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Comment by ygjb | Hacker News Reader

Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox.

Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from today that stop working due to remote service dependencies to force vendor lock-in.

It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly integrated the cloud services get to conventional computing tasks, the more likely we will end up with Vernor Vinge style programmer archaeologists from A Deepness in the Sky...

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When I worked for a NASA contractor doing sounding rocket telemetry, the main telemetry stack programming software was a Turbo C program from 1987-1990 (TDP502.exe on the odd chance that the maybe 50 other people on the planet who have ever used it sees this). Works just fine in DOSBox, at least to create files. Still needed an actual older PC with an ISA slot to handle the hardware that TDP knew how to control. But for configuration tasks, Windows + DOSBox + a USB 3.5" floppy drive = I could do things on an actual modern system.

So yeah, you're right, emulation saves the day in many cases. And I felt like a programmer-archaeologist using DOS to launch something into space in the 2010s...

I cant upvote this enough. The Vernor really captured this. As a programmer you can clearly see this happening right now.

I shudder to think of the massive house of cards we will have in 50 years.

Can you imagine how massive the field of software archeology will actually need to be to capture an understanding of the human experience of software development in the “distant past”.

Take any given product or system. what percentage of the software involved in implementing the system was written x years in the past. What’s gonna happen to that distribution in 10 or 100 years?

I wonder how inevitable it is that this percentage of ancient software in virtually every system will just keep growing and growing over time — until the systems of the future are tiny layers built on top of 1000 year old, impenetrable old growth forests which as well have been written by aliens for their understandability ...

So if emulation or a VM is your go to. How is that any different than what yuh can do with older versions of MacOS?

Virtualizating Windows isn't very hard, even back to something like Windows 95.

On the other hand, only OSX 10.7+ are really easy to run in a VM, and .5 and .6 only work for servers, and anything before 10.5 isn't really going to be compatible with virtualization. That's 2007, so OSX lets you virtualize back about 13 years, and Windows you can go back almost 30 years. People even have Win 3.1 running in VMware.

This is probably due to the fact that there isn't powerpc virtualization software, but if you need to run osx software from before 2007, you're basically out of luck.

You can also virtualize windows from just about any OS you can imagine, Mac, Linux, Windows etc, while OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac hardware.

A quick Google search for running PPC Mac software under emulation.

https://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml#pow...

For the most part yes. If you want to run Mac software you need to own Mac.

As far as going back 30 years. Now you’re in the Classic Mac era. There are plenty of cross platform emulators that run Mac software that old.

If you want to go back 40 years. Apple // emulators are a dime a dozen.

> There are plenty of cross platform emulators that run Mac software that old.

What, Basilisk II and Sheep Shaver? PCE and Mini vMac if you want a Mac Plus. For a large array of apps only one of these options will actually work.

That's fair, but this was about virtualization not emulation. Similar but different, but that's certainly a solution too.

If the current version of OS X was backwards compatible with 10.0 - 10.4. It would still need both a PPC emulator and a 68K emulator since iOS 9 still had 68K code.

Thanks for the flashback! I remember when PearPC was announced!

I’d been wanting a Mac for several years, but had little understanding of how it worked. PearPC let me try it out and a get a glimpse of Mac OS X.

>OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac hardware.

If you aren't a stickler for Apple's terms of service (if you're doing this for business purposes, I suggest you should be), you can use a tool called macOS unlocker to patch VMWare Workstation to run macOS VMs. Runs great, though all VMWare products can only render display output for macOS in software mode.

Run a shady binary that seems to not have a certain author/website, as administrator, so it modifies VMWare binaries? A rather... curious approach, but for some reason common in Windows among e.g. gamers.

I've ran MacOS in VirtualBox iirc, without shady patches―though it probably was in Linux.

I have literally never heard of a "gamer" running shady binaries with administrator privilege in my entire life. Maybe you're thinking of the hacker culture of the 80s, but gamers today use launchers to manage downloading, installation and setup of software. Maybe you're thinking of software pirates using scene software as keygens or DRM-defeaters. I suppose that's common among kids who don't buy things (but I don't believe those tools run as admin).

It may be more common in Windows, but I would challenge that since Windows is basically free and runs on anything from a raspberry pi up, the vast majority of "hacky" stuff happens in Windows and Linux. Mac users buy very, very expensive hardware to do very specific tasks, and "hack around" is often not a good enough justification for the most expensive personal computers money buys.

I would also suggest that it in the Linux world where running random binaries as root is most common. Found some random repo that claims it's a fork of a good one with a bug fix? Build it and run it!

10.4 x86, the origins of Hackintosh, will be the first version that's actually practical to virtualise.

Pearpc can run MacOS X 10.1.

You act as if no x86 OS X software that was written before 10.7 will run on 10.7.

There seems to be a misconception that you can only run 10.5 and later in a VM, but you can actually run OSX 10.4 Tiger fairly easily. This is the non server version. [1]

I was able to import almost everything from my old PPC computers. It's not completely virtualized because is using Rosetta and can not use Classic OS apps. But it is still extremely useful, and way faster than my PPC computers ever were.

[1]: https://github.com/ranma42/TigerOnVBox

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