9 ms·
Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive
- trimbo 9y agoDark Castle! It was so great for the time. https://archive.org/details/mac_DarkCastle_1_2 https://archive.org/details/mac_DarkCastle_1_2
- phjesusthatguy3 9y agoThe Dark Castle games are what I intend to try first when I get BasiliskII[0] set up on Playstation Vita. [0]https://github.com/meetpatty/basiliskii/releases https://github.com/meetpatty/basiliskii/releases
- username223 9y agoPart of me wants to download and play that, but another part is afraid. Games were hard back then, and Dark Castle was brutal! I can still hear that weird yodel you make after a non-fatal fall almost 30 years later.
- DonHopkins 9y agoI ran into Jonathan Gay at CGDC, and upon realizing who he was, I squatted down, raised up my arms up above my head, flapped my hands, and chanted "Nya nya nya nya nya!" Dark Castle was so cool, I totally forgave him for writing Flash.
- pmarreck 9y agoTIL the author of Dark Castle went on to write Flash. (Didn't it start out as some Macromedia thing?)
- DonHopkins 9y agoJonathan Gay [1] and Charlie Jackson [2] founded FutureWave Software [3], and developed a drawing program called "SmartSketch", to which they added animation features and renamed "FutureSplash Animator" to challenge Macromedia Shockwave [4], which Macromedia (nee "Macromind") then bought and renamed "Macromedia Flash". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Jackson_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Jackson_(software) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Shockwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Shockwave
- pmarreck 9y agowow, that's awesome! Also, any old Dark Castle fans should note that "Return to Dark Castle" exists and was finally released a few years ago https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/return-to-dark-castle/id410703154?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/return-to-dark-castle/id4107... (possibly the longest wait for a game sequel ever?)
- scrollaway 9y agoImpressive work :)
- beefhash 9y agoI do wonder, from a legal perspective, did the Internet Archive get permission from Apple or are they merely trusting that no one will enforce their rights on abandoned software? Especially since they seem to be doing the same with MS-DOS/Windows 3.1[1]. [1] https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/11/internet-archive-does-windows-hundreds-of-windows-3-1-programs-join-the-collection/ https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/11/internet-archive-does-wi...
- TillE 9y agoDefinitely seems like the latter. It's pretty strange to see archive.org adding more and more stuff that's under copyright without explicit permission. They have a ton of copyrighted games, they have recordings of concerts from artists who almost certainly haven't authorized that. Personally I love this, I just really hope they don't get sued into the ground.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoDMCA exemption. http://archive.org/about/dmca.php http://archive.org/about/dmca.php And the Archive could always move out of US jurisdiction if absolutely required.
- beefhash 9y ago> Following deliberation, the Copyright Office ruled in late October 2003 that four exemptions should be added to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, to be valid until the next Copyright Office rulemaking in 2006, including two that are related to the Internet Archive's original comments: [...] It's past 2006 now. This text seems outdated. Furthermore, it states: > In 2003 the Internet Archive, as part of research into vintage software archiving, discovered possible archiving issues involving the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This could make it impossible to legally archive early computer software and games, even for accredited institutions wishing to store limited amounts of non-distributable, archival images. I don't believe we're looking at "non-distributable archival images" here.
- oso2k 9y agoThis is why I donate. To me this is important. We already lost the library of Alexandria once (or multiple times really until its final destruction). Let's not have our hubris do that again.
- jonafato 9y agoThe donation link, to save everyone a search: https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
- Tloewald 9y agoSeveral things strike me going down this memory lane: 1) How modern and responsive the UI behavior is. 2) How many subtle improvements there have been (e.g. the old Mac menu behavior that I liked I find annoying). No command-A for select all in MacWrite. 3) How screen updates I used to think were instantaneous decidedly were not. (That said, I couldn't trigger the "ultra slow update" mode and watch menus drawing one line of pixels at a time). 4) Copyright notices for third party companies in "Apple" software (e.g. MacWrite is copyright "Encore Systems".
- saagarjha 9y agoInteresting that this is done in-broswer; it looks like they're using Emscripten for emulation.
- aaroninsf 9y agoCorrect, also for the other runnable software (e.g. Apple II collection) and livingroom consoles :)
- adamnemecek 9y agoSomewhat OT but it should be more widely known that you can run NeXTSTEP on VMWare. https://medium.com/@jmarhee/installing-nextstep-on-vmware-fusion-5c5c3e4442f4 https://medium.com/@jmarhee/installing-nextstep-on-vmware-fu... It's pretty creamy.
- gattilorenz 9y agoAnd with shoebill[1] you can run A/UX, Apple's Unix with a MacOS GUI. What I love is that it was a real Unix, but it could run Mac apps, and it even provided a graphical interface to select/explain the command line switches of some Unix tools. [1] https://github.com/pruten/shoebill https://github.com/pruten/shoebill
- homarp 9y agoand you can emulate various NeXT with the Previous emulator http://previous.unixdude.net/ http://previous.unixdude.net/ Discussion forums: http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2642&start=1080 http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2642&sta... previous-ly on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745943
- cm2187 9y agoWhat strikes me is that Excel almost hasn't changed. Yes, they added some colors.
- ontouchstart 9y agoIt even works on iPhone ! https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/853683865113722885 https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/853683865113722885
- mambodog 9y agoI did the initial work of porting this emulator to the browser (most credit should go to the original emulator author however: http://hampa.ch/pce http://hampa.ch/pce). I wrote up the process and hacks that went in to making this possible here: https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser The most gross/fun part was how I made the Mac OS mouse position align with your real mouse cursor: by writing its position directly to the emulated computer's memory. Classic Mac OS held the mouse position in a few fixed global memory locations. I realised I could just write to those memory locations every few CPU cycles. I could have instead written a driver which ran inside the emulated OS to communicate with the emulator program, but this was simpler!
- macrael 9y agoSadly it's not working for me, seems to be off by half. The emulated mouse is always at x/2 y/2 compared to the real mouse pointer.
- mambodog 9y agoInteresting. What browser are you using?
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y agoIs this a Retina display issue, perhaps?
- db48x 9y agoI believe Chrome misreports the mouse position if you zoom the page, or if you have a hidpi display. Care to share more details?
- macrael 9y agoThis was in Safari on a retina mac book pro
- wiredfool 9y agoheh. Enterprising pranksters could also rewrite those locations using an init. I believe gravity mouse was the name of it.
- marchustvedt 9y agoSo many hours of my childhood were spent playing early Mac games, especially Dark Castle and Prince of Persia. Ubisoft did release an iOS port of the original Prince of Persia: https://appsto.re/us/FNmRB.i https://appsto.re/us/FNmRB.i But sadly Apple is about to discontinue support for iOS apps that don't support 64 bit. I expect that Prince of Persia Classic will get lost to that.
- disconcision 9y agooh man, Crystal Quest! amazing. the mouse control seems wonky though, sudden bursts of acceleration, and jitter even when the mouse isn't moving?
- JoeDaDude 9y agoAs I recall, the mouse sets acceleration, but not the position of the gamer's piece, so it is possible to have movement even if the mouse is left alone. FWIW, I just tried the emulator on MacOS Sierra and Chrome and it works just like I remember it.
- oldmancoyote 9y agoBasilisk II on a current Mac may be a more useful option for those interested. I routinely run Mac OS 8.0 with hyperCard... on my 2016 MacBook Pro using Basilisk II.
- peterburkimsher 9y agoShufflepuck! I'm so excited to play that again. Please can we get a copy of LogoWriter on one of those? That was how I first learned to program, on a Mac Plus when I was about 7 or 8 years old.
- michaelwsherman 9y agoAwesome. Mac Plus was my first real computer as a kid, played a lot of games. World Builder scripting was the first programming I ever did.