
Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU - arm
https://www.jamesbadger.ca/2018/11/07/emulate-mac-os-9-with-qemu/
======
klodolph
The magazine archives linked from the article really take me back. I like how
colorful they are. I like the weird studio photography they would do with a
bunch of hardware on weird pedestals.

[https://archive.org/details/macworld-
magazine?&sort=date](https://archive.org/details/macworld-magazine?&sort=date)

[https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date](https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date)

This was how we knew what Apple was doing, how to keep computers running, etc.

There are some things I really miss about the classic Mac era. Computers were
cool. The entire experience of using a computer was very consistent. Poking
around in MacsBug or ResEdit was interesting. Install an app by dragging it to
your hard drive, uninstall it by dragging it to the trash. Word 5.1a, a.k.a.
the best version of Microsoft Word ever made. Still waiting for Google Docs to
catch up in terms of feature parity, it’s not even close.

Plenty of things I don’t miss. No memory protection. Cooperative multitasking.
Open Transport. As much as Unix is a bit of a mess, it doesn’t have any of
these problems.

The only reason I still go back is for the games. A few of the old games can
be played on new computers—if it ever got a PC port, there’s a chance you can
run it in DOSBox, but the Mac exclusives got left behind, and a bunch of them
were just cute little shareware pieces that never had a bunch of money behind
them.

~~~
paulryanrogers
> Word 5.1a, a.k.a. the best version of Microsoft Word ever made. Still
> waiting for Google Docs to catch up in terms of feature parity, it’s not
> even close.

What features are missing?

~~~
pjmlp
Google Docs feels like using Word 2.0 for Windows 3.1.

~~~
opless
You say that like that's a bad thing.

Feature wise Word 2.0 is miles ahead of gdocs. In fact I'd rather use office
95 than the bloatware that came after it.

~~~
einr
It's also lightning fast, unlike Google Docs. It's seriously mind-boggling how
far we've regressed that we're running Javascript word processors on eight
core 3 GHz machines and yet are arguably worse off in terms of performance and
UX than we would be on a 486/33 running Word 2.0.

Office 95 was a beautiful thing too. Oh how I miss the no BS interface and the
UI consistency of Windows 95 and its applications.

~~~
opless
I agree with you vehemently with you here.

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gcp123
Been doing this with SheepShaver for years. Audio works perfectly. Runs Mac OS
7, 8, or 9. Is able to share your Mac’s internet connection. It can run in
full screen mode on your Mac, without a black border or anything. It’s
fantastic. Best of all, you can create a shared folder with the host computer,
so files you download through your modern browser from places like Macintosh
Garden can be accessed immediate in the virtualized vintage OS. Works great
the other way around too. SheepShaver + MacOS9 comes in really handy when I’m
feeling nostalgic for SimCity 2000.

~~~
duskwuff
SheepShaver is kind of rough around the edges -- booting to the desktop and
running some basic applications will work, but a lot of more advanced
applications (games, development tools, Macsbug) will behave incorrectly or
crash the emulator. More importantly, the codebase is an ancient mess, and has
been essentially unmaintained for 10+ years. qemu is a much more viable
approach going forward.

~~~
dddddaviddddd
Particularly difficult is how the Office '98 apps all crash in SheepShaver.

------
saagarjha
It’s interesting to see Infinite Loop completely covered in short grass,
instead of the drought-tolerant variety that now blankets the area by Infinite
Loop 5 in the bottom right of the picture. I wonder when the landscaping was
changed.

~~~
brigade
2013, according to their environmental report -
[https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/apple_environ...](https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/apple_environmental_responsibility_report_0714.pdf)

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Keyframe
If only we could somehow emulate IRIX. Seems to me that platform is doomed to
vintage hardware only.

~~~
protomyth
Which company ended up with the rights to IRIX?

~~~
unixhero
The charm in using Silicon Graphics machines was the dedicated hardware and
graphics pipelines that these machines had. In addition to that the awesome,
no, supreme hardware design and cool boxes.

I maintain that emulating Irix, wouldnt bring all of that back. It would be
like watching porn instead of doing it.

~~~
Keyframe
At the time? Of course. With modern hardware speeds and bandwidth, it ought to
work just right. Maybe not the last of the lineup (Tezro), but it would get
there. Just like it did with (less powerful) Amiga. Problem is that so much of
the stuff was custom inside.

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floren
I recently acquired an old iMac running OS 9. I'd like to play around with
interesting old software, but half my attempts to download things off e.g.
Macintosh Garden have resulted in a file on my desktop the system can't seem
to use. Are there any good guides for what to do and how to do it on a classic
Mac? I've got Myst installed but that's been the extent of it.

~~~
chongli
To open those old archives you need to get StuffIt Expander [1]. Once you have
that installed, you'll be able to extract any .sit archives (unless they're
corrupted).

 _Edit_ : If you're looking for some interesting software to run on OS 9,
Macintosh Garden has Photoshop 7 [2] as well as Illustrator 7 [3]. It's
extremely cool that you can get this old software for free now. Those
applications are still highly capable for serious editing and design work.

[1] [http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/stuffit-
expander-55](http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/stuffit-expander-55)

[2]
[http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/photoshop-7x](http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/photoshop-7x)

[3] [http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/adobe-
illustrator-7](http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/adobe-illustrator-7)

~~~
Gracana
You may also need to open the files from Stuffit, rather than just double-
clicking, as they may have lost their type and creator codes.

You should also get Disk Copy to mount disk images.

------
userbinator
I've noticed that Mac OS 9 along with some of the other OSs/platforms that
disappeared into obolescence have one thing in common: a filesystem that has a
more fancy abstraction that just "stream of bytes". The resource fork/data
fork system of classic Mac OS is an extra hurdle to sharing files with other
systems which don't have such distinctions. It was technically superior in
some ways, but also restrictive in others (one of my first experiences with it
was "what do you mean I can't open any file in the text editor to see the
bytes?") and I suspect the latter may have contributed to its demise, because
the opaqueness was not conducive to creating a culture of power users and
"semi-developers" unlike the PCs of the time. Early Macs were an even more
isolated ecosystem than the ones today.

~~~
mietek
_> …the opaqueness was not conducive to creating a culture of power users and
"semi-developers" unlike the PCs of the time._

Utter nonsense, as anyone who has ever used ResEdit can tell.

[http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...](http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/5/1_Resources_and_Resource_Editors.html)

Also, extended file attributes are alive and well.

~~~
userbinator
...so you have to go get additional software in order to do that, instead of
being able to use what comes with the OS? That's already going to turn off a
bunch of users.

In those days, PC users were entering Asm code published in magazines into
DEBUG (which came with MS-DOS), creating real application binaries.

------
jammmety
Here is an 'easy way' that also provides simple transfer of files to / from
the OS 9 VM:
[http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html](http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html)

------
rayiner
> I recently got an urge to revisit old computer media from the late 90s and
> early 2000s.

Shit that makes me feel old. In my mind that “modern times.” It wasn’t long
ago—I could my first SDSL connection around then. I had a Pentium II!

(Still the heyday of computing if you ask me.)

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nonamenoslogan
Love to see MacOS on new stuff. Have you looked at Basilisk?

~~~
xenophonf
Basilisk only emulates 68K Macs, not PowerMacs, and Mac OS 9 only ran on the
PowerMacs like the G3 and G4. Mac OS 8.1 was the last version to run on 68K
Macs like the Quadra, and it's the last version you can run under Basilisk as
a result.

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microcolonel
It works, at least on GNU/Linux. I can't figure out how to take a screenshot
in OS 9 itself though.

[http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=906e26bbcaac11be20cb28f6...](http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=906e26bbcaac11be20cb28f64b5197ff)

~~~
tambourine_man
Hold Cmd-shift-3

