About a year ago I came across the Previous emulator – it appeared to be a faithful simulation of the NeXT hardware and thus capable of running NeXTStep. While including it in Infinite Mac would be scope-creep, NeXT’s legacy is in many ways more relevant to today’s macOS than classic Mac OS. It also helped that it’s under active development by its original creator (see the epic thread in the NeXT Computers forums), and thus a modern, living codebase.
Previous is the fifth emulator that I’ve ported to WebAssembly/Emscripten and the Infinite Mac runtime, and it’s gotten easier. As I’m doing this work, I’m developing more and more empathy for those doing Mac game ports – some things are really easy and others become yak shaves due to the unintended consequences of choices made by the original developers. Previous is available on multiple platforms and has good abstractions, so overall it was a pretty pleasant experience.
↫ Mihai Parparita
By porting previous to WebAssembly/Emscripten, Infinite Mac now offers access to a whole slew of NeXTSTEP releases, from the earliest known release to the last one from 1997. There’s also a ton of applications added to make the experience feel more realistic. This makes Infinite Mac even more useful than it already was, ensuring it’s one of the best and easiest ways to experience old macOS and now NeXTSTEP releases through virtual machines (real ones, this time), available in your browser.
I’ll be spending some time with these new additions for sure, since I’ve very little experience with NeXTSTEP other than whatever I vicariously gleamed through Steven Troughton-Smith‘s toots on the subject over the years. Mihai Parparita is doing incredibly important work through Infinite Mac, and he deserves credit and praise for all he’s doing here.
I have nothing to add about emulators but I do remember that DOOM and multiple other games were created on Nextstep and then ported to DOS and other platforms. Also that DOOM has been ported to over 80 different OSs. I don’t know how many more than 80 but that was the last figure that I saw on some reputable website. Maybe this one.
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP
These are really interesting artifacts of computing history. And makes one nostalgic to see all those older systems available with a single click.
Though, I would say Javascript shows its limits. Even though the models before 1990 run at really fast, faster than native speeds, versions after ~1995 or so feel like I am running things from old ATA hard drives. Though probably understandable, and also a potential defense against copyright claims, as these would not be replacing a full featured desktop.
One thing I never ran was the NEXT/STEP family of operating systems. And I realized how good WindowMaker was on Linux back then.