I'm currently doing SICP with Harvey and to be honest after list and cons in general are introduced I wish the course would abandon sentences altogether.
I'm doing the examples and exercises in Racket.
If so my way of dealing with this when I'm too lazy to deal with trying to get stuff to work on another system, is to using something like Virtual Box and work on the exact OS the library/language I want to work with was made for.
I know one of he people who is running 61as, and I believe he wants to move as much as possible into the browser. In fact, they might even use a JavaScript-based Emacs clone instead of Emacs proper next time.
I think using the browser should make setting up the environment much easier than using some old, unsupported Scheme implementation!
I'll need to check out the Javascript based implementation sometime. But it is really annoying that the course is using something that hasn't been updated in ages.
I think it's a good idea, personally. It could also make many of the assignments more interactive.