It’s a strange quirk that software becomes obsolete much quicker than hardware. You can still buy an for less that will read disks created on a Macintosh Classic from 1990. And yet there are apps written for that won’t run in just seven years later. Documents that you access regularly naturally survive the passage of time because they get migrated from one format to the next, as you upgrade your Mac. But the dusty box of floppy disks with that unfinished first novel in MacWrite and your father’s carefully researched family tree in an old version of FileMaker Pro are unreadable binary detritus on a modern Mac. Being able to run old software is the best way to rescue these files, but old Mac apps can be fun too.
E-Maculation – dedicated to emulation of the classic Macintosh computer in OS X. Mac OS 9.2.2 for PowerMac G4 MDD – Retail Mac OS 9 installers do not.
Even though we undoubtedly live in a golden era of computer and video games, there are still some genuinely worthy classics from the ’80s and ’90s. And you don’t need to lovingly restore an actual Macintosh Plus just to play Lode Runner. Modern Macs easily have enough horsepower to emulate the older Mac operating systems.
Many of the old 8-bit games are still surprisingly playable Virtually a PowerPC Let’s start with OS X. A lot of apps originally developed for 10.5 Leopard or 10.6 Snow Leopard won’t run on later versions. Snow Leopard was also the last version of OS X to support PowerPC processors. So, if you have any software that originally ran on a G3, G4 or G5 Mac, that’s as far as it could be upgraded. Unfortunately, running Snow Leopard isn’t as simple as just taking the original install DVD and putting the system on an external drive.
An operating system from five years ago doesn’t have the right drivers for lots of the hardware on a modern Mac, such as a Retina display or USB 3.0 ports. Instead, you should use either. Either of these can create a virtual machine that runs within your existing OS and allows you to install and run a completely different operating system on top of that. The virtualisation software takes care of interfacing with your modern hardware, so it works even with older operating systems. The only tiny complication is that Apple’s licensing agreement doesn’t allow the regular edition of Snow Leopard to be installed on a virtual machine, so you need to buy a copy of Snow Leopard Server instead. This works just the same as the regular edition of Snow Leopard (apart from some system administration features that you’ll never use) but handily, it will also install correctly under Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion.
You can pick up a copy of on eBay for about £50/$60/AU$85, as long as you avoid getting a copy with unlimited licences. Dark Castle was released in 1986 Perhaps you need to roll the clock back even further and run software designed for Mac OS 9? If you still have a Mac running 10.4 Tiger, you might be able to run them using the Classic environment, but this will only work on a Mac with a PowerPC processor. You can’t run the Classic environment on an Intel Mac, even if you’re running 10.4 from within Parallels or Fusion. For that, you’ll need to download.
This curiously named utility emulates the PowerPC hardware so that you can install OS 9 – or even OS 8. Because it’s emulating a different hardware architecture, SheepShaver needs to use the system ROM files from one of the older Macs.
These are copyrighted by Apple, so you can’t legally use them unless you also own the physical Mac they came from. ROM files for various older Mac models are available for download though, so you don’t need to go through the rigmarole of copying off the system ROM from that old G3-powered Mac in your loft.
Once you have OS 9 running inside your emulator – see the walkthrough on the next page for step-by-step instructions – you’re ready to install some apps. Even if you no longer have the original disks for your software any more (or perhaps even a drive that will read them!) there are lots of apps that are classed as abandonware.
This is a legally grey area whereby very old software that’s no longer available commercially is distributed for free by enthusiasts. It’s technically still software piracy, but the original copyright holder either can’t be traced or chooses not to enforce their copyright. For software that’s 20 or more years old, some would argue that downloading it is an ethical act of software preservation.
Maintains an extensive library of Mac abandonware, including some classic games from the ’90s. Apple’s Classic environment is an emulator of Mac OS 9 that was included with OS X up to 10.4 Tiger Installing old software Although you can download apps directly from the web browser running in OS 9, you’ll find it generally much easier to download the files in OS X and then move them across to the emulated OS 9 environment. SheepShaver uses a shared folder for this purpose; files you you place in that folder from OS X will appear in a virtual disk called ‘Unix’ on the OS 9 desktop. When you add a new file, you’ll need to close and reopen the Unix folder in OS 9 to see the changes. Most software you find online will in the form of ‘.sit’ files, which have been compressed using the StuffIt utility, and so you’ll need to enable you to double-click a sit file in OS X to expand it; you’ll then normally see a ‘.img’ disk image. Mount these in the emulated OS 9 by adding them to the list of disks in SheepShaver’s preferences.
When you quit SheepShaver and restart it, the disk image will appear on the OS 9 desktop, and you can open it and run the app’s installer. Back in ’94, Alone in the Dark scared the bejesus out of us Step back further in time Finally, if you want to get really retro, there are apps written back when Macs used the Motorola 68000-series of processors, before even the PowerPC chips. These models ran System 7 and earlier. Modern Macs have so much more computing power than these that you can run a faithful emulation of. This is a great way to give you a feel for what you’re letting yourself in for, but only a few apps and games are available this way. To run anything else, you’ll need to install.
As before, you’ll need to own a copy of the OS and the system ROM that you’re emulating. Think of this as a more convenient way to access the software on an old Mac you already own, rather than a way of getting a whole extra virtual computer. Emulating your old Mac’s OS is also a great way to get at software on a Mac that no longer works – it’s a sort of virtual repair. Basilisk II can emulate a Macintosh Classic or a Macintosh II, and it can theoretically run operating systems all the way back to version 1.0 from 1984.
In practice, System 6 is usually the furthest back you need to go. This ought to run virtually all software from the mid ’80s and has much better memory management than earlier versions.
Eight years ago, when I was 11, I came across. I had heard about, but I had never had a chance to use the Lisa Office System (LOS). The reason was that the emulator project didn’t have a working Lisa emulator, and neither did anyone else – until now. Ray Arachelian, creator of the Lisa Emulator Project, has finally created a working Lisa emulator (for more on that, see ). I, like many others, have been waiting for years for this emulator to be up and running, so I downloaded the Lisa emulator, got a ROM, and found a copy of the LOS, both of which are necessary for the emulator to work. I got a copy of LOS 7/7 Version 3.1, installed it on the disk image, and started up the virtual Lisa.
I’m going to show you several features of the LOS – I made over a dozen screen shots to help demonstrate. When you turn the Lisa on, this is the first thing you see. Clock not set Notice there is one thing that Microsoft didn’t steal from the Mac when they made Windows: the hourglass (the classic Mac OS shows a wristwatch). No, they stole the Windows hourglass from the Lisa.
Anyway, you’ve seen the startup process – now down to business. First off, the Lisa really does act differently from other computers. For instance, you don’t open LisaWrite, LisaDraw, or any other application, select the type of document you want to make, then make the document, anhd then save it with a title like you would on any newer GUI. On the Lisa, you tear off a piece of paper from a stationary (such as LisaDraw Paper or LisaWrite Paper) by double clicking on it. Creating your document on Lisa. I wonder why this isn’t the way modern operating systems work. It makes more sense to me.
You might be wondering why I have the clock set to 2/25/95. Well, Lisa’s clock stopped rolling over in 1995. (At least Lisa didn’t have a Y2K problem.) Another thing Lisa had was, so you could hold a menu open and the rest of the system wouldn’t stop. That’s right – preemptive multitasking was a standard feature on the Lisa in 1983. (It wasn’t a feature on the Mac until OS X arrived in 2001.).
Lisa is completely document oriented. Another nice thing is that you never have to tell Lisa to save something. If you do tell it to save something, it makes a reference file that you can revert to at a later time. Say you started working on something last week, and the last time you saved it was two days ago. Lisa keeps track of all of the changes you made since the last time you saved, so every time you set aside your document, it updates it without even asking. But say you screwed something up in your document? You can simply tell Lisa to revert to the previous version! In fact, the only reason you would ever want to save anything on Lisa is so you can revert to the previous version later on.
Other than the revert feature, there’s absolutely no reason you would ever have to save a document; it’s automatic. Here is another thing I really like: If you have a document open on a disk and you try to eject that disk, Lisa will save the document(s), close them, and only then eject the disk. This would come in handy if someone (like your boss) gave you another disk and told you to check it out. And as soon as you put the previous disk you were working on back in Lisa, it automatically reopens the document(s) you were working on – just as you had them before you ejected the disk. The same thing happens when you hit the Power Button. Even if you have 20 documents open and you hit the Power Button, Lisa will save all of them, set them aside, put everything away, and only then turn itself off. The Lisa is turning off.
As soon as you turn Lisa back on, it reopens everything and puts it just like you had it before you turned it off. It works kind of like Sleep on a Mac, the only difference is that all of your documents are automatically saved. Another feature I like is when you tell Lisa to duplicate a file.
It creates a flashing icon resembling the file you wish to duplicate. Before it duplicates the file, you have to drag the flashing icon where you want the copy before it duplicates it. I imagine this was because back in 1983 disk space was limited, and in some cases you didn’t have enough room on the disk to simply duplicate the file on the same disk. Another thing that is a little strange – but not when you think about how things work in the real world – when you drag a program from one disk to another, once the file is copied, Lisa deletes the program from the first disk. This may sound strange, but when you thing about it, when you move a real file from one folder to another in real life, the file no longer exists in the folder from which it came. The Lisa Emulator You’re all probably wonder what the emulator is like.
Well, it’s very well designed. Not only does it emulate the UI, it emulates the entire computer, including the power light and the disk drives. When you run the emulator, it really feels like you are sitting in front of a Lisa! As of right now, the Windows version is the only version where the disk drive motor sound and disk animation works, and there is currently no documentation on the emulator. There is also a bug in the emulator causing the scroll bar arrows not to appear in some programs. The same bug causes the Desk menu to malfunction.
(The desk menu is supposed to show all of the items that are on the desktop.) However, the only major problem I have with the emulator is that it runs really slow on my 733 MHz G4 (the emulator reports it is running at about 3 MHz- that’s only 60% of Lisa’s slow 5 MHz hardware speed). Ray Arachelian assures me that the next release, due sometime next week, will run much faster on G4 machines. The Windows version, on the other hand, runs pretty fast, so if you have a Windows machine, I suggest running the emulator on there for the time being (unless you have a really fast Mac).
Well, I hope you enjoyed your look into the LOS. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me. And be sure to stay tuned, because I’m in the process of interviewing Ray Arachelian so I can share more about the Lisa Emulator Project.
Update: LisaEm 1.2.0 (released 2007.09.23) and later no longer require a ROM image. Further Reading., Ted Hodges, 2006.02.14., Dan Knight, Online Tech Journal, 2001.05.31., Tom Hormby, Orchard, 2005.10.05., Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 2003.01.20., Wikipedia Keywords: #lisaemulator #applelisa Short link: searchword: lisaemulator.