Macintosh Emulation

This page is about emulating the Mac OS on other systems. It will be of little interest for Macintosh users.

Emulating the Macintosh on other systems is always a problem, mainly because Apple does not want it to happen. For all the emulators except Executor you need (copyrighted) ROM of the Mac you want to emulate. Executor is a so-called clean room emulator, it uses none of Apples software, it just behaves similarily, but the authors made the interface significantly different to avoid a look-and-feel lawsuit.

An interesting aspect is that some of these emulators are available for the Mac OS itself. This makes perfect sense since really old Mac programs, especially the black and white ones, simply don't run properly on the new machines. At the very least you don't have sound.

Emulators

E-Maculation is a general site about emulating a Mac on Windows.
vMac emulates a Macintosh Plus (512x342 black&white) on a variety of platforms, including MS-DOS, Windows 9x and the Mac OS itself. Up to now, it is the only one I got running. It is fairly easy to use, since it runs in a window with a toolbar. It tries to boot from the physical floppy, but you can click on the first of the three floppy icons and direct it to a disk image somewhere on your computer.
Basilisk II emulates a Mac Classic or Macintosh II on many operating systems.
Executor is a commercial program, and it is not cheap; for those $150 you should easily get one of the Macs it can emulate. Its main advantage is that you need neither an Apple ROM nor a copy of Mac OS for it to work. To avoid a look-and-feel lawsuit, the interface has been slightly changed. A demo version can be downloaded from the website. Executor is available for Windows and Linux.
Fusion/Softmac

With the exception of Executor, all these programs emulate only the hardware; you still need a copy of an appropriate Mac OS. Apple offers the older versions (6 through 7.5) as a free download. Technically, you might be violating your EULA by installing them on anything but an Apple computer.

Handle Macintosh Files

Here are a few utilities that let you handle Macintosh files under Windows:

HFV Explorer is a utility to read Macintosh disks from Windows and create simulated Macintosh harddrives for emulators.
TransMac for Windows can access Macintosh CD-ROM, hard drives, high density diskettes and most removable drives. You can even write HFS-formated floppies! The site has a lot of interesting information.

Last modified 2004-05-18