This is taking Basilisk II (which is already a native app that runs on all major platforms!) and recompiling it into javascript, so that it can be run less efficiently and more bloatedly in Electron. Can we please stop doing this to ourselves?
Last time I used Basilisk II to set up a Mac 8 VM there was considerably more work involved to get it working. With this I'm deep in nostalgia in just a few clicks.
This is purely awesome.
But transpiling it to JS and then wrapping in electron... just seems like some weird masochistic exercise in how to make things worse for no benefit.
then again:
> Should this have been a native app? Absolutely.
Maybe the author was fully aware of that, but this makes me wonder what their motivations were.
Shits and giggles, possibly. There's something deliciously ironic and outright hilarious when totally mismatched platforms from different time periods are mashed together like this, and it still works somehow.
Macintosh.js is one download and ships with a handful of interesting productivity tools and games. Why Basilisk II cannot do the same (one is as legal as the other) is an open question.
I'm a bit of an emulator hobbyist and have played with the native version of Basilisk II. If you weren't an outsider and part of the communities on reddit/discord you'd know the torrents trackers to use (public and private). Sure, there are shady sites, but that's not the emulators fault. And the fix is definitely not killing the good performance of a native emu by transpiling it to JS. Improved documentation could help send new users down a better path.
legit roms sign up at pleasuredome
A previous employer was once sent a C&D by the lawyers of a well-known British corporation, demanding that my employer stop distributing a certain app, apparently oblivious that said corporation had paid my employer to make and distribute that app on their behalf in the first place.
Left hand, meet right hand.
Back in the late 90's/early 00's we had it more difficult to finish a lot of emulation tasks because you couldn't get these with ease.
Now you can set System 7.5.3 with ease and legally except the ROM.
I think the Gen-Z generation it's pretty much spoiled and this should be changed.
Back then we thought it was funny, but these days that just seems to be how software works.
[0] Hey guys, remember Bochs? https://bochs.sourceforge.io/
Edit: interestingly, it looks like he also has a Windows95 emulator in Electron.
The hardware manufacturers probably like this "artificial inflation of requirements"...
If someone knows of an emulator that would run under early 90's DOS, then you could get to 7.
See my Tweet [1] with a screenshot.
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1: https://twitter.com/travisbhartwell/status/13582883829131796...
The "hard part" of making it run in a browser engine is already done. WASM is supported across all browsers with good performance. There is absolutely no advantage of running it in Electron, and it's harder for the user to install (since Windows SmartScreen will most likely block the installation, and the macOS version is distributed as a zip file.
Same DMCA implications.
This accomplishes it's goal and an interesting/unique way to learn about many different technologies and how they can link together. That it brought someone joy is not a good reason to deride our field.
The "browser emulators" might be able to be made to work with iPad Safari.
On a more serious note - something went terribly wrong if we consider it a good idea to keep wrapping (slow) abstractions and wrappers around things which work perfectly fine.