7 ms·

Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU

166 points by arm 8y ago

saagarjha 8y ago
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 8y ago
  2013, according to their environmental report - https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/apple_environmental_responsibility_report_0714.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/apple_environ...
floren 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
  - virusduck 8y ago
    Oh man Stuffit really takes me back....
- klodolph 8y ago
  .img -> disk image, open with built-in tools (Disk Copy), copy to hard drive, then unmount it .bin -> MacBinary, uncompressed binary format containing one file, use MacBinary or Stuffit .hqx -> BinHex, uncompressed ASCII format containing one file, use BinHex or Stuffit .sit -> compressed Stuffit archive, use Stuffit .sea -> self-extracting archive, must be wrapped (.bin or .hqx is common), run it as a program .cpt -> compressed Compact Pro archive, use Compact Pro or Stuffit You can drag a file onto the Stuffit application icon and it will open in Stuffit. This is a feature I sorely miss when I am using Windows or Linux.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    > You can drag a file onto the Stuffit application icon and it will open in Stuffit. This is a feature I sorely miss when I am using Windows or Linux. I thought dragging a file onto an executable in Windows did open the file with the executable? Dunno about *nix, though if it doesn't work it should be easy enough to implement.
    - klodolph 8y ago
      I just went and tried, and apparently you need to shift-drag. So, on Windows, the default action for dragging an HTML file onto Google Chrome, in the taskbar, is “pin to Google Chrome,” and “open with Google Chrome” is what you get when you hold the shift key down. I think this might make sense in some kind of fantasy world. My general expectation is that dragging and dropping is a great way to discover an easier way to do something on a Mac, at least if you have a mouse and not a trackpad. I can drag a file into a terminal and get its full path, with escapes as appropriate. I can drag a folder into a “save” dialogue box and the dialogue box will move to that folder. I can drag an application off the Dock and remove it. My general experience on Windows is that if you try dragging and dropping something, it may perform some kind of action, and it may be consistent about how it performs that action, but it is rarely the action I want to perform. Drag a file into a save dialogue? Obviously, I wanted to move that file into the folder that the save box was browsing! My general experience on Linux is that drag and drop is utterly broken and will never work so I might as well give up. Even copy and paste is hell on Linux.
- walrus01 8y ago
  a few years ago arstechnica tried using an OS9 computer as a 'daily driver' for fun, they detail some of the challenges encountered: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/my-coworkers-made-me-use-mac-os-9-for-their-and-your-amusement/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/my-coworkers-made-me... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/an-os-9-odyssey-why-do-some-mac-users-still-rely-on-16-year-old-software/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/an-os-9-odyssey-why-...
nonamenoslogan 8y ago
Love to see MacOS on new stuff. Have you looked at Basilisk?
- xenophonf 8y ago
  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.
klodolph 8y ago
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.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  > As much as Unix is a bit of a mess, it doesn’t have any of these problems. Unix was an option, even back then. An expensive option, sure, but you could even run it on some types of Mac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX Actually A/UX was a pretty amazing operating system. The GUI of a Macintosh with the underpinnings of UNIX. Just like OS X - only in 1988!
  - orangecat 8y ago
    I always wondered why Apple didn't consider A/UX for the base of its future OS, rather than spending 5+ years on the obviously-in-retrospect-doomed Copland/Taligent stuff and then buying NeXT. Unix licensing costs maybe?
    - klodolph 8y ago
gcp123 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Particularly difficult is how the Office '98 apps all crash in SheepShaver.
- bitwize 8y ago
  SheepShaver segfaults in the CPU emulator before running anything for me -- no matter which configure options I pass to it. It's an absolute nonstarter. Meanwhile, qemu works a treat.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  Wrote a sheepshaver how-to recently because I always have trouble finding links to everything: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2018/10/os9-on-ubuntu/ http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2018/10/os9-on-ubuntu/
Keyframe 8y ago
If only we could somehow emulate IRIX. Seems to me that platform is doomed to vintage hardware only.
- protomyth 8y ago
  Which company ended up with the rights to IRIX?
  - IntelMiner 8y ago
    According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Final_bankruptcy_and_acquisition_by_Rackable_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Final_bankrup... "Rackable Systems, Inc" picked them up, and then got acquired by HP Presumably HP now owns IRIX then? Though it seems to have been retired
  - unixhero 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
rayiner 8y ago
> 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.)
microcolonel 8y ago
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=906e26bbcaac11be20cb28f64b5197ff http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=906e26bbcaac11be20cb28f6...
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  Hold Cmd-shift-3
jammmety 8y ago
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
userbinator 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > …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_View/Entries/2010/5/1_Resources_and_Resource_Editors.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... Also, extended file attributes are alive and well.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    ...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.

166 points by arm 8y ago

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 8y ago
2013, according to their environmental report - https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/apple_environmental_responsibility_report_0714.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/apple_environ...

floren 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- virusduck 8y ago
  Oh man Stuffit really takes me back....
klodolph 8y ago
.img -> disk image, open with built-in tools (Disk Copy), copy to hard drive, then unmount it .bin -> MacBinary, uncompressed binary format containing one file, use MacBinary or Stuffit .hqx -> BinHex, uncompressed ASCII format containing one file, use BinHex or Stuffit .sit -> compressed Stuffit archive, use Stuffit .sea -> self-extracting archive, must be wrapped (.bin or .hqx is common), run it as a program .cpt -> compressed Compact Pro archive, use Compact Pro or Stuffit You can drag a file onto the Stuffit application icon and it will open in Stuffit. This is a feature I sorely miss when I am using Windows or Linux.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  > You can drag a file onto the Stuffit application icon and it will open in Stuffit. This is a feature I sorely miss when I am using Windows or Linux. I thought dragging a file onto an executable in Windows did open the file with the executable? Dunno about *nix, though if it doesn't work it should be easy enough to implement.
  - klodolph 8y ago
    I just went and tried, and apparently you need to shift-drag. So, on Windows, the default action for dragging an HTML file onto Google Chrome, in the taskbar, is “pin to Google Chrome,” and “open with Google Chrome” is what you get when you hold the shift key down. I think this might make sense in some kind of fantasy world. My general expectation is that dragging and dropping is a great way to discover an easier way to do something on a Mac, at least if you have a mouse and not a trackpad. I can drag a file into a terminal and get its full path, with escapes as appropriate. I can drag a folder into a “save” dialogue box and the dialogue box will move to that folder. I can drag an application off the Dock and remove it. My general experience on Windows is that if you try dragging and dropping something, it may perform some kind of action, and it may be consistent about how it performs that action, but it is rarely the action I want to perform. Drag a file into a save dialogue? Obviously, I wanted to move that file into the folder that the save box was browsing! My general experience on Linux is that drag and drop is utterly broken and will never work so I might as well give up. Even copy and paste is hell on Linux.
walrus01 8y ago
a few years ago arstechnica tried using an OS9 computer as a 'daily driver' for fun, they detail some of the challenges encountered: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/my-coworkers-made-me-use-mac-os-9-for-their-and-your-amusement/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/my-coworkers-made-me... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/an-os-9-odyssey-why-do-some-mac-users-still-rely-on-16-year-old-software/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/an-os-9-odyssey-why-...

nonamenoslogan 8y ago

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

xenophonf 8y ago
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.

klodolph 8y ago

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.

LeoPanthera 8y ago
> As much as Unix is a bit of a mess, it doesn’t have any of these problems. Unix was an option, even back then. An expensive option, sure, but you could even run it on some types of Mac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX Actually A/UX was a pretty amazing operating system. The GUI of a Macintosh with the underpinnings of UNIX. Just like OS X - only in 1988!
- orangecat 8y ago
  I always wondered why Apple didn't consider A/UX for the base of its future OS, rather than spending 5+ years on the obviously-in-retrospect-doomed Copland/Taligent stuff and then buying NeXT. Unix licensing costs maybe?
  - klodolph 8y ago

gcp123 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Particularly difficult is how the Office '98 apps all crash in SheepShaver.
bitwize 8y ago
SheepShaver segfaults in the CPU emulator before running anything for me -- no matter which configure options I pass to it. It's an absolute nonstarter. Meanwhile, qemu works a treat.
EamonnMR 8y ago
Wrote a sheepshaver how-to recently because I always have trouble finding links to everything: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2018/10/os9-on-ubuntu/ http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2018/10/os9-on-ubuntu/

Keyframe 8y ago

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

protomyth 8y ago
Which company ended up with the rights to IRIX?
- IntelMiner 8y ago
  According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Final_bankruptcy_and_acquisition_by_Rackable_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Final_bankrup... "Rackable Systems, Inc" picked them up, and then got acquired by HP Presumably HP now owns IRIX then? Though it seems to have been retired
- unixhero 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.

rayiner 8y ago

> 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.)

microcolonel 8y ago

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=906e26bbcaac11be20cb28f64b5197ff http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=906e26bbcaac11be20cb28f6...

tambourine_man 8y ago
Hold Cmd-shift-3

jammmety 8y ago

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

userbinator 8y ago

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 8y ago
> …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_View/Entries/2010/5/1_Resources_and_Resource_Editors.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... Also, extended file attributes are alive and well.
- userbinator 8y ago
  ...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.