24 ms·

Mac OS 9

945 points by Shank 4y ago

blonky 4y ago
Oh boy. Those extensions loading. So many times I held my breath when adding a new extension. If it doesn’t then you have to restart in Safe mode, or something. I won’t miss the extensions. OS 9 was cool. I used it a lot on my lime-green imac.
nodesocket 4y ago
Oh my god, its got Hotline[1]. Hotline Client 1.2.3. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
- jrnichols 4y ago
  you might be surprised at how many Hotline servers are still up and running today. :)
sandgiant 4y ago
I love projects like these! I don't have anything to add to what others have already said about nostalgia and simpler times, except I watched the Civilization intro and almost started a play-through. The original Civilization tile set is so pleasant to look at.
kirykl 4y ago
Love the inclusion of ClarisWorks, spent so much time in there
5amdotis 4y ago
Brings back memories!
- yubiox 4y ago
  I wanted access to the college mac lab so bad back then, and eventually got in. Something about those little white screens and the feel of those keyboards was so compelling.
autotune 4y ago
Oh wow this actually has The Oregon Trail available to play, this is impressive!
- spking 4y ago
  Prince of Persia as well. There goes my whole day.
  - aareet 4y ago
    I tried the Prince of Persia but it just loops on the intro. Wasn't able to get to the game.
    - autotune 4y ago
      This may sound obvious but try clicking File -> New Game. That is how I escaped the intro loop.
      - aareet 4y ago
        Aha! thank you :)
johnthuss 4y ago
This is awesome! I still love the look of the Finder from this era, and I love that this has the Window Shade extension turned on too.
- lostgame 4y ago
  WindowShade was amaaaazing. There was something that - for a while, was an OSX equivalent…I want to say ‘ShapeShifter’(?) - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4.
  - zero_iq 4y ago
    You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II emulator for the Amiga.
    - lostgame 4y ago
      Nope, the utility was actually called ShapeShifter: (I used to make themes for it) https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11531-shapeshifter-osx-theming- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11531-shapeshifter-osx-t...
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    There was a utility called "WindowShade X" which (messily) hacked the functionality back into early versions of Mac OS X. This developer's utilities had a nasty habit of breaking with every OS update, though, sometimes even making the machine fail to boot, so it probably comes as no surprise that it's no longer available. The same developers also had a UI skinning utility called ShapeShifter, which is probably what you're getting WindowShade X confused with.
- chongli 4y ago
  The WindowShade control panel disappeared after MacOS 8. The feature became part of the Appearance control panel at that point. You can customize it on this MacOS 9 machine by going to Apple -> Control Panels -> Appearance and clicking on the Options tab. There you have access to the option "Double-click title bar to collapse windows", an option that lets you use the feature the way it originally worked (before the minimize widget was added to the far right end of the title bar).
bri3d 4y ago
This is really impressive and goes way above and beyond the normal "emscripten an emulator into a browser" shenanigans. There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an AppleTalk zone together. Extremely cool stuff.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  If you open the developer console, it is revealed that the experience is provided by SheepShaver, a traditional desktop emulator (packaged presumably with Emscripten) running in the browser. :) The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt. Edit: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-emulators https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-emulator... reveals that it is indeed built using Emscripten.
  - bri3d 4y ago
    Oh sure, I didn't expect it to be a from-scratch emulator, but it's way beyond the usual low-effort "type make and send it" type stuff.
Not_John 4y ago
Reminds of this https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ Had a lot of fun with this some time ago.
poundtown 4y ago
KPT Bryce!
- genewitch 4y ago
  but who is Kai
  - johndoe0815 4y ago
    Kai Krause, a German designer and software developer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause
bastardoperator 4y ago
Sick!
agys 4y ago
Makes me remind (and appreciate) of how beautiful and clean the UI was. Designed in the tiniest detail!
slowmotarget 4y ago
It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen. Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.
- mk_stjames 4y ago
  The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general... All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee. Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.
  - Cockbrand 4y ago
    I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal", of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x. I do agree on all other points :)
    - ihatepython 4y ago
      Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva.
      - Cockbrand 4y ago
        You're right, I mixed up the two font names in my head. I edited my post above.
    - mk_stjames 4y ago
      Huh, TIL. I had always thought it was always just up-res'ing variations on Chicago, up thru and including the first iPod. They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit. As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.
mk_stjames 4y ago
So, is Photoshop 3.0 considered freeware/abandonware at this point? It runs impressively fast in this compared to what I remember in period.
- hardnose 4y ago
  It's considered shhhware
johnthuss 4y ago
Civilization 1 runs! I played this for SO many hours back then. I loved that game so much. This VM locked up after 100 turns or so, but man, this really brings me back.
- smallstepforman 4y ago
  Whatever you do, dont attack Spearmen with a battleship.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Spearman is civ 2. Phalanx is the Civ defender of choice :)
tambourine_man 4y ago
I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a certain age, I feel it’s a bit counterproductive and not a net positive. But old Macs hit me hard and it’s something I can’t seem to build an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of the metaphors… so good.
- rocketbop 4y ago
  Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the way.
- Nav_Panel 4y ago
  Same. And, for me, it's the little happy Mac icon at startup... seeing him takes me back to such specific moments in my childhood. Playing Oregon Trail in my friend's basement... damn.
- chongli 4y ago
  That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally) Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because they have a conflict of interest by running the ad network so many spammers use. I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi-user security was non-existent (you were basically always running as "root"). But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors, and borderline unusable by grandma.
  - ace2358 4y ago
pram 4y ago
I miss window shading to this day, shame it never made it into OSX.
bitlax 4y ago
Wow, A10 Attack must have been by the same people who did FA-18 Hornet.
- fideloper 4y ago
  I played that game for HOURS as a kid. I literally just yelled "OMG A-10 ATTACK!" when I saw it there about 3 minutes ago. I don't remember the key bindings very well (or if it works with a mouse), but I did make it into the air before crashing. What a wonderful hit of nostalgia. I'll have to try to play again when I have a free second.
pmarreck 4y ago
Graphing Calculator doesn't work because it can't find an FPU, and it's the first thing I tried. :/ (also, because it was pretty revolutionary at the time!)
jdlyga 4y ago
Brings me back to being a kid playing with Mac OS making folders and colorizing them with labels. This was the first time in my life I ever heard the word "essential" and had no idea what it meant. I used to pronounce it like "assess natal".
- thfuran 4y ago
  You had a very novel approach to phonetics.
- heywire 4y ago
  I have some words like this too. I still read archive as arch-ive in my head all these years later. Native speaker too, just wasn’t a word I heard a lot when I was younger I guess.
eigenhombre 4y ago
Very cool to see a working HyperCard app in there (Infinite HD > Multimedia > HyperCard). Some of the animations are painfully slow, but dang this takes me back... and the old Photoshop!!! Just, wow! Spent a lot of time in this world a few decades ago....
sph 4y ago
Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
- cogman10 4y ago
  And why is everything just so slow! That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many actions have noticeable lag. Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Some of that you can tune down as it’s trying to redraw at every single step in between. Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back up (don’t redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn off animations but not sure you can disable that one.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    It's created with javascript in the browser, which is not efficient.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      JavaScript is very efficient. It compiles to native on the fly in v8 engines. The DOM itself, however, has a lot of foot guns for performance.
      - IncRnd 4y ago
        That's a distinction without a difference. Running JS is slower than native. The user of JS cares about the real world speed of emulating a quadra machine, which is shown as very slow at this webpage.
        4y ago
winrid 4y ago
Amazing that this boots faster in Chrome on my phone than it did on my laptop in the day.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed. Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it has some quirks.
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  You can change the color depth in the Control Strip in the bottom left corner. It's indeed set by default to "256 Colors", setting it to "Millions of Colors" (=24bit) removes the dithering from the icons.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Nice catch. Opening the Monitors control panel yields an error but didn't think to check the Control Strip.
Cockbrand 4y ago
Oh man, it's even got the "Grouch" extension for the Trash Can. Can't install it on Chrome/Mac, though, as it can't be read. Still, very very nice! And as others have pointed out, the UI/UX design is immaculately well thought out, discoverable and very clean.
DrBenCarson 4y ago
Really cool. Is this running in Web Assembly?
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Oh no... it has a working Civilization...
WraithM 4y ago
Ohh! Don't tease me with Escape Velocity! It apparently needs 2050K more memory?
trafnar 4y ago
I really wanted to play Barrack but it doesn't work :(
webwielder2 4y ago
Very excited to see Infini-D. Hands down the most Macintosh-esque 3D rendering software ever created.
lprd 4y ago
Wow, what a blast from the past. I was only 9 at the time this was released and every bit enamored with the world of computers. My dad owned a data recovery business that also developed software. I was home-schooled and would visit his office frequently after class as I loved looking at all the hard drives and also loved the "computer room smell". There was also the office tradition of playing a game of Bungie's Marathon (which ran natively on Mac OS 9) before closing up shop. It wasn't too long after I would be saving up for my first tangerine iBook. Good times.
- dheera 4y ago
  Reminds me of a fake MacOS website that we naughty students used to load up on IE on Windows machines at school and then full screen it, which would make it look like it was converted to a Mac. Except it was just a webpage designed to look like a Mac with some very basic GUI features. It was an extremely popular prank, I just can't remember the name of the website now. And today we have actual real MacOS in a browser.
- genewitch 4y ago
  the smell being dust, or ozone? Working in a computer repair place when i was ~19 ruined my sinuses forever. I have a lot of old hardware kind of sorted in cabinets, and whenever someone needs some old hardware i have to either dust mask or take an antihistamine. So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is, and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice.
  - lprd 4y ago
    > the smell being dust, or ozone? I'm not exactly sure the origin of the smell. Perhaps its the silicon/plastic they use on the electronics? Maybe even the heat combined with all the rest of the components produces that unique smell that I love so much.
sroussey 4y ago
I can’t seem to install McDraft on it, unfortunately.
s1k3s 4y ago
Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I build, thanks!
- bovermyer 4y ago
  Two questions: 1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic? 2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?
  - s1k3s 4y ago
    I am serious, and it's all about how things are named and how the OS interacts with you. Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before): - "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to users, among many other names - a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square with no color differentiation on the Mac - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right - taskbar showing date + time and the calendar "on click" on Windows vs. time, date on click & no calendar on the Mac ... and the list can go on. I honestly believe they screwed up by acting too smart, when people wanted something simple that makes sense to them.
    - robotresearcher 4y ago
      - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right The top right current program name has the running programs in a dropdown on click. You can 'tear off' the dropdown menu to create an always-visible task bar, either in the dropdown format or as nice little icons.
    - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
      Just a reminder that Windows 98 was Microsoft's popular OS at the time and it had its own issues: https://youtu.be/yeUyxjLhAxU https://youtu.be/yeUyxjLhAxU
hardnose 4y ago
One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder days!
j1elo 4y ago
Oh well, I almost got to play Another World :-) (I recently finished it on PC so it was the first thing to catch my eye). Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome (memory access out of bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore) but I get it, playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator!
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  And here I thought the purpose of this emulator was to play Battle Chess. Unfortunately, that doesn't work either.
  - ehaliewicz2 4y ago
    Escape velocity seems to work, I recommend it if you haven't played it.
mbauman 4y ago
Man, I miss all those Ambrosia Software games (Apieron, Barrack, Escape Velocity, etc). I love how many are pre-loaded there, but the few I tested all seem broken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software
- BillFranklin 4y ago
  The A-10 attack game works! Controls are at http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/A-10_Tank_Killer_-_Manual.pdf http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/A-10_Tank_Killer.... Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware. The price hasn't decreased in about 20 years though.
  - danaris 4y ago
    > Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware. There's also an open-source clone, Endless Sky [0], and a recently-Kickstarted project to re-create EV Override for modern systems, Cosmic Frontier: Override [1]. 0: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky 1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
- ehaliewicz2 4y ago
  Escape velocity works here!
- alana314 4y ago
  Oh I was really hoping Barrack would work!
mdasen 4y ago
I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. Likewise, it wasn't the blinding white of light-mode in macOS/Windows today. The purple used was soft and pleasant, unlike the harsh yellow of folders in Windows or the harsh royal blue of Windows progress bars. Plus, everything had lots of contrast without feeling harsh. One of the things that bugs me about modern UIs is the lack of contrast. I don't need a high-contrast mode, but it would be nice to get back to the contrast of 90s operating systems.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  I would take Mac System 6, 7, 8, 9, OS X 10.1 aqua, windows 95, 98, ME, or XP over Windows 11's GUI.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  >I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. I feel similarly. The Win9X gray is just a touch too dark, it reminds me of a dark overcast day or something. Platinum's shade of gray is great, and the shade that they switched to in Windows 2000 is also very good. For this reason on the Windows side of the fence I've always considered Win2K's UI the peak of Win9X-type UIs.
  - akx 4y ago
    The win9x default gray was from an age where you didn't necessarily have the option to use an arbitrary shade of gray - meanwhile Macs had full control of the hardware (as they still do) and could pick any old color. That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      > That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs. Well, until Kaleidoscope[0] was created way back in 1991, followed by Apple's own Appearance Manager[1] in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998, both of which allowed all-encompassing theming that could stop just short of changing colors or radically change your UI's appearance. Windows wouldn't get an equivalent until the addition of visual style themes in XP in 2001 (which still had to be hacked to allow arbitrary third party themes) and was by predated the third-party WindowBlinds[2] by three years. To date I've not seen OS theming that was as capable as Kaleidoscope was. Kaleidoscope schemes could change practically any aspect of the Mac OS UI (e.g. moving titlebars to the bottom or left/right edges of windows) which led to the creation of some extremely creative and zany schemes. Even the theming systems of modern Linux desktop environments which are built with customization as a central tenant aren't as capable as Kaleidoscope was. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds
siruva07 4y ago
I can hear "Sosumi" while clicking around :) "Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company, regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi
- spongeb00b 4y ago
  For me it was weird not hearing that very specific sort of grinding noise of old hard drives while watching the boot screen :)
ben_w 4y ago
Hah, Marathon Infinity, running in real time on a Javascript emulation of MacOS, in Safari, on my phone. What a difference 26 years makes.
GingerMidas 4y ago
Warcraft II actually plays, I wasn't expecting that.
cortesoft 4y ago
I still play quite a few games from MacOS using SheepShaver. Still find it pretty fun.
hadrien01 4y ago
Question from someone who never used MacOS 9: why does the Sherlock UI look so... OS X like?
- johnzim 4y ago
  Because it was built with the newer design language that Apple was developing - they used it in Quicktime too. I'd hazard a guess that the key difference was that at the time that MacOS 9 came out, you could get something in as long as it appealed to Steve. It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out the door.
  - Lammy 4y ago
    See also: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
ty_2k 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this. It's stuff like this that really makes the web feel mysterious and magical.
samhickmann 4y ago
Brings so much good memories! [Edit] and their macos8 emulation is even better
aj7 4y ago
It’s amazing how much more central search is in modern OS’s. This feels more like the original’84 Mac, but gussied up. I like OS6 better. It was 10 years ahead of anything else, except perhaps Amiga, in the hands of a developer. This Mac OS9 actually looks like it came from a low point in Mac’s penetration and power.
- adolph 4y ago
  Agreed, 6 was the high point, 7 wasn’t bad and 8/9 were skeuomorphic slow lipstick on the core OS pig. Gimme 6 with original iPod any day of the week.
  - aj7 4y ago
    The low point was when someone at Apple had decided that dragging a document over a print icon to print the document was an important innovation. That’s about the time I switched to Windows for 18 years.
  - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
    I started with System 6, and after getting 7.0.1, would only begrudgingly go back to 6 for apbs that needed it.
    - adolph 4y ago
      IIsi was my first self-owned one so I largely started on 7. I discovered 6 from using a PB100 which could fit 6 and Word 4.5 in a RAMdisk persisted through restarts by the PB100's pseudostatic RAM. 6 for me at the time was the modern day equivalent of a distraction-free writing environment. Similar to using an iPad of a couple years ago in terms of how silent and instantly receptive it was to my inputs.
ok123456 4y ago
How do I send the command key (propeller)?
- genewitch 4y ago
  at the bottom of the non-fullscreen browser window there's a rectangle, hover over that, or if on touch, move your finger about 5 words to the right, there's a "settings" button hidden (at least on my monitor) that lets you swap ctrl and command. Doing that lets you press ctrl-I for info, or whatever.
davepeck 4y ago
In addition to being impressive technically, this is just plain fun. I downloaded a game my friends and I wrote way back in the day [1] and... it worked in my browser. Such a nice blast from the past. [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2851-infotron https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2851-infotron
erksa 4y ago
Sherlock, I've forgotten about this beautiful software and how it opened the internet for me.
papandada 4y ago
Not a Mac user. Figured this was a new announcement. Clicked and then remembered -- I was at a "System 7" launch as a youngster, 30+ years to get a couple version would be very, very slow.
- genewitch 4y ago
  when mac os X was announced they said "we're done with the versions! forever!" and it took them about 16 years to start incrementing the versions again. I get announcements from a discord server about mac OS checkpoint releases and they're over version 15 now, i think. edit to add: also when windows 10 came out microsoft was like "we're done with the versions! forever!" and then a couple years later "windows 11!"
  - papandada 4y ago
    I wonder if any company is successfully keeping any of its "forever" promises. ("unlimited gmail storage") -- I guess Costco's hot dog price is still holding strong.
blastro 4y ago
Turns out I'm nostalgic for an operating system...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chuckreynolds 4y ago
idk why but... cool. I had that Hellcats and Glider game... probably f-18 one too.
rcarmo 4y ago
This sort of UI elegance is why I keep around an XFCE container with the Platinum theme: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 I love using it when I need a break from GNOME.
etc-hosts 4y ago
how do I use this to play Dark Castle and Crystal Quest?
- tren 4y ago
  I went for dark castle first thing as well. Says you need to change the display to 2 colours for it to work, I couldn't figure out how to do it.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    on the bottom left there's a thing that looks like the color bars from old TV stations, click that and pick your color depth. the one with the checkerboard pattern to the right is the resolution settings.
emrah 4y ago
No matter how good anything is, it has to be resigned every year/major version/etc because it is far more "fashion" based whether we like it or not. And fashion is all about creating novelty by changing stuff not for utility but for the sake of generating a different neural firing pattern in our brains so the item doesn't simply fade into oblivion even if it is designed and works perfectly
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  I am not unsurprised by the fact that Photoshop in this little browser emulated Mac OS 9 starts up faster than modern Photoshop on my decked out modern Macbook. What the hell happened?
mihaip 4y ago
I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission. This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work. If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7). The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Fantastic work. Could this have implement dynamic screen resolutions, like Qemu/Virtualbox/Vmware guest extensions do when virtualising other operating systems ?
- jxdxbx 4y ago
  I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline or in some kind of encapsulated web app form?
  - mihaip 4y ago
    macintosh.js (https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/) is an Electron packaged version of an earlier iteration of the BasiliskII Emscripten port.
  - JonathonW 4y ago
    There's a professor at Columbia University that has good prebuilt SheepShaver packages with OS 9: Mac: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html Windows: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html There's not much in the way of third-party software included in these images, but it's a good starting point.
ubermonkey 4y ago
That's the version of Mac I started with, back around the turn of the century, on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook. I was in a job that was mostly analysis and presentation and writing, and Win95/98 on a laptop was just a NIGHTMARE of freezes and crashes and excruciatingly long boot times. I had a colleague, though, that was using a Mac (because his background was design), and while OS 9 definitely did crash, too, it was far less frequent -- and boot times were faster. Plus, sleep actually WORKED. Maybe 18 months later, that firm tanked, OS X came out, and I was keeping the lights on with freelance LAMP work using that same Mac as a dev environment. I'm on OS X to this day.
PeterCorless 4y ago
OMG. Original Warcraft was so terrible. But at the time, we thought it was SO COOL. Very simple "guns or butter" simulator. [Also runs slow like molasses in the emulator.]
gnicholas 4y ago
A tiny nit — this refers to showing the experience of using a Mac in the mid-90s, but the screen looks like it's the 15" display that Apple released in 2000. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and they had something like this in the 90s?
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  Mac OS X came out in 2001, so even though Mac OS 9 was mostly a 1990's experience, it did survive into the 2000s.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Oh sure, I remember running OS 9 on my Cube in 2000 before the OS X beta was available. My point was that the monitor frame shown is not consistent with the note in the stickies that indicates a mid-90s timeframe.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    mac os x server came out in 1999.
zczc 4y ago
Apple logo on the bottom does not render on non-apple machines, because it is apple-specific PUA code-point U+F8FF. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use
mitchitized 4y ago
First thing I did was look for Shufflepuck Cafe and Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. Anybody else do the same?
calmconviction 4y ago
Does anyone know the address of a website that used to bring up a full blown VM in the browser as a background to whatever the main site was loading?
sfpotter 4y ago
Just FYI, anyone who wants to play any of the Marathon games, be advised that they have been available open source for a long while now: https://alephone.lhowon.org/ https://alephone.lhowon.org/
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Related discussion from only 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646 1038 points, 323 comments
TacticalCoder 4y ago
Oh the memories! I've spent countless hours on MacOS 8 and then 9 IIRC, running QuarkXPress to do professional desktop publishing. Mostly on a beige Powermac G3 tower. I still have that computer somewhere in a garage, don't know if it still boots and still has my software of yore installed. Our physical tools of the trade were Iomega Zip drives and Iomega Zip disks (100 MB then 250 MB IIRC), Apple II Extended keyboard (the M3501, with ALPS switches: incredible keyboards for the time), HP LaserJet printers (600 and then 1200 dpi) and Sony Trinitron CRTs.
GoofballJones 4y ago
Now you just need QuarkXpress loaded on it and use a weird 3rd party font manager to load the customers weird fonts....and then have it simulate crashing every 5 minutes or so. Would really bring back that OS 9 feeling.
scelerat 4y ago
I was stoked to see Apeiron in the Games folder. One of the best Centipede clones ever. Too bad it doesn't work -- hope that's a temporary thing.
- genewitch 4y ago
  it's missing inputsprokets, which i spent about 2 minutes looking for in other folders before the system crashed...
scroot 4y ago
Would really appreciate if someone could get SK8 running in one of these environments!
jejones3141 4y ago
I've never owned a Mac, but I remember Mac OS 9 because some of its users would post their questions on comp.os.os9.
damontal 4y ago
I want to zap the pram and fire up Myst.
fdr 4y ago
Nice to see Escape Velocity in there. It's a shame that its distribution is endangered ever since Ambrosia closed up, without selling or releasing the source and rights.
1letterunixname 4y ago
I'm installing 9.2.2, Internet Explorer 5.1.7, and Netscape 7.0.2, so I'll backup to your AFP server over AppleTalk. Cool? Ah, the old days of watching extensions load and single-tasking. EDIT: Stable Google Chrome on a M1 MAX with a bazillion other tabs open is ~7-78x faster than real hardware. Chrome beats Safari beats Firefox.
vishnuharidas 4y ago
Open Photoshop, press Ctrl+Alt+"About Photoshop" for an easter egg.
glitchc 4y ago
Is it slow for a reason or to mimic real-life performance in its heyday?
deluarseo 4y ago
jwr 4y ago
A desktop where windows remember their positions… so refreshing in today's world, where every window and app has total amnesia and launches in random places.
SentientAtom 4y ago
Spent a lot of time restoring candy imacs in p.o.s. applications with OS 9, was always fun getting the PostScript dependencies loaded for Laser-Writers; periphery like plate-makers and Design-Jets, and getting them to see network shares. OS 8, and 9 were both lean as fuck and full of utilities. Back when distros were stable and code was efficient.

945 points by Shank 4y ago

Oh boy. Those extensions loading. So many times I held my breath when adding a new extension. If it doesn’t then you have to restart in Safe mode, or something. I won’t miss the extensions. OS 9 was cool. I used it a lot on my lime-green imac.

nodesocket 4y ago

Oh my god, its got Hotline[1]. Hotline Client 1.2.3. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

jrnichols 4y ago
you might be surprised at how many Hotline servers are still up and running today. :)

sandgiant 4y ago

I love projects like these! I don't have anything to add to what others have already said about nostalgia and simpler times, except I watched the Civilization intro and almost started a play-through. The original Civilization tile set is so pleasant to look at.

kirykl 4y ago

Love the inclusion of ClarisWorks, spent so much time in there

5amdotis 4y ago

Brings back memories!

yubiox 4y ago
I wanted access to the college mac lab so bad back then, and eventually got in. Something about those little white screens and the feel of those keyboards was so compelling.

autotune 4y ago

Oh wow this actually has The Oregon Trail available to play, this is impressive!

spking 4y ago
Prince of Persia as well. There goes my whole day.
- aareet 4y ago
  I tried the Prince of Persia but it just loops on the intro. Wasn't able to get to the game.
  - autotune 4y ago
    This may sound obvious but try clicking File -> New Game. That is how I escaped the intro loop.
    - aareet 4y ago
      Aha! thank you :)

johnthuss 4y ago

This is awesome! I still love the look of the Finder from this era, and I love that this has the Window Shade extension turned on too.

lostgame 4y ago
WindowShade was amaaaazing. There was something that - for a while, was an OSX equivalent…I want to say ‘ShapeShifter’(?) - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4.
- zero_iq 4y ago
  You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II emulator for the Amiga.
  - lostgame 4y ago
    Nope, the utility was actually called ShapeShifter: (I used to make themes for it) https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11531-shapeshifter-osx-theming- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11531-shapeshifter-osx-t...
- duskwuff 4y ago
  There was a utility called "WindowShade X" which (messily) hacked the functionality back into early versions of Mac OS X. This developer's utilities had a nasty habit of breaking with every OS update, though, sometimes even making the machine fail to boot, so it probably comes as no surprise that it's no longer available. The same developers also had a UI skinning utility called ShapeShifter, which is probably what you're getting WindowShade X confused with.
chongli 4y ago
The WindowShade control panel disappeared after MacOS 8. The feature became part of the Appearance control panel at that point. You can customize it on this MacOS 9 machine by going to Apple -> Control Panels -> Appearance and clicking on the Options tab. There you have access to the option "Double-click title bar to collapse windows", an option that lets you use the feature the way it originally worked (before the minimize widget was added to the far right end of the title bar).

bri3d 4y ago

This is really impressive and goes way above and beyond the normal "emscripten an emulator into a browser" shenanigans. There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an AppleTalk zone together. Extremely cool stuff.

rzzzt 4y ago
If you open the developer console, it is revealed that the experience is provided by SheepShaver, a traditional desktop emulator (packaged presumably with Emscripten) running in the browser. :) The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt. Edit: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-emulators https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-emulator... reveals that it is indeed built using Emscripten.
- bri3d 4y ago
  Oh sure, I didn't expect it to be a from-scratch emulator, but it's way beyond the usual low-effort "type make and send it" type stuff.

Not_John 4y ago

Reminds of this https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ Had a lot of fun with this some time ago.

poundtown 4y ago

KPT Bryce!

genewitch 4y ago
but who is Kai
- johndoe0815 4y ago
  Kai Krause, a German designer and software developer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause

bastardoperator 4y ago

Sick!

agys 4y ago

Makes me remind (and appreciate) of how beautiful and clean the UI was. Designed in the tiniest detail!

slowmotarget 4y ago

It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen. Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.

mk_stjames 4y ago
The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general... All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee. Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal", of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x. I do agree on all other points :)
  - ihatepython 4y ago
    Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva.
    - Cockbrand 4y ago
      You're right, I mixed up the two font names in my head. I edited my post above.
  - mk_stjames 4y ago
    Huh, TIL. I had always thought it was always just up-res'ing variations on Chicago, up thru and including the first iPod. They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit. As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.

mk_stjames 4y ago

So, is Photoshop 3.0 considered freeware/abandonware at this point? It runs impressively fast in this compared to what I remember in period.

hardnose 4y ago
It's considered shhhware

johnthuss 4y ago

Civilization 1 runs! I played this for SO many hours back then. I loved that game so much. This VM locked up after 100 turns or so, but man, this really brings me back.

smallstepforman 4y ago
Whatever you do, dont attack Spearmen with a battleship.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Spearman is civ 2. Phalanx is the Civ defender of choice :)

tambourine_man 4y ago

I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a certain age, I feel it’s a bit counterproductive and not a net positive. But old Macs hit me hard and it’s something I can’t seem to build an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of the metaphors… so good.

rocketbop 4y ago
Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the way.
Nav_Panel 4y ago
Same. And, for me, it's the little happy Mac icon at startup... seeing him takes me back to such specific moments in my childhood. Playing Oregon Trail in my friend's basement... damn.
chongli 4y ago
That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally) Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because they have a conflict of interest by running the ad network so many spammers use. I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi-user security was non-existent (you were basically always running as "root"). But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors, and borderline unusable by grandma.
- ace2358 4y ago

pram 4y ago

I miss window shading to this day, shame it never made it into OSX.

bitlax 4y ago

Wow, A10 Attack must have been by the same people who did FA-18 Hornet.

fideloper 4y ago
I played that game for HOURS as a kid. I literally just yelled "OMG A-10 ATTACK!" when I saw it there about 3 minutes ago. I don't remember the key bindings very well (or if it works with a mouse), but I did make it into the air before crashing. What a wonderful hit of nostalgia. I'll have to try to play again when I have a free second.

pmarreck 4y ago

Graphing Calculator doesn't work because it can't find an FPU, and it's the first thing I tried. :/ (also, because it was pretty revolutionary at the time!)

jdlyga 4y ago

Brings me back to being a kid playing with Mac OS making folders and colorizing them with labels. This was the first time in my life I ever heard the word "essential" and had no idea what it meant. I used to pronounce it like "assess natal".

thfuran 4y ago
You had a very novel approach to phonetics.
heywire 4y ago
I have some words like this too. I still read archive as arch-ive in my head all these years later. Native speaker too, just wasn’t a word I heard a lot when I was younger I guess.

eigenhombre 4y ago

Very cool to see a working HyperCard app in there (Infinite HD > Multimedia > HyperCard). Some of the animations are painfully slow, but dang this takes me back... and the old Photoshop!!! Just, wow! Spent a lot of time in this world a few decades ago....

sph 4y ago

Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.

cogman10 4y ago
And why is everything just so slow! That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many actions have noticeable lag. Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Some of that you can tune down as it’s trying to redraw at every single step in between. Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back up (don’t redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn off animations but not sure you can disable that one.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  It's created with javascript in the browser, which is not efficient.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    JavaScript is very efficient. It compiles to native on the fly in v8 engines. The DOM itself, however, has a lot of foot guns for performance.
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      That's a distinction without a difference. Running JS is slower than native. The user of JS cares about the real world speed of emulating a quadra machine, which is shown as very slow at this webpage.
      - 4y ago

winrid 4y ago

Amazing that this boots faster in Chrome on my phone than it did on my laptop in the day.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed. Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it has some quirks.

Cockbrand 4y ago
You can change the color depth in the Control Strip in the bottom left corner. It's indeed set by default to "256 Colors", setting it to "Millions of Colors" (=24bit) removes the dithering from the icons.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Nice catch. Opening the Monitors control panel yields an error but didn't think to check the Control Strip.

Cockbrand 4y ago

Oh man, it's even got the "Grouch" extension for the Trash Can. Can't install it on Chrome/Mac, though, as it can't be read. Still, very very nice! And as others have pointed out, the UI/UX design is immaculately well thought out, discoverable and very clean.

DrBenCarson 4y ago

Really cool. Is this running in Web Assembly?

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Oh no... it has a working Civilization...

WraithM 4y ago

Ohh! Don't tease me with Escape Velocity! It apparently needs 2050K more memory?

trafnar 4y ago

I really wanted to play Barrack but it doesn't work :(

webwielder2 4y ago

Very excited to see Infini-D. Hands down the most Macintosh-esque 3D rendering software ever created.

lprd 4y ago

Wow, what a blast from the past. I was only 9 at the time this was released and every bit enamored with the world of computers. My dad owned a data recovery business that also developed software. I was home-schooled and would visit his office frequently after class as I loved looking at all the hard drives and also loved the "computer room smell". There was also the office tradition of playing a game of Bungie's Marathon (which ran natively on Mac OS 9) before closing up shop. It wasn't too long after I would be saving up for my first tangerine iBook. Good times.

dheera 4y ago
Reminds me of a fake MacOS website that we naughty students used to load up on IE on Windows machines at school and then full screen it, which would make it look like it was converted to a Mac. Except it was just a webpage designed to look like a Mac with some very basic GUI features. It was an extremely popular prank, I just can't remember the name of the website now. And today we have actual real MacOS in a browser.
genewitch 4y ago
the smell being dust, or ozone? Working in a computer repair place when i was ~19 ruined my sinuses forever. I have a lot of old hardware kind of sorted in cabinets, and whenever someone needs some old hardware i have to either dust mask or take an antihistamine. So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is, and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice.
- lprd 4y ago
  > the smell being dust, or ozone? I'm not exactly sure the origin of the smell. Perhaps its the silicon/plastic they use on the electronics? Maybe even the heat combined with all the rest of the components produces that unique smell that I love so much.

sroussey 4y ago

I can’t seem to install McDraft on it, unfortunately.

s1k3s 4y ago

Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I build, thanks!

bovermyer 4y ago
Two questions: 1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic? 2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?
- s1k3s 4y ago
  I am serious, and it's all about how things are named and how the OS interacts with you. Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before): - "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to users, among many other names - a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square with no color differentiation on the Mac - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right - taskbar showing date + time and the calendar "on click" on Windows vs. time, date on click & no calendar on the Mac ... and the list can go on. I honestly believe they screwed up by acting too smart, when people wanted something simple that makes sense to them.
  - robotresearcher 4y ago
    - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right The top right current program name has the running programs in a dropdown on click. You can 'tear off' the dropdown menu to create an always-visible task bar, either in the dropdown format or as nice little icons.
  - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
    Just a reminder that Windows 98 was Microsoft's popular OS at the time and it had its own issues: https://youtu.be/yeUyxjLhAxU https://youtu.be/yeUyxjLhAxU

hardnose 4y ago

One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder days!

j1elo 4y ago

Oh well, I almost got to play Another World :-) (I recently finished it on PC so it was the first thing to catch my eye). Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome (memory access out of bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore) but I get it, playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator!

dkonofalski 4y ago
And here I thought the purpose of this emulator was to play Battle Chess. Unfortunately, that doesn't work either.
- ehaliewicz2 4y ago
  Escape velocity seems to work, I recommend it if you haven't played it.

mbauman 4y ago

Man, I miss all those Ambrosia Software games (Apieron, Barrack, Escape Velocity, etc). I love how many are pre-loaded there, but the few I tested all seem broken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software

BillFranklin 4y ago
The A-10 attack game works! Controls are at http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/A-10_Tank_Killer_-_Manual.pdf http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/A-10_Tank_Killer.... Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware. The price hasn't decreased in about 20 years though.
- danaris 4y ago
  > Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware. There's also an open-source clone, Endless Sky [0], and a recently-Kickstarted project to re-create EV Override for modern systems, Cosmic Frontier: Override [1]. 0: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky 1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
ehaliewicz2 4y ago
Escape velocity works here!
alana314 4y ago
Oh I was really hoping Barrack would work!

mdasen 4y ago

I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. Likewise, it wasn't the blinding white of light-mode in macOS/Windows today. The purple used was soft and pleasant, unlike the harsh yellow of folders in Windows or the harsh royal blue of Windows progress bars. Plus, everything had lots of contrast without feeling harsh. One of the things that bugs me about modern UIs is the lack of contrast. I don't need a high-contrast mode, but it would be nice to get back to the contrast of 90s operating systems.

phendrenad2 4y ago
I would take Mac System 6, 7, 8, 9, OS X 10.1 aqua, windows 95, 98, ME, or XP over Windows 11's GUI.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
>I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. I feel similarly. The Win9X gray is just a touch too dark, it reminds me of a dark overcast day or something. Platinum's shade of gray is great, and the shade that they switched to in Windows 2000 is also very good. For this reason on the Windows side of the fence I've always considered Win2K's UI the peak of Win9X-type UIs.
- akx 4y ago
  The win9x default gray was from an age where you didn't necessarily have the option to use an arbitrary shade of gray - meanwhile Macs had full control of the hardware (as they still do) and could pick any old color. That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    > That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs. Well, until Kaleidoscope[0] was created way back in 1991, followed by Apple's own Appearance Manager[1] in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998, both of which allowed all-encompassing theming that could stop just short of changing colors or radically change your UI's appearance. Windows wouldn't get an equivalent until the addition of visual style themes in XP in 2001 (which still had to be hacked to allow arbitrary third party themes) and was by predated the third-party WindowBlinds[2] by three years. To date I've not seen OS theming that was as capable as Kaleidoscope was. Kaleidoscope schemes could change practically any aspect of the Mac OS UI (e.g. moving titlebars to the bottom or left/right edges of windows) which led to the creation of some extremely creative and zany schemes. Even the theming systems of modern Linux desktop environments which are built with customization as a central tenant aren't as capable as Kaleidoscope was. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds

siruva07 4y ago

I can hear "Sosumi" while clicking around :) "Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company, regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi

spongeb00b 4y ago
For me it was weird not hearing that very specific sort of grinding noise of old hard drives while watching the boot screen :)

ben_w 4y ago

Hah, Marathon Infinity, running in real time on a Javascript emulation of MacOS, in Safari, on my phone. What a difference 26 years makes.

GingerMidas 4y ago

Warcraft II actually plays, I wasn't expecting that.

cortesoft 4y ago

I still play quite a few games from MacOS using SheepShaver. Still find it pretty fun.

hadrien01 4y ago

Question from someone who never used MacOS 9: why does the Sherlock UI look so... OS X like?

johnzim 4y ago
Because it was built with the newer design language that Apple was developing - they used it in Quicktime too. I'd hazard a guess that the key difference was that at the time that MacOS 9 came out, you could get something in as long as it appealed to Steve. It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out the door.
- Lammy 4y ago
  See also: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

ty_2k 4y ago

Thanks for sharing this. It's stuff like this that really makes the web feel mysterious and magical.

samhickmann 4y ago

Brings so much good memories! [Edit] and their macos8 emulation is even better

aj7 4y ago

It’s amazing how much more central search is in modern OS’s. This feels more like the original’84 Mac, but gussied up. I like OS6 better. It was 10 years ahead of anything else, except perhaps Amiga, in the hands of a developer. This Mac OS9 actually looks like it came from a low point in Mac’s penetration and power.

adolph 4y ago
Agreed, 6 was the high point, 7 wasn’t bad and 8/9 were skeuomorphic slow lipstick on the core OS pig. Gimme 6 with original iPod any day of the week.
- aj7 4y ago
  The low point was when someone at Apple had decided that dragging a document over a print icon to print the document was an important innovation. That’s about the time I switched to Windows for 18 years.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  I started with System 6, and after getting 7.0.1, would only begrudgingly go back to 6 for apbs that needed it.
  - adolph 4y ago
    IIsi was my first self-owned one so I largely started on 7. I discovered 6 from using a PB100 which could fit 6 and Word 4.5 in a RAMdisk persisted through restarts by the PB100's pseudostatic RAM. 6 for me at the time was the modern day equivalent of a distraction-free writing environment. Similar to using an iPad of a couple years ago in terms of how silent and instantly receptive it was to my inputs.

ok123456 4y ago

How do I send the command key (propeller)?

genewitch 4y ago
at the bottom of the non-fullscreen browser window there's a rectangle, hover over that, or if on touch, move your finger about 5 words to the right, there's a "settings" button hidden (at least on my monitor) that lets you swap ctrl and command. Doing that lets you press ctrl-I for info, or whatever.

davepeck 4y ago

In addition to being impressive technically, this is just plain fun. I downloaded a game my friends and I wrote way back in the day [1] and... it worked in my browser. Such a nice blast from the past. [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2851-infotron https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2851-infotron

erksa 4y ago

Sherlock, I've forgotten about this beautiful software and how it opened the internet for me.

papandada 4y ago

Not a Mac user. Figured this was a new announcement. Clicked and then remembered -- I was at a "System 7" launch as a youngster, 30+ years to get a couple version would be very, very slow.

genewitch 4y ago
when mac os X was announced they said "we're done with the versions! forever!" and it took them about 16 years to start incrementing the versions again. I get announcements from a discord server about mac OS checkpoint releases and they're over version 15 now, i think. edit to add: also when windows 10 came out microsoft was like "we're done with the versions! forever!" and then a couple years later "windows 11!"
- papandada 4y ago
  I wonder if any company is successfully keeping any of its "forever" promises. ("unlimited gmail storage") -- I guess Costco's hot dog price is still holding strong.

blastro 4y ago

Turns out I'm nostalgic for an operating system...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

chuckreynolds 4y ago

idk why but... cool. I had that Hellcats and Glider game... probably f-18 one too.

rcarmo 4y ago

This sort of UI elegance is why I keep around an XFCE container with the Platinum theme: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 I love using it when I need a break from GNOME.

etc-hosts 4y ago

how do I use this to play Dark Castle and Crystal Quest?

tren 4y ago
I went for dark castle first thing as well. Says you need to change the display to 2 colours for it to work, I couldn't figure out how to do it.
- genewitch 4y ago
  on the bottom left there's a thing that looks like the color bars from old TV stations, click that and pick your color depth. the one with the checkerboard pattern to the right is the resolution settings.

emrah 4y ago

No matter how good anything is, it has to be resigned every year/major version/etc because it is far more "fashion" based whether we like it or not. And fashion is all about creating novelty by changing stuff not for utility but for the sake of generating a different neural firing pattern in our brains so the item doesn't simply fade into oblivion even if it is designed and works perfectly

wildrhythms 4y ago
I am not unsurprised by the fact that Photoshop in this little browser emulated Mac OS 9 starts up faster than modern Photoshop on my decked out modern Macbook. What the hell happened?

mihaip 4y ago

I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission. This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work. If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7). The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.

stuaxo 4y ago
Fantastic work. Could this have implement dynamic screen resolutions, like Qemu/Virtualbox/Vmware guest extensions do when virtualising other operating systems ?
jxdxbx 4y ago
I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline or in some kind of encapsulated web app form?
- mihaip 4y ago
  macintosh.js (https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/) is an Electron packaged version of an earlier iteration of the BasiliskII Emscripten port.
- JonathonW 4y ago
  There's a professor at Columbia University that has good prebuilt SheepShaver packages with OS 9: Mac: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html Windows: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html There's not much in the way of third-party software included in these images, but it's a good starting point.

ubermonkey 4y ago

That's the version of Mac I started with, back around the turn of the century, on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook. I was in a job that was mostly analysis and presentation and writing, and Win95/98 on a laptop was just a NIGHTMARE of freezes and crashes and excruciatingly long boot times. I had a colleague, though, that was using a Mac (because his background was design), and while OS 9 definitely did crash, too, it was far less frequent -- and boot times were faster. Plus, sleep actually WORKED. Maybe 18 months later, that firm tanked, OS X came out, and I was keeping the lights on with freelance LAMP work using that same Mac as a dev environment. I'm on OS X to this day.

PeterCorless 4y ago

OMG. Original Warcraft was so terrible. But at the time, we thought it was SO COOL. Very simple "guns or butter" simulator. [Also runs slow like molasses in the emulator.]

gnicholas 4y ago

A tiny nit — this refers to showing the experience of using a Mac in the mid-90s, but the screen looks like it's the 15" display that Apple released in 2000. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and they had something like this in the 90s?

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
Mac OS X came out in 2001, so even though Mac OS 9 was mostly a 1990's experience, it did survive into the 2000s.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Oh sure, I remember running OS 9 on my Cube in 2000 before the OS X beta was available. My point was that the monitor frame shown is not consistent with the note in the stickies that indicates a mid-90s timeframe.
- genewitch 4y ago
  mac os x server came out in 1999.

zczc 4y ago

Apple logo on the bottom does not render on non-apple machines, because it is apple-specific PUA code-point U+F8FF. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use

mitchitized 4y ago

First thing I did was look for Shufflepuck Cafe and Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. Anybody else do the same?

calmconviction 4y ago

Does anyone know the address of a website that used to bring up a full blown VM in the browser as a background to whatever the main site was loading?

sfpotter 4y ago

Just FYI, anyone who wants to play any of the Marathon games, be advised that they have been available open source for a long while now: https://alephone.lhowon.org/ https://alephone.lhowon.org/

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Related discussion from only 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646 1038 points, 323 comments

TacticalCoder 4y ago

Oh the memories! I've spent countless hours on MacOS 8 and then 9 IIRC, running QuarkXPress to do professional desktop publishing. Mostly on a beige Powermac G3 tower. I still have that computer somewhere in a garage, don't know if it still boots and still has my software of yore installed. Our physical tools of the trade were Iomega Zip drives and Iomega Zip disks (100 MB then 250 MB IIRC), Apple II Extended keyboard (the M3501, with ALPS switches: incredible keyboards for the time), HP LaserJet printers (600 and then 1200 dpi) and Sony Trinitron CRTs.

GoofballJones 4y ago

Now you just need QuarkXpress loaded on it and use a weird 3rd party font manager to load the customers weird fonts....and then have it simulate crashing every 5 minutes or so. Would really bring back that OS 9 feeling.

scelerat 4y ago

I was stoked to see Apeiron in the Games folder. One of the best Centipede clones ever. Too bad it doesn't work -- hope that's a temporary thing.

genewitch 4y ago
it's missing inputsprokets, which i spent about 2 minutes looking for in other folders before the system crashed...

scroot 4y ago

Would really appreciate if someone could get SK8 running in one of these environments!

jejones3141 4y ago

I've never owned a Mac, but I remember Mac OS 9 because some of its users would post their questions on comp.os.os9.

damontal 4y ago

I want to zap the pram and fire up Myst.

fdr 4y ago

Nice to see Escape Velocity in there. It's a shame that its distribution is endangered ever since Ambrosia closed up, without selling or releasing the source and rights.

1letterunixname 4y ago

I'm installing 9.2.2, Internet Explorer 5.1.7, and Netscape 7.0.2, so I'll backup to your AFP server over AppleTalk. Cool? Ah, the old days of watching extensions load and single-tasking. EDIT: Stable Google Chrome on a M1 MAX with a bazillion other tabs open is ~7-78x faster than real hardware. Chrome beats Safari beats Firefox.

vishnuharidas 4y ago

Open Photoshop, press Ctrl+Alt+"About Photoshop" for an easter egg.

glitchc 4y ago

Is it slow for a reason or to mimic real-life performance in its heyday?

deluarseo 4y ago

jwr 4y ago

A desktop where windows remember their positions… so refreshing in today's world, where every window and app has total amnesia and launches in random places.

SentientAtom 4y ago

Spent a lot of time restoring candy imacs in p.o.s. applications with OS 9, was always fun getting the PostScript dependencies loaded for Laser-Writers; periphery like plate-makers and Design-Jets, and getting them to see network shares. OS 8, and 9 were both lean as fuck and full of utilities. Back when distros were stable and code was efficient.