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Infinite Mac: Infinitemac.org

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267 pointsmariuz53 comments

> Using a new Emscripten port of Mini vMac

Last I heard, the author of Mini vMac, Paul C. Pratt, is missing. Not missing in the police sense, but in that no one has been able to contact him nor find evidence of a continued online presence in the last couple years. If you know anything, please post.

https://eggfreckles.net/notes/paul-c-pratt-is-missing

https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11570

Went down a rabbit hole after reading your comment - clearly a lot of the people in this community (that I also just learned about) care about him very much. Hope he turns up.

I did notice that his site was renewed on 2022-06-09 16:56:27 UTC, although from a comment on Emaculation it appears that this is exactly one year to the day that it was last renewed, meaning it was probably done automatically.

Hoping Paul's okay, but disappearing is something I can relate to heavily, after the passing of a close relative, my emotional and mental health became very turbulent so I simply disappeared by uninstalling all my social media, never picking up calls, stopped working on my OSS projects, not replying to anyone, just because I couldn't handle it. I came back in due course after working on myself but a lot of people also attempted to find out if I was alive and it did give me a lot of anxiety that I couldn't handle at that stage, I believe the people on the forums have done their due diligence and after that, unless there's some actual information we must keep in mind we may do more harm than good even though intentions are pure. Just a thought.

Very well said about doing more harm than good. Yes this "well intentioned " behavior can be a form of unintentional harassment, that is still harassment. It's like when you have a controlling partner that keeps tabs on you because he/she is insecure and worried about you all the time. No matter what the intention, it's still controlling behavior and it's unacceptable.

The Internet has become a social surveillance panopticon. The author of that web page should stay out of that guy's private life. What's wrong about not having an online presence? My God how far the surveillance society has come. One more reason to stay anonymous online with everything you do, let alone someone be "concerned" about you... The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Oh wow, before this I haven't used old System versions than 6.0.8 or so and it's just super amazing how ready and well thought even the System 1.0 feels usability-wise! Compare to any Windows before Windows 95, which finally caught on enough of the System/Mac OS classic desktop metaphor and made things feel not too clunky.

I've probably said it before and I say it once again: the old Mac OS windowing and spatial Finder feels even today better and more usable than any of the current DEs, macOS included. They managed to cram bunch of windows and widgets in the paltry 512x384 resolution when nowadays we manage to have max 2 windows in one screen or one window per display. (and yes, there are tiling WMs etc but that's a different story...)

On my personal mac there’s a couple of folders that I only ever use in a specific workflow that I have spatial mode flipped on for. It’s nice to know that a folder’s window will always open at a specific on-screen location with a specific size every time… might sound silly but the removed friction is significant.

Mac's are nice. As for Windows the best version IMO was NT 3.5.1 which is a different flavor beast than Mac/Win95 but did it's job exceedingly well, with the one exception of the nested MDI (multiple-document-interface) windows like in Program Manager. Fortunately I rarely opened more than one document per app.

I remember going to a computer store and watching somebody demo System 1.0. But by the time my dad brought home a Mac 128 for the family they were already on System 1.1. So that was my first Mac OS version.

Playing with 8.x/9.x in these VMs makes me wish that modern OS light mode themes would go back to using light mid-grays instead of stark whites. The color choices in Platinum are so much more usable… it doesn't make me feel the need to flip on dark mode immediately.

Conversely I also think dark modes shouldn't be plain black; it should be a dark shade of gray.

Except on OLED displays (or whatever Macs have), where black looks extremely nice.

I like black blacks on OLED screens but otherwise agree with you

Not only that but they’ll add longevity to the monitor by avoiding burn in

Not sure what you mean, current macOS uses light gray for UX backgrounds, no stark white at all.

Except for content areas like your document or the Finder content, but those have always been 100% white.

Or are you talking about a different OS?

Current macOS light mode isn’t technically white, but it’s a lot closer than platinum was. iOS is even brighter, as is Win10/11.

Older OSes and apps used gray backgrounds to mitigate the visible flicker due to low refresh rates.

On a modern display, if a white background bothers your eyes, it often means that the brightness is turned up too high. After all, hardly anyone is bothered by black ink on white paper.

Try holding up a white sheet of paper next to your screen and turn down the brightness until the display matches the paper. You may find it more usable.

I do turn down brightness to an extent, but the problem with the most commonly used backlit LCD panels is that turning down brightness also reduces contrast and color vibrance. This is why I typically use dark mode with a higher-but-not-maxxed brightness.

This doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a problem on my phone, which uses an OLED panel. Color and contrast are retained to a much greater degree at low brightness, which makes lower brightness more practical to use. I'd still like a light-mid-gray light mode option for iOS/Android regardless.

Once you throw HDR displays in the mix, you end up back at the conclusion that the colors chosen by the OS need to be reasonably not-bright, rather than blaming the user for not dimming the whole display to compensate for bad UI design.

The colors don't look like they used to because modern displays are much brighter and higher contrast. (and are 2.2 gamma not 1.8)

Good times and brings back a lot of memories! My favorite hack (right after upgrading my Mac Plus to 4MB of RAM) was using SteppingOut! to create a large virtual screen to improve scrolling in Sim City (basically by eliminating scrolling in game and using SteppingOut! instead to virtually pan around). The amount of hours I spent playing Sim City - yowza!

This inspired me to dig into a box I haven't yet unpacked after a recent move and I have MacUsers from 87-91, a few MacWorlds and some other misc late 80's/early 90's computer mags. Should be some fun going through them again. Looking back at the advertisements are hilarious - also looking forward to re-reading some of Dvorak's columns again. He sure served his purpose well - I would often turn to the back page first when I got a new Mac User - looking forward to getting incensed at his hot takes. Ha!

> right after upgrading my Mac Plus to 4MB of RAM

Sure, lord it over the rest of us plebs

Large numbers of those kind of mags can be found on the internet archive.

Direct link to the goods:

https://infinitemac.org/

> Using a new Emscripten port of Mini vMac, it is now able to run almost every notable version of Mac OS, from 1984’s System 1.0 to 2000’s Mac OS 9.0.4.

This is a very impressive effort. It is mind blowing that the computers and game consoles of my childhood are available online via efforts like this.

I used the original vMac! I had a Mac SE that I tried to pull the rom from. I ended up having to find a rom from "the internet". It was the holy grail at that point in my life. I had the demo version of Excecutor (from ARDI - a clean room reimplementation of the Mac ROM/OS). A year or so later, I had Shapeshifter running INSIDE WinUAE (the Amiga Emulator) I was able to procure a ROM from a Macintosh Quadra. Man.... such good old days!

Also: no full emulator needed with the ROM and the disk image. m68k translator on the fly.

https://github.com/autc04/executor

>Executor

Wow, now there's a name I haven't heard in a very long long time. I must have missed when they opened the code. Nice! I remember back in the day when I was first learning about 68k emulation and Basilisk II was the one everyone I knew used despite Fusion PC and SoftMac (with prerequisite rom card) was also popular. There was always something amazing about Executor's vision to make a complete solution which required no rom file. I wasn't sure if they'd ever get there but I was enthralled that someone was actively pursuing such a path.

There's an interesting project along those lines here:

https://mace.software/

Sadly, the source isn't available (yet?), but there are some demo executables available.

First impression: "oh god, I'm old"

Second impression: "I should dig out the SE30 and let the kid have a go at it"

Third impression: "I'm probably being emulated too."

emulated!? The simulation is the actual you.

When the Zen master said you were one with everything, he was referring to memory address space.

Then why is it randomized? Oh yeah...

Chuck Yeager Air Combat, the Marathons and that paper dark game.

So many good times.

Marathon is still alive!

AlephOne is the new engine for Marathon, runs all 3 games on modern platforms and is GPL: https://alephone.lhowon.org/

The original Mac OS 9 game files are freely available if you want to run them on a old Mac: http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/

Thank you! So many great memories!

F/A 18 Hornet and A-10 were my favorites. I might still have a disk somewhere. They're apparently also downloadable as "abandonware".

Somewhere in my NAS lives Mac classic OS, system ROM images, and hgx and sit files.

I'd love it if there were an abandonware place for all of the good stuff, with serial numbers, well organized similar to winworldpc.

Archival is important. It's not stealing, it's preservation. Without preservation and history, cool things and knowledge dies in unknowable, unseen distant obscurity.

https://macintoshgarden.org/ is pretty good for that.

Sweet find. Thanks.

I remember I bithoarded Marathon from https://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/

Wow, this is mindblowing. Oregon Trail is on the most recent version if anyone wants to check it out.

I learned C on an old Mac Plus or Mac SE... It felt useless at the time since I didn't have access to the computer outside the class but I can't forget the joy of making a circle move across the window...

This has gotten better. Last time I tried playing hellcats on the emulator, it wouldn't run. Now it runs perfectly!

> I am Mihai Parparita and can be reached at

oh man, mihai! his greasemonkey scripts made the internal version of gmail (caribou) usable back in the say.

is there anything like this for Win 3.x and Win95/98SE, with games pre-installed just like this?

https://www.pcjs.org/ is a similar project on the PC side.

The Internet Archive also has some collections: https://archive.org/details/classicpcgames and https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

One cool feature of Infinite Mac is missing from these, unfortunately. That is the clever virtual disk system and block by block fetching of the images over HTTP that allows for practically instant execution. Most people have internet connections that are at least as fast or even faster than the HDDs of 90s computers, so reading a remote disk allows for emulation that has no slower I/O than the real machines had.

I have a list here https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6379649c0cbade9abc02b242... which needs updating now after this article

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