this operating system? If you find them, then how do you integrate them into an emulated machine that only understands long-obsolete media and, if you’re lucky, network protocols?
Your pen pal was a bit of an expert in all things DOS early in his career, and still has a few hobby projects involving resurrecting older versions of DOS, now free. (You may have inferred this from the history of the release of FreeDOS 1.3.) It’s easy to run DOS (or even, say, Windows 9x) in a virtual machine on a modern OS, but it is then very difficult to get files in or out of this DOS virtual machine. In its day, DOS didn’t speak TCP/IP and couldn’t mount CDs as writable volumes. Connecting it to a shared drive on the host machine means installing several additional components, and there is no easy way to integrate these tools into the virtual machine other than creating floppy images or ISO files filled with installers and mount them in a virtual CD drive. . It is, in short, a pain.
Similar issues are true for existing Mac emulators like Basilisk II, as you can see from the rather lengthy guide on how to install MacOS 7 on it. (Specifically, MacOS 7.5. version of classic macOS that was free to download from Apple.com – and here we go now.) You also need a file containing an image of a Macintosh ROM, which wasn’t easy to get legitimately .
This is what Mihai Parparita from Tailscale decided to fix. As he described on his blog, he took James Friend’s browser-based version of Basilisk II, added a pre-installed hard drive image full of apps and games, networking support and methods for transferring files between the emulated Mac and the host. One particularly striking aspect is how quickly the emulated Macs boot up. He told us:
The even bigger boot time improvement was to go from loading the entire disk image (which is around 50MB) to loading only the parts needed to boot. There are many resources that are not needed at startup, so they do not need to be downloaded. This is done by dividing the hard drive into 256KB chunks and only loading them from the network when the emulator requests them (the LED on the monitor flashes when this happens). This also unlocked the large (1GB) “Infinite HD” with all software – everything loaded on demand as you browse.
The result, as he previously summarized, was a great success. This week it released a new iteration, which replaces the Basilisk engine with SheepShaver, providing PowerPC emulation instead of 68040.
About the construction of the new version, he modestly told us:
It’s quite different, but at the same time I’m building on existing work for the Basilisk II (68K) and SheepShaver (PPC) emulators, and they share subsystems and the overall architecture style, so this n Wasn’t as big of a lift as it looks. I’m currently investigating what it would take to support System 6 and older OSes, which would involve setting up a mini vMac or other emulator, which is going to be a bigger task.
If you prefer System 7 on PowerPC, there is also a version for that, as well as a Japanese version, KanjiTalk. The whole series is free to use and the source code is available if you want to see how it works. ®
FOSS Fest Friday Emulators make it easy to run old software in a window on a modern machine, but without expert knowledge of outdated systems it can be difficult to do much with them. It turns out, unexpectedly, that a good answer to this is…run them in a browser.
MacOS9.app is the latest, and in some ways the most impressive, version of “The Infinite Mac”, a series of five classic Macintosh computer web emulators. It adds a MacOS 9 version to the existing System7.app and MacOS8.app emulators. This involved changing the emulation engine, since MacOS 9 is PowerPC only. All load in a web page, but run on your local computer; their storage is online, streamed on demand, and comes preloaded with a host of apps and games… but even so, they’re configured to allow you to load and save files from your local drive, and they can even be networked with other instances of themselves.
Emulation is fun. Even a low-end 21st century computer is so much faster (and roomier) than a computer from 25 or 30 years ago that it can not only easily run a full-speed emulation of the old machine, but you can also do stuff like run emulators inside emulators. There are issues though: where do you find the old operating systems to run on the emulated machine? And the applications or games to run on this operating system? If you find them, then how do you integrate them into an emulated machine that only understands long-obsolete media and, if you’re lucky, network protocols?
Your pen pal was a bit of an expert in all things DOS early in his career, and still has a few hobby projects involving resurrecting older versions of DOS, now free. (You may have inferred this from the history of the release of FreeDOS 1.3.) It’s easy to run DOS (or even, say, Windows 9x) in a virtual machine on a modern OS, but it is then very difficult to get files in or out of this DOS virtual machine. In its day, DOS didn’t speak TCP/IP and couldn’t mount CDs as writable volumes. Connecting it to a shared drive on the host machine means installing several additional components, and there is no easy way to integrate these tools into the virtual machine other than creating floppy images or ISO files filled with installers and mount them in a virtual CD drive. . It is, in short, a pain.
Similar issues are true for existing Mac emulators like Basilisk II, as you can see from the rather lengthy guide on how to install MacOS 7 on it. (Specifically, MacOS 7.5. version of classic macOS that was free to download from Apple.com – and here we go now.) You also need a file containing an image of a Macintosh ROM, which wasn’t easy to get legitimately .
This is what Mihai Parparita from Tailscale decided to fix. As he described on his blog, he took James Friend’s browser-based version of Basilisk II, added a pre-installed hard drive image full of apps and games, networking support and methods for transferring files between the emulated Mac and the host. One particularly striking aspect is how quickly the emulated Macs boot up. He told us:
The even bigger boot time improvement was to go from loading the entire disk image (which is around 50MB) to loading only the parts needed to boot. There are many resources that are not needed at startup, so they do not need to be downloaded. This is done by dividing the hard drive into 256KB chunks and only loading them from the network when the emulator requests them (the LED on the monitor flashes when this happens). This also unlocked the large (1GB) “Infinite HD” with all software – everything loaded on demand as you browse.
The result, as he previously summarized, was a great success. This week it released a new iteration, which replaces the Basilisk engine with SheepShaver, providing PowerPC emulation instead of 68040.
About the construction of the new version, he modestly told us:
It’s quite different, but at the same time I’m building on existing work for the Basilisk II (68K) and SheepShaver (PPC) emulators, and they share subsystems and the overall architecture style, so this n Wasn’t as big of a lift as it looks. I’m currently investigating what it would take to support System 6 and older OSes, which would involve setting up a mini vMac or other emulator, which is going to be a bigger task.
If you prefer System 7 on PowerPC, there is also a version for that, as well as a Japanese version, KanjiTalk. The whole series is free to use and the source code is available if you want to see how it works. ®