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Mac OS 8 Emulator Available as a Downloadable App

I wonder how well the ARM will run JavaScript vs Intel in this situation?
Most likely ARM will crawl to a halt.
 
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Reactions: Mr. Awesome
wivey said:
You mean I can use Word Perfect again?!! - woowee :) Just need to figure out how to hammer in my old floppy discs.
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Don't count on it. I had kept dozens of floppy disks in a nice cool environment over the years and when I went to use them, they were unreadable. Maybe it depends on the brand or the alignment of the stars but floppies lose their magnetic properties over time. I still have a working Mac Plus and almost all of the disks I had for it simply stopped working. I threw away the external floppy drives I had because of that reason. I wish you good luck with your floppy disks. I also used Word Perfect and Multimate for DOS way back when and they were a lot of fun until I started using MS Word. I don't think I'll be downloading any of those old OSes because I'm only moving forward and not backward.

Anyway, here's something to get you started with your time travels: https://vintagemacmuseum.com/resources/mac-software/
 
This is horrible to use and causes my MacBook Air to take off, but I love it. Not seen the Scrapbook for a while!
 
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applelink.png


Wonder if my old AppleLink ID would still work to login :)
 
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Really interesting and definitely worth a look!

I'm curious how much is written anew or borrowed from other emulation projects. I use SheepShaver, which still has a community maintaining it and adding new features.

As an archivist and emulator enthusiast, I recommend anyone interested in running old Mac software to visit Emaculation.com.
 
960design said:
That is amazing... where do people find the time for amazing pet projects like this?!
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It does leverage existing technologies like WebAssembly, Basilisk Macintosh Emulator and wraps it it all up with Electron.
Certainly not trivial, but doable in a reasonable time span. Power of open source!
 
This is awesome.. I have fond memories of the Mac then, and had my first professional programming job then. I loaded it up and played a bit of Duke Nukem for old times sake!
 
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ksgant said:
I'm old enough to remember System 6 and later it's "Multifinder", which allowed the running of two programs at a time. Then the complete mess with multiple crashes with System 7. When System 8....sorry, "OS 8" came along, it fixed a lot of things, but it was still coopertative multitasking with no memory protections, which meant if something crashed, it could crash the entire system.
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I remember watching my friends with Macs, back in the day, and they sure looked pretty, but the underlying architecture was archaic. I remember often saying (literally), “what this thing needs is demand-paged virtual memory and preemptive multitasking”. Then, Mac OS X came along, and it didn’t merely add those, it had switched over to my beloved Unix, complete with a FreeBSD userland! Gave it a couple years to mature (or get past being a toddler, at least), and dove in feet first. macOS is the best Unix workstation, and has been for a long time. What it loses in Unix purity (the case-mangling filter on the filesystem is still a black mark against it), it gains in having the nicest, most consistent GUI of any Unix, and support by commercial software that Linux could only dream of (yes, you can get Linux versions of some commercial apps, but not nearly the scope that macOS commands).

Linux stole BSD’s thunder by capturing the spotlight as a x86 Unix(-alike) while BSD was mired in a frivolous lawsuit from AT&T (and, man, the Linux fanatics, many of whom had never seen a Unix before, showered Linux with praise and crowned it prom queen, and devoted huge efforts into improving it and proselytizing it, at a time when it wasn’t half the OS that FreeBSD was*), but then macOS stole the desktop market for Unix that Linux was always promising itself (“next year will definitely be the year of Linux on the desktop”).

*: (To me, back in the day, it seemed like Linux was a beat up VW Bug that rolled into a town of Windows bicyclists who had never seen a car, and the Windows townsfolk all said, “Lo! This wondrous new device is a CAR! And it’s clearly the first and greatest CAR ever!” and then they set up a cult around it to spread the word to everyone that this was the greatest car ever and all should bow before it and bring it offerings... and when their missionaries reached people who were well acquainted with cars, those car people said, “you know, that’s fairly mediocre as cars go, we have these here that have been carefully designed and finely tuned over the decades—” “NO! You see, Linux is FREE! That makes it the best car ever!” “Uh, yeah, you see, all these BSD variants are free too, even more free than your Linux, and—” “NO, I say! Begone, heretic! Shun the disbeliever!”. Anyway, that’s today’s Unix history lesson. Nowadays, I work on Linux servers, among others, but I do it from a Mac. Linux is a good solid OS these days, and great for servers - more by dint of huge efforts thrown at it over the years than because of its underlying design - but it’s still far from catching macOS as a desktop OS ;))
 
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Wrapping a speedy emulator in a slow js VM. Nice job.
Just download the emulator, guys.
 
ArPe said:
Warning, this will heat up your MacBook Pro’s like crazy and the fans stay on even in sleep. You’ll have to reset PRAM and SMC if it happens to you.
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I bet it will run super fast on the new Apple silicon -- probably as fast as the native Motorola chips!!
😜
 
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Reactions: JosephAW
Boyd01 said:
My daughter playing a game on my "Fat Mac" 512k, circa 1987 (with an ImageWriter II in the background). Anyone recognize this game? I got the Mac in 1985 after owning an Apple ][ since 1978.
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This is a great photo. Thanks for sharing! That ImageWriter II is a nice little gem in the background, and your daughter looks really engrossed in the game. I can't quite make out the title in the menu bar and don't recognise the game by the image on-screen. Was it likely an educational title or a choose-your-own adventure, perhaps? The 512k must have been quite the investment!
 
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OK, got it up and running. How do I get Classic Zork I to run in it? It's in the Unix folder within the macintosh.js folder, but nothing happens.
 
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Some where in one of my old paper files is my Apple Level Technical Service Level 2 certification, I got back in 1982 when I drove to Chicago and was trained by Apple to repair Apple II, Apple III and Lisa. Apple printers: silentwriter, Imagewriter and Apple Laserwriter. They also showed us a secret project that was in development on a new smaller computer that was less than the Lisa, code name Macintosh :)
 
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