What CD-ROM drives are compatible with iMac 2019?

Lisafisher110 wrote:

How would I figure that [You may want to confirm that these CDs are compatible with your Mac] out?

Short answer:

The apps are not compatible.

Long answer:

This won’t be a case of connecting the CD drive, and simply running the apps. Far from it.

Three-part answer, software, and hardware, and licensing.

Software: Apps from Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9 and written for either Motorola 68k or PowerPC processors are not compatible with macOS 14 or macOS 15 on Intel, nor with macOS on Apple silicon.

That’s twenty-some versions of macOS (formerly OS X) back, then one or two major versions of the earlier Mac OS further back, and one or maybe two processor architectures back (PowerPC, maybe 68k) depending on the app.

Which means emulation.

Hardware: You’ll then have to get the contents of the CDs either configured and directly accessible from the emulator, or transferred into macOS where the emulator can access it without the CD drive access. And I don’t know if the emulator can access the CD media contents directly, or whether there’s a way to offload the contents into the emulator.

Licensing: You’ll need to satisfy whatever licensing and/or copy protection may have been used by the app vendor, either in the app itself, or in how the CD was created, or both. Details here vary. Widely.

The path forward:

Install, configure, and troubleshoot emulation.

Here’s an older article on exploring this from macOS 10.15:

https://blog.alexseifert.com/2020/06/09/emulating-mac-os-9-on-macos-10-15/

The link to the pre-built emulation environment is now here:

https://mendelson.org/macos9osx.html

Here is an overview of Mac PowerPC and 68k emulation, including the two emulators used in the above package:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS#Emulation

Then get the app, its dependencies, emulation, and licensing working. And emulation of an app, its dependencies, the operating system, the old hardware, and whatever weird licensing got used, is a complex undertaking, and won’t necessarily work reliably. Or might not work at all.

A shorter path?

Again, if they have the books of interest, and if the newer app itself works, Wanderful Storybooks and an Apple silicon iMac is likely to involve acquiring rather less technical savvy, and less troubleshooting.

PS: The migration from Intel processors to Apple silicon processors started in 2020, so that iMac 2019 Intel isn’t all that long for current-version macOS support, either. That iMac 2019 is the oldest with current-version macOS support too, and thus likely the next to drop off current support. The previous iMac 2017 models dropped off current-version support a couple of macOS versions ago.