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Comment by mihaip | Hacker News Reader

I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission.

This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work.

If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7).

The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.

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I'm a little disappointed that "Just Grandma and Me" isn't a first person shooter but other than that, great work!

Hi, it's a great project, although I found out that some 68k and PPC software seems to have required things that aren't emulated by either BasiliskII nor Sheepshaver, or at least so it looked when I was playing with it - tried running Macintosh Common Lisp and it always seemed to crash.

Still, reminds me of plying with vMac long ago and this weird world of, to our perception then, barely usable machines ;)

Awesome, this is so cool! I remember MacOS 9 with a mix of fondness, hatred, and nostaglia. OS X was definitely a big improvement when it came out (I remember OS 9 having so many crashes), but some of the charm was definitely lost.

And these .app domain names you're all using in this space are great and totally apt. I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like this.

OS9 always seemed like little improvement over OS8. The biggest thing I remember was this was when they introduced the Applications folder. It's like they were trying to get you to get used to how the structure in OS X was going to be, but with no explanation.

OS9 was really just 8.7 but, as you describe, a stepping stone towards 10, both numerically and with a few nods to the future, e.g. Keychain Access, CarbonLib, and file/printer sharing over TCP.

Carbon worked all the way back with Mac OS 8.1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

Correct, but it wasn't shipped with the OS until MacOS 9.

Carbon was a moving target; each "update" cut more core MacOS tools and added OSX service interfaces. It was quickly obvious that there was no intention of letting MacOS run in the future, so why port to Carbon? many social signals in the developer group at the same time.

Yeah, so looking back at the release dates of these, I definitely used at least back through OS 7, but I can't say I remember anything specifically about them because it's fading into the haze of youthful memories. In my mind it's all just pre-OS X and post-OS X, as that marks by far the biggest change in Mac OS functionality that I remember.

> I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like this.

Out of curiosity and ignorance--what is the work you're referring to here which is being used for the project / website? The comment makes me feel it's the (dot)app TLD, in which case--fascinating! But also what does it even mean to work on something like that?

I believe GP is the lead engineer of Google Registry. .app is owned and run by Google.

Indeed that is correct. For more information see:

https://registry.google

https://nomulus.foo (our open source software that runs our TLDs)

I love that this exists. Time to time I crave playing some of my childhood games that are OS9 based and setting up sheepshaver is a pain. This will help me to get my kicks playing some old games for the few minutes I intend to play them :) thanks!

I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline or in some kind of encapsulated web app form?

macintosh.js (https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/) is an Electron packaged version of an earlier iteration of the BasiliskII Emscripten port.

There's a professor at Columbia University that has good prebuilt SheepShaver packages with OS 9:

Mac: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html Windows: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html

There's not much in the way of third-party software included in these images, but it's a good starting point.

I'll testify to this software, I use it on my i9 Catalina Mac and it works great.

If you have experience with QEMU now there is good support for MacOS 8/9/X in ppc and there is an alpha version with initial support for System 7/8/A/UX on 68k. It's still a PITA but at least it's similar to the PITA of other QEMU VMs, which you may be familiar with.

This is really great. I can't seem to get sound working on Firefox, though.

so cool, thanks for making this! Love that you have escape velocity!

I immediately checked for EV and was stoked to see it!! I haven’t played that game in decades…so many good memories. SOL?

Fantastic work.

Could this have implement dynamic screen resolutions, like Qemu/Virtualbox/Vmware guest extensions do when virtualising other operating systems ?

Having worked with it extensively, how would you say the performance of SheepShaver compiled to WASM compares to a natively compiled VM binary?

Is there a way to browse the Web somehow?

wine em, dine em, OS 9 em!

Doesn't load on my mobile firefox and it tries to hijack browsing history (have to fight with it hitting the back button to get back to HN).

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