Ports of Basilisk II are available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and a number of lesser known systems. With Basilisk II, one can boot Mac OS versions 7.x through 8.1. Basilisk II is an open source emulator of 68xxx-based Macintosh computers for Windows, OS X and Linux.
![]() 9 Emulator Linux Mac OS Versions 7They share the same developers, the same configuration program, and even the same source code repository. SheepShaver and Basilisk IISheepShaver and Basilisk II are two very related Macintosh emulators. I'm writing this because the state of Macintosh emulation needs serious improvement, preferably before every working classic Mac dies out. Writing an emulator is a laborious, thankless job, and I'm not writing this to be mean. It should also be noted that I haven't talked with any of the developers of these emulators, and I mean no disrespect when writing any of these criticisms. ![]() Software compatibility is far from perfect, although it's often "good enough" for most use. The Windows version refuses to start with no error message unless you've installed both SDL 1.2 and GTK 2, both very painfully obsolete libraries. Nice? I guess?It's far from perfect, though. The newest build of SheepShaver is from 2015, explicitly for testing. The most popular build of Basilisk II dates back to 2010, and this is still the only version listed for Linux platforms. Literally years can pass between releases, and there's no synchronization between builds for Windows, Linux, or macOS. Builds are added to the OP whenever some forum user just decides to recompile the software. Let me just try to explain how new versions of Basilisk II and SheepShaver are released.The official place to download Basilisk II/SheepShaver is a random forum thread on the Emaculation message board. But fine, this is a work in progress. ![]() It could definitely use some more developers, some unit tests, better ways of managing disk images, but it's fine.PearPC is another Power Macintosh-era emulator. The code is perfectly readable, everything is nice and separated, it's fine. It would take almost no effort for them to use this to compile and publish up-to-date builds, or to at least use the GitHub releases page to host the official builds instead of a random forum thread on an unrelated website.Honestly, if they just made those simple tweaks to how they build and distribute the emulator, I'd have a lot less complaints about Basilisk II and SheepShaver. They're already using Continuous Integration to check the correctness of the code, at least on Linux. Right here! It's actively somewhat actively worked on, too. Android root emulator macThe most recent releases were in 2011 and in 2005. That's fine.Well, actually, there might be a reason for that. It's strange that 10.5, the last PowerPC version of Mac OS X, doesn't work, but sure. Adobe cc photoshop osx high sierra invisible new documentIt hasn't been in active development since 2005, and development only started around 2004. Most implemented hardware are just stubs at this point, just enough to get the system bootable.This emulator is very incomplete. CPU emulation is pretty slow, between 15x to 500x slower than the host computer. It does not support sound. It's a multi-system emulator, but it emulates some early Macintoshes, up to the Macintosh SE and the Macintosh Classic. PCEThis one is interesting. And yet, somehow, it's still constantly placed in lists of Macintosh emulators as if it's still relevant. It's really nothing more than a historical curiosity right now. It took me some difficulty to figure out how to turn the thing off, and I'm still not really sure how to give it a disk image.It's aggravating that all the the emulators I consider "fine" are infrequently or never updated. On the other hand, launching the emulator opened up a terminal window, then the emulator, which just swallowed my mouse and keyboard inputs. On the one hand, it bundles in a ROM and a disk image of a pre-installed System 7.0.1, so that saves you some trouble. That said, no official build has came out since 2017, and the newest version you can download and use out of the box is from 2013.At least for the Windows build, the user experience isn't great. It works very well in that role, and from the few titles I've tried, they all work fine. It is rather user-hostile unless you're really into reading man pages and fiddling with command-line parameters. It has experimental support for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. I think it's often used for cross-platform ARM development, for instance. QEMUQEMU is a very popular multi-system emulator that emulates pretty much everything. Mini vMacThis is the one I have the most beef with. It's also where I took the image from, since unlike the others there were no images on QEMU's website I could steal. Here's a blog post on someone emulating Mac OS 9 in QEMU. SheepShaver might still be better for now though. Definitely use this over PearPC. But it is a good, functional emulator. It has a nice error window telling you if you're missing a ROM or if a disk image is invalid. (I guess, technically, this emulator could compile itself.) It's been ported to many, many, many systems, some strange and esoteric like the DS and even the classic Mac itself. It comes as a single binary file, with no DLLs required on Windows. I'll start by listing what I like about it. Or I want to set my display resolution to 640x480, or 800x600. Let's say I'm emulating a Mac II, which has an external monitor, and I want to set the color depth to 256 or 16 colors. Let's start with something simple: changing the settings. Isn't that all you need?This is where I start peeling back the layers. It does its job perfectly fine. It has a nice website with lots and lots and lots of documentationSo why am I complaining? It's a good emulator. The number of disk drives the system emulates (it's 6 by default) Whether the "magnify" option in the Control Mode magnifies by 2x, 3x, or 4x Here's some other things you can't change: Whether emulation occurs when mini vMac is not the active window (you can set this in the Control Mode, but it doesn't persist.
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