Emulators Online - Run the Mac OS on Windows -Welcome to Darek Mihockas web site. Unix with X11 (Linux i386/x8664/ppc, NetBSD 2.x, FreeBSD 3.x) Mac OS X (PowerPC. SheepShaver is a MacOS run-time environment for BeOS and Linux that allows you to run. Mac OS nanokernel Alpha Microsystems for a similar architecture to run 68k code on x86 Rosetta, a similar feature in Mac OS X that translates PowerPC instructions to x86 instructions, The Abysmal State of Macintosh Emulation - Articles - InvisibleUpI have classic Mac OS running in emulators (BasiliskII and SheepShaver) because: a) I enjoy the nostalgia (I grew up with Macs as a kid and didnt get a PC.Home page of the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator. Native Mac OS X outside of Classic never used the emulator. PowerPC Macintosh emulators such as SheepShaver therefore use the emulator as well when running the classic Mac OS.It should also be noted that I haven't talked with any of the developers of these emulators, and I mean no disrespect when writing any of these criticisms. Let's go through all the Macintosh emulators I'm aware of. It pioneered many conventions of the graphical user interface, it introduced the mouse to the mainstream, and the operating system was a marvel of its time.Unfortunately, classic Macintosh emulation is pretty pitiful. This is probably the best replacement.Home About Articles Doodles Projects Links The Abysmal State of Macintosh EmulationPublished The Abysmal State of Macintosh EmulationThe original Macintosh platform, released in 1984 and discontinued in 2001, was nothing short of iconic.
Emulator Sheepshaver Mac OS OnI used Basilisk II a lot when writing my AOL article series, as for some reason only the Mac version of AOL gave me things to explore.Basilisk II on Windows at least comes with HFVExplorer, a nice-ish disk editor. I haven't used SheepShaver much, but Basilisk II has some very nice features like TCP/IP support, and the ability to browse your local computer. The difference is that SheepShaver targets newer PowerPC-based systems, while Basilisk II targets Motorola 68000 System 7-era systems.They're fine. They share the same developers, the same configuration program, and even the same source code repository. SheepShaver and Basilisk IISheepShaver and Basilisk II are two very related Macintosh emulators. I'm writing this because the state of Macintosh emulation needs serious improvement, preferably before every working classic Mac dies out. The Windows version refuses to start with no error message unless you've installed both SDL 1.2 and GTK 2, both very painfully obsolete libraries. Nice? I guess?It's far from perfect, though. It also comes with some Windows 95 drivers for the CD drive, a Windows NT compatible network driver (that you don't even need), along with some readmes from the year 2000. (Macintosh files are strange, because they have a data fork and a resource fork, which is unlike almost every operating system today.) It's clunky, weird, and was last updated in 1999, but I appreciate it. Literally years can pass between releases, and there's no synchronization between builds for Windows, Linux, or macOS. Builds are added to the OP whenever some forum user just decides to recompile the software. Let me just try to explain how new versions of Basilisk II and SheepShaver are released.The official place to download Basilisk II/SheepShaver is a random forum thread on the Emaculation message board. But fine, this is a work in progress. System crashes tend to take down the entire emulator. This specifically is a page automatically generated by GitHub, the most popular website to host source code. (The project in question is Twin Peaks, a browser for the Gemini protocol that I've been working on-and-off on.)There's a version number, a screenshot, descriptive text of what changed, and at the bottom, links for every platform. The latest stable version is from 2013.For those in the audience who aren't software developers, this is what a normal release page looks like. There are numerous known issues listed in the post. The newest build of SheepShaver is from 2015, explicitly for testing. Right here! It's actively somewhat actively worked on, too. That's called Continuous Integration.The amusing thing about this all is that Basilisk II and SheepShaver are developed using GitHub. GitHub isn't good, it's just popular.)If you wanted to, you can even set up GitHub to automatically compile and publish a release at the push of a single button, or even just when you upload your code to the website. However, instead of emulating Mac OS 8 and 9 like SheepShaver, this targets OS X 10.1 through 10.4, and various versions of Linux and BSD. It could definitely use some more developers, some unit tests, better ways of managing disk images, but it's fine.PearPC is another Power Macintosh-era emulator. The code is perfectly readable, everything is nice and separated, it's fine. It would take almost no effort for them to use this to compile and publish up-to-date builds, or to at least use the GitHub releases page to host the official builds instead of a random forum thread on an unrelated website.Honestly, if they just made those simple tweaks to how they build and distribute the emulator, I'd have a lot less complaints about Basilisk II and SheepShaver. Thankfully, these are downloadable from the project website, with source code. The most recent releases were in 2011 and in 2005. That's fine.Well, actually, there might be a reason for that. And yet, somehow, it's still constantly placed in lists of Macintosh emulators as if it's still relevant. It's really nothing more than a historical curiosity right now. The absolute latest commit on its GitHub page is from 2015. It hasn't been in active development since 2005, and development only started around 2004. Most implemented hardware are just stubs at this point, just enough to get the system bootable.This emulator is very incomplete. CPU emulation is pretty slow, between 15x to 500x slower than the host computer. That said, no official build has came out since 2017, and the newest version you can download and use out of the box is from 2013.At least for the Windows build, the user experience isn't great. It works very well in that role, and from the few titles I've tried, they all work fine. Most of the hardware is supported.PCE also has a JavaScript port, which is used by the Internet Archive for their Macintosh emulator. It's a multi-system emulator, but it emulates some early Macintoshes, up to the Macintosh SE and the Macintosh Classic. Professional music editing software for macIt has experimental support for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. I think it's often used for cross-platform ARM development, for instance. QEMUQEMU is a very popular multi-system emulator that emulates pretty much everything. But at the same time, at least on the classic Mac side, the only changes that really need to be made to PCE seem to be either really obscure edge-cases, additional hardware support, or user experience improvements. It took me some difficulty to figure out how to turn the thing off, and I'm still not really sure how to give it a disk image.It's aggravating that all the the emulators I consider "fine" are infrequently or never updated. On the other hand, launching the emulator opened up a terminal window, then the emulator, which just swallowed my mouse and keyboard inputs. Definitely use this over PearPC. But it is a good, functional emulator. Sound support is a work-in-progress. It comes as a single binary file, with no DLLs required on Windows. I'll start by listing what I like about it. It's a small, simple emulator for every Macintosh system from the pre-release Twiggy model all the way up to the Macintosh II, with active work being done on newer models. Mini vMacThis is the one I have the most beef with. It's also where I took the image from, since unlike the others there were no images on QEMU's website I could steal. Here's a blog post on someone emulating Mac OS 9 in QEMU. It's got a nice built-in control panel when you press the control key, that lets you set window size, emulation speed, inserted disks, etc. It has a nice error window telling you if you're missing a ROM or if a disk image is invalid. (I guess, technically, this emulator could compile itself.) This should be possible, but it's not. Or I want to set my display resolution to 640x480, or 800x600. Let's say I'm emulating a Mac II, which has an external monitor, and I want to set the color depth to 256 or 16 colors. Let's start with something simple: changing the settings. Isn't that all you need?This is where I start peeling back the layers. It does its job perfectly fine. ![]()
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