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1991 Macintosh Quadra with Mac OS 8.1 as an Electron App
- asveikau 6y agoSomehow I thought OS 8 was the first major release to be PowerPC only. Wikipedia says they cut off 68K in 8.5 though.
- virtue3 6y agolikewise, I had a powerPC running on 7.x and 8.x. ooof, takes me back.
- asveikau 6y agoMy friend had a power mac 6100 with system 7.1. It seemed pretty awesome at the time.
- Lammy 6y ago8.0 and 8.1 do require an '040, cutting off any MacⅡ or 1xx-series PowerBook. It's especially important to have access to OS 8.1 for HFS+ filesystem support!
- sabellito 6y agoyou'll find various games and demos preinstalled, thanks to an old MacWorld Demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons. Oh this is not just looks, which would already be nice, but it actually runs stuff.
- setgree 6y agoAre all these games abandonware? Even if not, I can’t imagine anyone pursuing a legal case, but it would be the kind of thing I worried about.
- tambourine_man 6y agoIt’s hard to explain the excitement that those CDs packed to newer generations. The internet was 14.4 or 33.6kbps. My HD had 250MB. That meant that 650MB was just colossal. Thousands of exquisite icons, games, productivity, utilities, etc. It was vast. Besides, the drivers were 2X or 4X, so it really took you a while to browse the whole thing. Every reading noise would correspond to another portion of the screen being partially painted, something to look forward to.
- IggleSniggle 6y agoI swear I'm into computers because stuff took forever. Listening to that floppy drive, listening to that hard drive, watching that loading bar fill, swapping out the disk, anticipation and excitement growing ever greater. The result maybe wasn't that important, but the PROMISE of the result...that was special. Same thing hit again later with Napster and building up collections of albums. I didn't even care about the music, but those loading bars hit a primal spot of "acquire," "forbidden fruit," and "anticipatory glee."
- duopixel 6y agoMacFormat, a UK based magazine with a CD full of shareware and demos, would unexplainingly appear every month at a magazine shop in my hometown of Puebla, Mexico, at around ‘94-98. Without a doubt I would have a different career should I have not have access to this information. This is what I do today https://method.ac https://method.ac
- tambourine_man 6y agoI wasn't born in Mexico, but I had a similar experience. There was a fancy magazine shop/bookstore/coffeeshop that sold MacWorld, MacFormat, MacUser, MacAddict, etc. And they were expensive. Everything seems so when you're 10, of course, but I imagine it truly was, if you account for currency exchange, shipping, etc. It sure consumed every christmas, birthday present and dime I could get my hands on at the time. I learned so much from those magazines: tips and tricks, reviews of products I could never afford, industry analysis. Being featured on a Q&A session was ecstatic. A few years ago I had coffee and a Cuban cigar at that store when I visited my parents. I heard it went out of business recently.
- josh2600 6y agoThis was the first graphical user interface I saw as a kid. Thank you for the trip down memory lane.
- aduitsis 6y agoThe graphical user interface still looks gorgeous! And it brings me a slight shudder that the look and feel might be more consistent that what we have today, even on the Mac.
- athenot 6y agoRight until you open the AppleCD Audio Player… Music apps never followed the UI guidelines. :(
- perardi 6y agoAppleCD Audio Player is nothing… https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80 …compared to the brushed metal and bizarre volume control in QuickTime in Mac OS 9. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90
- the_af 6y agoQuickTime looks felt bizarre even to us Windows users. Even though we had no expectations of consistent or pretty UIs, every time I had to use QuickTime (a typical use case: watching movie trailers) I marveled at the grotesque bizarreness of its UI.
- toast0 6y agoModern windows has no expectations of consistency, but Windows in the 9x era would have a pretty consistent feel. Sure, there were two file pickers, and yes some people made their own, but other than media players and games meant for full screen, almost everything used system widgets and kept system colors etc.
- projektfu 6y agoQ: Does it run my favorite game? A: Even a Mac Plus runs Glider.
- gaze 6y agoglider really was an incredibly fun game. Still a favorite of mine.
- savoytruffle 6y agoGlider Pro probably didn't run well on a 68040. Of course with this emulator, speed is irrelevant if a copy can be located.
- ErikAugust 6y agoGlider. And Shufflepuck for good measure.
- codecamper 6y agoShufflepuck!? Really?????
- archgoon 6y agoTitle: Quadra, not Quandra.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoFixed. Thanks!
- caiobegotti 6y agoDownloading it right now! But... > Can I connect to the Internet? No. For what it's worth, the web was quite different 30 years ago - and you wouldn't be able to open even Google. However, Internet Explorer and Netscape are installed [...] If IE and Netscape are available I'd assume this would be alright, unless it's some Electron thingy going on... how's that so?
- guerrilla 6y agoThis may be helpful [1]. It's not exactly modern but far more up-to-date than IE and NS. Last updated 2014 I think [2]. [1]. https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classilla
- Lammy 6y agoClassilla requires a PowerPC and CarbonLib, and this machine is an emulated 68040. The best browser you can get is probably iCab, but even then it won't display many modern pages. Think of how many sites require TLS 1.2 to do anything at all.
- userbinator 6y agoThink of how many sites require TLS 1.2 to do anything at all. ...and then think of how there's no theoretical reason why TLS 1.2, 1.3 or any crypto, really, won't work on such a processor; the practical reason is that no one has really spent the effort to create/port such an implementation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anthk 6y ago> won't work on such a processor; Eh, I think SSH clients for OS8 existed. http://www.heilancoo.net/MacCVSClient/MacCVSClientDoc/ssh-classic.html http://www.heilancoo.net/MacCVSClient/MacCVSClientDoc/ssh-cl... http://linuxmafia.com/ssh/macos.html http://linuxmafia.com/ssh/macos.html
- kanobo 6y agoProjects like these remind me that there are people in this world live in a different intellectual plane than us. For them, time probably moves slowly and the average person's intellect must surely amuse them. Because how is it possible for this to be made by one human?
- steviedotboston 6y agoThis is really just a repackaging of work thats already been done. It uses the BasiliskII emulator which was compiled to Javascript with Emscripten by someone else a few years ago. Still pretty cool but not some crazy technological feat.
- kanobo 6y agoOh, that would nice to include in the README - changes my entire perception of this project. Thanks for the context!
- steviedotboston 6y agohttps://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/blob/master/CREDITS.md https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/blob/master/C...
- boogies 6y agoIf you squint you can see Basilisk II under “Credits” in the screenshot.
- hoistbypetard 6y agoAnd if you look at `CREDITS.md` in the top level of the project source, you can see that the author of this project considers that the "real work": https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/blob/master/CREDITS.md https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/blob/master/C...
- felixrieseberg 6y ago
- coldnose 6y agoLike that GAN that simulates Pac-Man, this is an exciting new level of inefficiency I couldn't even conceive of a couple decades ago.
- Twixes 6y agoWe need to go deeper! Soon we'll have a machine learning algorithm conjure Mac OS by calculating the next frame to display, taking into account user input, based on watching thousands of hours of normal Mac OS usage
- sillysaurusx 6y agoWeirdly I don't think there's a machine learning algorithm that can actually do this. pix2pix loses cohesiveness quickly, and GANs require mostly aligned input to make any sense of reality. BigGAN is the closest, yet even that doesn't seem to work very well for continuity.
- rjeli 6y agoyeah, you’d have to jump into the IL/RL/IRL/infogan tarpit :)
- peterkelly 6y agoPrediction: Spinning beach ball (92% confidence)
- bwip 6y agoThis is really nice. A little easier and more modern for someone just looking to run retro games than minivmac or qemu. If you're looking for games or other software for this check out the always excellent Macintosh Garden. https://macintoshgarden.org/ https://macintoshgarden.org/
- dilap 6y agoAlas, it doesn't have Excel on it. I want to test my theory that Excel 5 in an old mac emulator would be more snappy for basic input tasks than Excel 16 native on a MBP.
- guerrilla 6y agoLooks like you either get the German version or an alpha 5.0 version [1]. [1]. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x
- balaksakrionon 6y agoOn the bright side we may be saved from just such an infuriating realization
- ebg13 6y agoI have a theory that modern Excel forces the display to redraw too much. It's the only thing I can think of that would cause my 2018 MBP CPU to peg at 100% while (jankily) resizing the window on my external monitor unless I play games with the OS resolution settings to disable retina upscaling.
- orbitingpluto 6y agoAs soon as you start to vary, accidentally or not, the heights of cells, you're in for a bad time. Sorting large datasets with varying cell heights will bog down your system. Force uniform cell height and sorting can easily be twenty times quicker.
- boogies 6y agoSo basically https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ but with a macOS iso and Electron packaging?
- wmf 6y agoJSLinux doesn't emulate 68K, but something like that.
- balaksakrionon 6y agoMy experience with the .deb version seems to be stuck during startup on "Loading emulator dependencies"
- Glyptodon 6y agoSame for me.
- Arathorn 6y agoIt's got Photoshop 3 on it! And it's... faster than it was on my old Quadra? This is awesome :D
- EamonnMR 6y agoThis is extremely cool. Would be interested to see OS9 too; the emulator situation is kind of a hassle at the moment.
- Applejinx 6y agoI'd like to file a bug report: running Photoshop and using my wacom tablet, the lines are somewhat twitchy. On the other hand, it's responsive as hell: how nice to upgrade to a Quadra running inside Electron inside Mojave inside a pretty gnarly iMac Pro :) I wish my old Performa 575 booted that fast or ran Photoshop 3 that well. I am old enough that I started with Photoshop 3 on such a machine, so this really was a trip for me. How utterly cool. Now if I could run Photoshop 3 natively on THIS box… hoo boy would that be responsive.
- retreatguru 6y agoYikes! I started with Digital Darkroom which I think was a Photoshop precursor.
- cenal 6y agoI was a Macromedia fanboy. Photoshop is still a second class citizen in my mind to Fireworks. Even though Adobe felt different and nuked their best editor I still run it.
- girvo 6y agoAmen! I ran my entire first business from Fireworks. Damn was it excellent. I hated what Adobe did to Macromedia’s products after they bought them.
- glaberficken 6y agoIn the mid 2000s I spent years converting bitmap mockups into html table designs using Fireworks (using the slice->export workflow). My managers were perpetually in awe of how much faster I churned out the work when compared with the Photoshop wizards we had in the house. Really miss Fireworks.
- perardi 6y agoBase hard disk size of a 1991 Quadra 700: 80 MB Size of this .app on my Mac: 866 MB Yes, I know, it’s silly to snark on Electron app sizes by this point. You want to see some real bloat? Let’s compare the included Adobe Photoshop 3 and Adobe Photoshop 2020: Photoshop 3.0.5: 8.9 MB Photoshop 21.2.1: 2.76 GB Now that is some bloat.
- baddox 6y agoIsn’t the “Electron bloat” just that a version of Chrome has to be bundled in, and shouldn’t that only be like 25 MB?
- perardi 6y agoWell let’s explore the app package. Electron Framework takes up 174 MB. Past that, the big one is “disk” in Contents/Resources/app/src/ — which I will be completely honest, I don’t know what that is exactly. Is it a disk image? If so, does it have to be set to a reasonably large size at build time so you don’t run out of space in the emulator?
- perardi 6y agoAh, yeah, I think I assumed correctly. In the emulator, the “macintosh.js” hard drive is 650 MB, so you must have to explicitly give it a big giant size to begin with, as it can’t dynamically increase the volume size on the fly.
- felixrieseberg 6y agoHi, author here! This is silly, but I'm allocating the entire size of the _virtual_ disk on your actual hard drive. There's probably a smarter way to do this, but that's how it is right now. PRs would be lovely!
- monadic2 6y agoHave you considered using qcow? Sadly I’m not terribly knowledgable if this is easily implementable or not but theoretically you don’t need to allocate all the disk space, just the parts you’ve written to.
- chrisco255 6y agoOregon Trail should be mandatory curriculum for passing the 3rd grade. Kids these days don't even know about dysentery.
- the_af 6y agoAgreed. And if that's not enough, there's always the retro remake Organ Trail -- as brutal as the original, but with zombies!
- felixrieseberg 6y agoDeveloper here! I'm so excited to see that people like this toy. I'm happy to answer any questions, if you have any. But first, some important credits: Emulator: Basilisk II, a 68k Macintosh emulator, by Christian Bauer et al, modified and compiled with Emscripten by James Friend. Installed software from vintage computing archives: WinWorldPC, Macintosh Garden, and Macintosh Repository.
- paultopia 6y agoThis is so cool!
- keyle 6y agoBeyond how cool this is, I appreciate the sorry part :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- brian_herman__ 6y agothis is one of the best posts of mac history on hacker news in a while someone should try this on their developer arm mac
- a_band 6y agoThis made me so happy. Thank you for doing it!
- tikwidd 6y agohow easy is this to get running in an actual browser, rather than Electron*? I want to host some Hypercard stacks (some of which need Quicktime support, hence colour Mac emulation).
- thomond 6y agoIt appears to use this as the emulator: https://jamesfriend.com.au/basilisk-ii-classic-mac-emulator-in-the-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/basilisk-ii-classic-mac-emulator-... You can just directly use that instead.
- sgt-serverless 6y agowow!
- somepeepz15 6y agoThat's pretty neat! somepeepz15@gmail.com
- somepeepz15 6y agoThat's really neat! I expect some cool projects will use this. somepeepz15@gmail.com
- mambodog 6y agoif electron is not to your taste, you can run the emulator in your browser here: https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/ https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/ coincidently today firefox 79 was released, which brings back support for SharedArrayBuffer, which is a key part of the browser port of this emulator
- IggleSniggle 6y agoJust feel like mentioning that the "old" version (without SharedArrayBuffer) works just fine on my iPhone 7 Safari browser. What a time to be alive.
- cdubzzz 6y agoIt's crazy to me that somehow "Alley 19 Bowling" has been lingering around in my brain for 20+ years. All of a sudden I feel like I played it yesterday.
- funman7 6y agoWhy the “I’m Sorry” ?
- peterkelly 6y agoI miss the spatial Finder
- ngcc_hk 6y agoThe thing is a developer software and go back to the future. Pascal ...
- 0xDEEPFAC 6y agoImagine the system requirements of this versus the original OS ; ) Cool toy though!
- philliphaydon 6y agoI was convinced when I saw "Oregon Trail"
- plun9 6y agoI love playing with the MacinTalk (text-to-speech) voices. Be sure to enable talking alerts in the Speech control panel.
- orionblastar 6y agoAny chance of emulating a PowerMac running MacOSX using PearPC or something that emulates PowerPC? It is so old that Apple should not care about it running in an emulator since they are moving from Intel to ARM.
- anthk 6y agoLast Qemu suports PowerMacs. Check Emaculation.
- orionblastar 6y agoThanks
- gcbw3 6y agoWhere exactly is the disk image? can't find it on the repo (also, github redesign removed file size?!?!)
- cgufus 6y agoDoes it theoretically also run A/UX ? I remember the Quadra machines were able to do so...
- trevorg16 6y agoUnlikely, since it's based on Basillisk II and so does not actually emulate the MMU [1]. 1: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=34664#34664 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=34664#3466...
- mietek 6y agoShoebill is an emulator built specifically to run A/UX. https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- denki39 6y agoAmazing! Seeing the interface with an auto CRT filter within my eyes.
- drrotmos 6y agoFinally! A way for a 68k Mac to use more than 1 GB of memory! Jokes aside, this is a neat tech demo :)
- adamzegelin 6y agoMissing the best Mac classic game: Lemmings!
- tomduncalf 6y agoHa, this is pretty cool. I remember the Macs of this era always seemed so exotic to me as a young PC user. I had one friend whos family had a Quadra and the OS seemed so cool and exciting and colourful the one time I used it. I also clearly remember how the floppy drive ejected with a motor rather than manually! Even now, the OS seems really thoughtfully designed, you can clearly see the lineage to MacOS of today. Small bug report, my cursor seems to jump around a bit after I've been running it for a few minutes!
- theandrewbailey 6y agoThe first time I encountered a Mac was in school. Because I had experienced cassette players eating tapes (along with other forms of device failure), I was never comfortable with any floppy drive without an eject button. Ditto for those CD drives, too.
- mnl 6y agoA few comments. This is a port of Basilisk II. If someone feels uncomfortable using an Electron app, they can still install plain Basilisk, which works just fine. I don't know if you can distribute OS 8.1, but there certainly might be a legal issue with the original ROMs. You're including one and the thing is people used to look elsewhere for those. They're easy to find, and there are tools to dump them if you happen to own such a Mac which would make this issue disappear. About some posts here. I've never had decent performance with Hypercard in Basilisk II, on the other hand Mini vMac works great for that. Lemmings run nicely in Executor, which happens to be a nowadays free compatibility layer for 68K Mac software that doesn't need neither a dumped ROM nor any copy of the Macintosh System Software.
- swiley 6y agoHoly cow. The online version is more responsive than most of the native apps on my phone.
- fmakunbound 6y agoAnyone recall why some applications on Mac OS have a stylized "f" suffix?
- mietek 6y ago“RandomMacApp ƒ” stood for “RandomMacApp’s folder”.
- fideloper 6y agoMy father had a Quadra 610 that I used for hours when growing up. I have some huge nostalgia for Hellcats Over the Pacific and A-10 Attack! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Attack! Wonder if I can play these@
- aeries 6y agoA-10 Attack! was a truly wonderful game- the flight model was so impressive.
- jakearmitage 6y agoSure, great. Let's take a fully functional emulator that works well on mac OS (https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7361 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7361) and all 3 major platforms (https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basilisk_ii https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basilisk_ii) and port it to JS using Emscripten, and then wrap that into an Electron app, and ship it again on mac OS. Is this an exercise in how many layers of abstraction one can do things?