Hacker News Reader

Comment by mihaip | Hacker News Reader

Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html

There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/

View on HN

In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car.

It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around.

Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulations repeatedly, with little understanding of the science but very much enjoying the ragdoll physics of it.

MATLAB or something from MathWorks?

I remember two programs like that, one that my middle school had called "Fun Physics," and one my high school had called "Conceptual Physics." The interfaces were exactly the same, and it wouldn't surprise me if Conceptual Physics was a rebundled version sold along with Paul Hewitt's course. Unfortunately, those names are so generic that I can't find them on Google.

You could author workspaces in Working Model and I dimly remember Fun Physics was built using WM.

Old software can frequently be found on archive.org—with much more focused selection than ‘the whole web’.

Oh wow, I remember this for sure. What a throw back. What was it called?

Working Model, by Knowledge Revolution. I used to work there, and my first project was making the jump from 2D to 3D.

Any stories / surprising bits from working there?

This is why I love this orange site.

Logged in users can change that color. For me it’s green.

You’re missing out

Green is best, although that orange bar reminds me of Hercules monitors.

I was going to say Interactive Physics but I think that came prior to that, by the same people

Oh man, there’s a 3D version? I has endless fun playing with the 2D one in the uni computer lab.

https://www.design-simulation.com/wm2d/

I caught this the last time it came around HN. Thanks for making this. Browser accessibility of these classic systems and the painstaking work you undertook to integrate all of the third party software is really important for preserving the experience we had growing up with these machines.

My son regularly asks me to play Lemmings now because of this app :)

I poked around a few weeks ago and ran into a variety of errors when I dug into the more hardware-specific bits.

So I was shocked when I could use the Disk Copy utility to image Macintosh HD right into the Uploads folder & onto my (real) desktop.

"It Just Works" in the best Mac sense. Amazing job.

HOLY SHIT! You have a working ver of Bryce KPT! from 1994!

Jeasus - that brings back so many shitty 3D city scapes I made back then/

Can you get Aldus Pagemaker (5.0 preferably, /r/beggingchoosers, and all that) running on this please.

I haven't tried this myself, but you should be able to download and install it from https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aldus-pagemaker-50 (drag the .sit on the emulator, and it'll be copied to the "Downloads" folder). You can then use StuffIt Expander to unstuff the .sit and Disk Copy to mount the install images (both are in the "Utilities" folder)

Incidentally, Apple reseller resource CDs[1] also contained fully functional copies of PageMaker, licensed only for customizing Apple marketing materials, along with the assets (product photography, custom Apple internal-use fonts) required to do so.

Creating period-correct marketing materials for projects like this emulator could be a fun art project.

[1] https://archive.org/search.php?query=arple

Welp, I can sorta get it there -- but I cant figure out how to install it after mounting:

https://i.imgur.com/WRNDdjB.png

https://i.imgur.com/Pedlilm.png

---

Whats really interesting to me about this, was that just ~last week or so, I was wondering what ever happened to Kai (Kai's Power Tools - Kai was the inventor of it and it was a revolutionary glimpse into the future of what 3D worlds were going to be put into the hands of the masses via PCs.)

Once you have the disk mounted in your second screenshot, drag (all?) the 1.image files onto the Disk Copy window to mount each individual floppy, and inside "1" is a Utilities folder with a How to Install and a Aldus Installer/Utility app.

Holy hell. Thank you for that website. When I was a kid I downloaded a game called “Foodfight” from the Internet cafe. However, when I got the floppy home, I attempted to run it on my dad’s Mac but it would not launch. For the last 25 years I’ve periodically wondered about that game, if it was any good or not, and why it didn’t launch (first mystery solved, it’s written in HyperCard!). I can’t wait to tell my dad.

BitLowskii! REPORTE!

Is there a way to use appletalk on a LAN? I would love to get a game of multiplayer bolo going in my office.

BOLO WAS THE BEST!

Maze Wars and Spectre VR were pretty fun on AppleTalk too.

Ah, giant 3d polygons. They just don't make games like they used to!

There is! netatalk on linux is the package you need for that, and it's still built in to BSD, I believe. now weather that package still speaks the older versions of the protocol, who can say. Interestingly, a challenge you would have with this because this emulator is web based, your networking options would be fairly limited, even if you could emulate netatalk, the browser's security features would preclude you accessing hosts than the server it's on, it's the same reason Fabrice Bellard didn't add networking to his jslinux project.

netatalk provides macintosh fileshare hosting services on unix/linux. It has nothing to do with this use case.

Since you can't listen for incoming connections from a browser, most likely no.

Coincidentally, Bolo networking was originally designed for serial networks like LocalTalk. The same network logic was used when UDP support was added. So there are assumptions made about learning of another player's network address from an third player, and is the reason why ubiquitous NAT broke Bolo internet gaming.

But if you have an old Mac around, you can play internet Bolo games using a Bolo packet re-writing proxy I wrote. We schedule games occasionally over at 68kMLA.

Something involving a web server, a websocket (ws) server acting as a switch or repeater, a emulator specific websocket client to act as a network adaptor. Each emulator would then send packets via websocket to the ws server which would then send to the other connected ws clients. All the ws would be abstracted behind the emulated network adapter.

That would give you enough to let a bunch of Bolo addicts go to the same site and play multiplayer. It would also let them share files amongst those emulators.

But that wouldn't necessarily let any of them talk to an appletalk server near the server, eg on its real lan. For that you'd need a tuntap thing acting as a bridge or router.

That said, you probably wouldn't require that appletalk/netatalk server. As long as one emulator holds the maps or files etc you could use that as a file server. No tuntap required.

Hmmm...

As someone who was involved in the creation of Infini-D back in the day, I can only say that this brought a smile to my face and that I've shared it with the whole original team. Thank you! Thank you!

Hey there! I opened Resedit and began deleting things in the System suitcase. Jammed the emulator up pretty good! Reloaded the page and it rebooted. Great work!

I would love it if you could include the game lunatic fringe in this.

Lunatic Fringe was part of After Dark, which is in the Control Panels & Extensions folder. If you drag that to the "Control Panels" folder in the System Folder and restart, it'll be enabled, and you can choose it.

There's an open source web version I worked on at GitHub if you want to play an in-dev version that works on modern computers.

https://github.com/jackinloadup/lunatic-fringe

Click to play: https://jackinloadup.github.io/lunatic-fringe/

Very impressive. A fantastic next step would be to emulate a NeXT so you can run WorldWideWeb, Tim Berners-Lee's original browser+editor. A bit like https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/ but including the whole NeXTSTEP system around it, allowing for looking at source code, editing pages, etc.

What a great tool that would be for educating how the original Web was built.

Just as a heads up -

I went to go create a new project in Think Pascal, and when I tried to enter a name all my keystrokes came out as boxes.

Using Chrome 100 on macOS Big Sur. English (Canadian) key layout.

This seems to work OK for me. Any chance a modifier is stuck down (try pressing command, option and shift to reset their state). If this still happens, can you file a bug at https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/new?

Any chance you can add Meat Gone Bad? https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6032-meat-gone-bad

Can I update the System 7.5.3 machine to A/UX?

A/UX is very picky about hardware. You can run it in the Shoebill emulator

Minor nitpicking: For some reason, the scroll thumbs (and their ghosts) do not work (visually). Otherwise, great work!

Thank you for the magnificent trip down memory lane!

Really awesome work!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com