Mac OS 8 Emulator Available as a Downloadable App

[jlocker]

My bad, I expressed myself wrong. I meant running Zork in the Classic Environment of the Mac, not the classic version of Zork.

My bad, I expressed myself wrong. I meant running Zork in the Classic Environment of the Mac, not the classic version of Zork.

This was fun on a teletype terminal in 1977 🙂 Super Star Trek 🙂

 

[00001000bit]

Might be fun to fire up for nostalgia. A few years back I had a System 7.5 image running in BasiliskII so I could recover old files created in WriteNow (loved that app) and get them into something portable to modern systems.

 

[EugW]

This brings back memories... of just how crashy those Macs were. I even couldn't last day on the OS 8 machines I had to use, before requiring a reboot. Even Windows 98 was more stable than OS 8, and that's not saying much, whereas Windows 2000 was in a completely different league.

I had no interest in Macs until OS X was released in 2000. Bought the first iBook that shipped with 10.1 (although it came as a dual boot machine, with OS 9 as the default boot OS).

 

[BaltimoreMediaBlog]

MAME now supports the ][gs. Those were great games.

Tass Times in Tonetown. Loved that one! 😀

 

[jlocker]

I always have to laugh when people say computer are expensive today. I did a lot of upgrades from the 128k Mac to the 512k Mac in 1985 in my Inacomp store repair shop. 🙂

 

[Geurt]

Crazy to think about how in another 23 years, people will feel and talk about a Big Sur emulator.

That is deep! Considering that Big Sur is actually an emulator already as it needs to mimic that ancient Intel stuff from the old days😉

 

[jlocker]

That is deep! Considering that Big Sur is actually an emulator already as it needs to mimic that ancient Intel stuff from the old days😉

25 years from now we will be all talking about how we made the transition from OS X to OS 11 and how we used Rosetta II and that will be the good old days 🙂

 

[robertcoogan]

May the blessings of a thousand sparkly rainbows visit these nice developers. This made my day. 😀

 

[RumorConsumer]

Dude it has Damage Inc.

 

[CopyChief]

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. So it was always "save save save" when working on anything. Do something, save. Do something a little more. Save. Etc etc.

We didn't get true multitasking until OS X, which was like a breath of fresh air, but even than took time to get everything over to it. And I realized I'm really old.

These are some great, er, interesting memories. These were not the days of "It just works." It seemed like there was a lot more complex tinkering to do just to keep things running – extension conflicts, etc. We didn't have the daily software update download, but it seemed like it might've helped.

I remember getting the OS 8 install disk on Day One. It was pretty exciting. I installed it on my machine at work, too, and the first email that came in afterwards was from IT, telling people not to install OS 8 because it caused huge problems on the network. It was really the beginning of the end for Macs in that company anyway, but if I remember their reasoning was so flawed I was blown away.

Even through the OS 9 days, "Save!" was a pretty common rallying cry anywhere I worked. When I was in an IT support role keeping 3 platforms - Windows, OS 9 and O X - all running smoothly was a bit of a juggling act.

Interesting times, those.

 

[George Dawes]

I never updated my quadra 840av beyond 7.1

Didn’t know how to and no internet in those days

Fond memories of the old os’s though 👍🏻

 

[Mr. Awesome]

Very cool. I think I still have some backups that go that far back, will have to give it a try with MacDraw II. 🙂

Electron also looks pretty cool, have been doing a lot of work with Javascript recently so I should check that out.

Electron is cool, but it’s performance-intensive and Electron apps are big files. Because it has to embed an entire instance of Chromium and run it underneath your app. So while it’s an awesome API and framework, it’s not practical for large-scale apps.

 

[jlocker]

My largest Apple computer sale at the store was to our main heart surgeon in our town in 1983.

2 Apple LISA computers $20,000
2 Apple Profile 5mb external hard drives $7000
2 Apple Imagewriter printers $1300

$260,000 in today dollars and people think the new Mac Pro cost a lot of money 🙂

 

[Geordiekeith]

Dark Castle for me 🙂

Rescue, the Star Trek game was the only thing other than Freecell that I played on my LCII.

 

[jgdeschamps]

Many members here never experienced Mac OS 8 as it came out 29 years ago.

23 years ago, not 29.

 

[Jasoco]

Why not 8.6 or OS 9? Those two id like to play with. I gave away my last Classic capable Macs a few months ago aside from my SE which doesn’t boot anymore and wouldn’t run them anyway.

 

[phgreer]

Loved seeing Netscape 3.01 start up with the splash screen. Also - Photoshop! 😁

 

[ncbill]

Anybody run Age of Empires II on it?

I've never been successful in getting an emulator (including Snow Leopard server under Parallels) to run the Macintosh (not Windows) version of AOE II...I don't want to use a Windows version.

 

[jgdeschamps]

Why not 8.6 or OS 9? Those two id like to play with. I gave away my last Classic capable Macs a few months ago aside from my SE which doesn’t boot anymore and wouldn’t run them anyway.

In my experience, MacOS 8/9 was all that and a bag of chips. I still remember how fast and helpful was using shortcuts only (mouse-less) to navigate the system structure, switching apps, etc.. Really fast and responsive UI, no hiccups, no glitches, no slow downs... You did had to install RAM to your Mac's maximum capacity to avoid crashes, since you had to manually allocate memory amounts to each app depending on your experience with file sizes and the workflows at hand. But if you got the hang of it, you were in crash-less-fast-paced heaven. I used my personal iMac DV Graphite SE for architecture school running ArchiCAD, Lightwave 3D and Pro Tools Free/LE (had at one point an MBox audio I/O at home, and a Digi001 at work too) and PowerMacs G3s and later G4s at work for Photoshop, Lightwave and Pro Tools. Damn, I miss the simplicity. Mac OS really was about you running your apps and hardware for your specific workflow as fast as the computer could. Installing and un-installing anything was truly drag-and-drop: just drag the app anywhere, one or two extensions (that looked like puzzle pieces) within the Extensions folder and one preference file in the Preferences folder (if applicable.)
I know they weren't true multitasking environments, but man, you wouldn't notice that at all if you knew what you were doing.

 

[jlocker]

 

[organic bond]

I wish there was color Crystal Quest

Crystal Quest! Thanks, I forgot completely about it!

 

[jlocker]

This 68000 processor was super expensive in it's day.

 

[dborod]

Strategic Conquest.
Wizardry.

I have Basilisk to run things like that occasionally. I don't have a copy of Wizardry anymore though.

Now we just need "Magic Windows" word processor for the Apple ][ from 1980 or 1981...

I loved that word processor. Having the cursor be fixed at the center of the screen was a great idea at the time.

 

[ImaxGuy]

Awesome! Now do it for Mac OS 9 please! That old sheepshaver file that’s been shared for 10 years now is pretty rough.

Seconded!!

 

[jlocker]

I remember now the Quadra 900 was my desk computer in my computer lab at GM/EDS IT headquarter in Michigan. This machine was a monster at the time. 🙂