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This is just a problem with technology generally and digital archives. It's part of the reason why the Internet Archive exists and its mission keeps expanding (

This is just a problem with technology generally and digital archives. It's part of the reason why the Internet Archive exists and its mission keeps expanding (thankfully). This is hardly unique to the Apple Silicon moment, especially as the author's concerns largely date back to M64 and PPC days. I'm certain an open source x86 emulator on ARM will get done (QEMU already?), as these requirements aren't specific to Apple Silicon (although will likely accelerate it). But if the author is concerned about PageMaker and old zines, why not run the original in something like SheepSaver that emulates PPC? Surely that port will exist (ARM -> PPC) with no need to run old Intel Mac apps.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
For PPC Mac emulation specifically, QEMU has been making strides in the past couple of years. It can competently run several versions of Classic Mac OS as well as OS X up through 10.4. 3D acceleration is still missing, but last I checked was in the works.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
brigade 6y ago
Yeah... both QEMU and Bochs have long been able to emulate a full x86 system. QEMU at least has had some people boot x86 macOS under emulation, but it hasn't been that interesting until now, since on x86 running macOS under a VM has been more useful.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  About 8 years ago, the last time I tried QEMU, it was painfully slow. With 8 years more development & much faster hardware, it should be relatively smooth. In general it seems like emu tech keeps up with the desire for its use.
  - brigade 6y ago
    To be fair, full-system emulation is still going to be pretty slow; emulating an MMU is painful and it's not going to be any easier when you can't use 4k pages.
    - twicetwice 6y ago
      Oh, this is very interesting—I just finished the Virtual Memory assignment for my Operating Systems class. (We had to use Bochs, and it was slow.) Why is emulating an MMU particularly painful?
      - avhon1 6y ago
        It adds a layer of indirection (which has to be intercepted and emulated) for every single access to RAM.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        Just curious, what OS were you using with Bochs? Last I used it around 8-10 years ago, playing around with Win95. It was painfully slow then, unusable, but I'd be curious about the level of improvement: was it minimally usable?
        twicetwice 6y ago
        The one we wrote for the class :) Well, sort of. The first assignment was to write a bootloader in x86 assembly. For the second assignment we were given a bootloader and a partially-implemented kernel, and we had to finish the kernel by writing a non-preemptive (cooperative) scheduler (including implementing context switching and so on). Third assignment same thing but a preemptive scheduler. And so on. The partially-implemented kernel is very rudimentary—kernel threads but no userspace threads or forking, no filesystem, no virtual memory and no actual difference between kernel mode and user mode (until the virtual memory assignment, in which the partial kernel we were given did actually do ring transitions), etc. Anyway all this is to say that we were running a very very bare-bones, stripped-down kernel, and even then it was annoyingly slow, so I expect that it would be still be extremely slow running a "real" OS. It's my understanding that that's not really what Bochs is for, though. If you want to run Win95 use a normal VM; Bochs is meant to be a low-level x86 development tool. Though again that's just my impression, so I could be wiong in that.
azinman2 6y ago
*M64->MK68

kitsunesoba 6y ago

For PPC Mac emulation specifically, QEMU has been making strides in the past couple of years. It can competently run several versions of Classic Mac OS as well as OS X up through 10.4. 3D acceleration is still missing, but last I checked was in the works.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

brigade 6y ago

Yeah... both QEMU and Bochs have long been able to emulate a full x86 system. QEMU at least has had some people boot x86 macOS under emulation, but it hasn't been that interesting until now, since on x86 running macOS under a VM has been more useful.

ineedasername 6y ago
About 8 years ago, the last time I tried QEMU, it was painfully slow. With 8 years more development & much faster hardware, it should be relatively smooth. In general it seems like emu tech keeps up with the desire for its use.
- brigade 6y ago
  To be fair, full-system emulation is still going to be pretty slow; emulating an MMU is painful and it's not going to be any easier when you can't use 4k pages.
  - twicetwice 6y ago
    Oh, this is very interesting—I just finished the Virtual Memory assignment for my Operating Systems class. (We had to use Bochs, and it was slow.) Why is emulating an MMU particularly painful?
    - avhon1 6y ago
      It adds a layer of indirection (which has to be intercepted and emulated) for every single access to RAM.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Just curious, what OS were you using with Bochs? Last I used it around 8-10 years ago, playing around with Win95. It was painfully slow then, unusable, but I'd be curious about the level of improvement: was it minimally usable?
      - twicetwice 6y ago
        The one we wrote for the class :) Well, sort of. The first assignment was to write a bootloader in x86 assembly. For the second assignment we were given a bootloader and a partially-implemented kernel, and we had to finish the kernel by writing a non-preemptive (cooperative) scheduler (including implementing context switching and so on). Third assignment same thing but a preemptive scheduler. And so on. The partially-implemented kernel is very rudimentary—kernel threads but no userspace threads or forking, no filesystem, no virtual memory and no actual difference between kernel mode and user mode (until the virtual memory assignment, in which the partial kernel we were given did actually do ring transitions), etc. Anyway all this is to say that we were running a very very bare-bones, stripped-down kernel, and even then it was annoyingly slow, so I expect that it would be still be extremely slow running a "real" OS. It's my understanding that that's not really what Bochs is for, though. If you want to run Win95 use a normal VM; Bochs is meant to be a low-level x86 development tool. Though again that's just my impression, so I could be wiong in that.

azinman2 6y ago

*M64->MK68