How to run old Mac OS & apps

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Level 1

10 points

How to run old Mac OS & apps

Hi,
Recently, a co-worker showed me that he is able to run really old Windows versions inside a window on his XP desktop. He called a virtual machine. I am not Windows user, but this is one feature that seems to be very cool. Question, is this capability available for OSX? I still have my original system disks, Apple and Claris app disks from my high school SE, the SE died long ago but I would love to run those again for their beautiful simplicity.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Will

PowerPC PowerMac G5, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Jun 27, 2008 11:02 AM

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Answer 1

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Jan Hedlund

Level 7

22,201 points

Jun 27, 2008 12:14 PM in response to william Mak1

Will,

Could this web page possibly be of interest to you?

Jan

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Answer 2

Jan Hedlund

Level 7

22,201 points

Jun 27, 2008 12:49 PM in response to Jan Hedlund

Addendum

Licence restrictions may prevent you from doing what you have in mind, at least if you do not own a computer of the exact model to be emulated. Carefully check all licence regulations.

It might be much easier (and better) to actually buy an old Macintosh computer, and run the software there instead. Such a machine is not expensive. Free operating systems are available for download from Apple.

Jan

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Answer 3

Jul 30, 2008 10:51 AM in response to william Mak1

While you wouldn't be able to run a virtual machine to do this you could use an emulator. Essentially a virtual machine makes use of the hardware in a machine, the emulator is required to emulate different hardware.

Depending on what version of the OS you wanted to run and which hardware you wanted to emulate, you could use SheepShaver (PPC emulation, system 8-9) or Basilisk II (68k emulation like your SE, system 7 and below). Updated versions of both of these for OS X are available at http://www.emaculation.com/forum/

The caveat of these emulators is that you need access to a Mac ROM file. To legitimately have a ROM you need to own the physical machine/ROM that the ROM image is pulled from (there's utilities to copy the ROM available). SheepShaver can use the ROM file from the System Install disks I believe.

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Answer 4

Jul 30, 2008 4:10 PM in response to william Mak1

Will-

I presume you know you can run "Classic", an OS 9 emulation that runs under Mac OS X (until 10.5, where they dropped support for it, and on Intel Macs, where they never supported it). If any of this is news to you, please post back and folks will explain how to get "Classic" going on your PowerPC Macs running up through 10.4.11.

Many (but not all) older Mac Applications will run under Mac OS 9 emulation. The "sticking point" in really old stuff is that it is sometimes not "32-bit clean", which means it flips out when you attempt to run with the OS 9 memory organization.

AppleWorks version 6 is no longer available new, but can be found used. It installs as an OS 9 AND Mac OS X executable. It has not become all "featured up" like so many others.

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