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Emulator Project Aims To Resurrect Classic Mac Apps, Games Without the OS (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the work-in-progress dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Sean Gallagher: Want to be able to run classic Mac OS applications compiled for the Motorola 68000 series of processors on your ever-so-modern Mac OS X machine? Or maybe you'd rather run them on a Raspberry Pi, or an Android device for that matter? There's an emulation project that's trying to achieve just that: Advanced Mac Substitute (AMS). Advanced Mac Substitute is an effort by long-time Mac hacker Josh Juran to make it possible to run old Mac OS software (up to Mac OS 6) without a need for an Apple ROM or system software. Other emulators out there for 64000 Mac applications such as Basilisk II require a copy of MacOS installation media -- such as install CDs from Mac OS 7.5 or Mac OS 8. But AMS uses a set of software libraries that allow old Mac applications to launch right within the operating environment of the host device, without needing to have a full virtual hardware and operating system instance behind them. And it's all open source.

I got a demo of AMS from Juran at Shmoocon in Washington, DC, this past weekend. He showed me an early attempt at getting the game LoadRunner to work with the emulator -- it's not yet interactive. A version of the project, downloadable from Github, includes a "Welcome" screen application (a sort of Mac OS "hello world"), Mac Tic-Tac-Toe, and an animation of NyanCat. Applications are launched from the command line for now and are executed by the emulation software, which interprets the system and firmware calls. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of work to be done. While AMS works on Mac OS X up to version 10.12 -- both on Intel and PowerPC versions of the operating system -- the code currently won't compile on MacOS Mojave. And the Linux implementation of AMS does not yet support keyboard input. I was unable to get the front end to execute at all on Debian 9 on Intel.

8 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:so in essence... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Sort of... Well, DOSBOX really.

    Except that MacOS is a GUI OS and hence a lot more effort than DOSBOX.

    (DOSBOX is a combination 32 bit x86 processor, MS-DOS and BIOS emulation all combined. Wine doesn't actually include a CPU emulator.) This does, to allow M68k code to run on other chips.

  2. Re:so in essence... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Given how much of old-world mac Toolbox behavior was in ROM; and how this project's plan to not require ROM dumps to run(as the current classic macOS options do); it sounds a bit more DOSbox than Wine.

    The project does have to include WINE-style implementations of OS behavior; but much more like DOSbox the relative lack of clean abstraction between the OS and and the lower level platform bits means a need to emulate that aspect as well. There may be bits of WINE that have to lie about a BIOS(I suspect some win32 software freaks out if WMI inquiries related to win32_computersystembios and friends don't produce coherent answers); but the OS and the platform details were much less entangled at that point.

  3. So, kinda like Executor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sounds a lot like the old (original?) mac emulator called Executor I used to run some System 6 applications on PC's in the early 90's.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)

    1. Re:So, kinda like Executor? by wierd_w · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is exactly what I was thinking. ARDI Executor. I would bet that a good deal of the code could be made use of.

  4. There is 20 year old software that does this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    A nearly 20 year old piece of software did this. It was called Executor and is now open source in its older iterations.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)
    https://github.com/ctm/executor

    1. Re:There is 20 year old software that does this by OrangeTide · · Score: 3, Informative

      I still use it (on Linux). It works fine. Executor is nice because there is no gray area ROMs to deal with like some of the other emulators. Is it bug-for-bug compatible with particular Apple hardware? No. Does it run most old Mac apps? yes.

      The architecture of their 68K processor emulation is a pretty interesting read, in that it can both interpret instructions or be compiled to do a sort of virtualization by catching instructions natively (like if you want to run Mac on another 68K like an Amiga)
       

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  5. SheepShaver by sit1963nz · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you can find some ROM images, sheep shaver works well.

  6. Why re-invent the wheel? by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Informative

    ARDI Executor did this decades ago, building an emulator with a clean-room reverse engineered Mac OS 7 compatibility layer. Nobody has touched it in many years, but after it died off the author released it under the MIT license.

    Wouldn't it make more sense to have modernized and improve Executor rather than starting from scratch?