Want to be able to run classic Mac OS applications compiled for the Motorola 68000 series of processors on your ever-so-modern Mac OS X machine? Or maybe you’d rather run them on a Raspberry Pi, or an Android device for that matter? There’s an emulation project that’s trying to achieve just that: Advanced Mac Substitute (AMS).
Emulators of older computer platforms and game consoles are popular with vintage game enthusiasts. But emulators also could be attractive to others with some emotional (or economic) attachment to old binaries—like those with a sudden desire to resurrect aged Aldus PageMaker files.
Definitely a very cool project.
Super cool. It’s like DOSBox for old Macintosh games. I hope the author manages to make it flexible enough to handle other software.
Hm, Apple provided MacOS 7.x as free downloads, so getting an OS wasn’t that much of a problem (I remember downloading them almost 2 decades ago for use with BasiliskII emulator) …but while searching now for a link, all I got was https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7369332 or https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6830915 which say the download page for old MacOS versions was at one point removed by Apple… 🙁 (so it seems the discussed project got more needed)
The problem was getting the ROMs.
One of the most common ways to get the roms legally was to buy the HD floppy upgrade for the Mac II. It came with a replacement set of roms that could then be dumped using a number of different products like the A-Max or Emplant emulators. Many shops that worked on Macs also would sell roms from scrapped Macs, giving another way to get roms legally.
I remember playing with another software that did the same thing (68K Mac emulation, no ROMs&System needed). Didn’t remember the name but a comment on Slashdot mentioned it: Executor.
Compatibility isn’t perfect, but works well enough to run many old apps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)
Wonder how many are still using classic Mac OS 8.5 just to allow these kinds of apps to work. Back in the naughts, when osx was slowly being adopted my work stayed with classic on classic hardware so they didn’t have to upgrade quark. It worked fine. The crazy people who ran it knew all of its pitfalls.