/vr/ - Retro Games

because it had very few exclusive games

There were mucho many different Macs with as many ROM revisions, and Apple never really documented anything in there.

how the hell did i remember the name to this game 30 years after having last played it?

>>9394516
>ROM
>classic Mac OS
Couldn't Executor achieve this with neither one?

>>9394516

Because Apple still exists, and the multitude of DOS-supported PC makers don't. Apple is litigious. The ROMS are out there: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/7038-all-macintosh-roms-68k-ppc-

The trick is you need to pick what version of the Mac OS you want to run. It is RIDICULOUS how much variance there is in support of applications between versions of the Mac OS. No other thing you will emulate for fun is this picky.

There is stuff that will only run on Mac OS 6, so for that stuff, use a Mac SE/30 rom. For Mac OS 7.1, use a Mac iici rom or around that era. For Mac OS 7.5-7.6.1, you start to get PPC support, and you literally have to choose whether you want to run 68k or PPC ROMs, and some software is picky about that, or literally comes with 2 binaries.

For Mac OS 8.0-/8.6.2 use a 604-chip PPC, maybe a Power Computing ROM, or a PowerMac G3 ROM. 8.6 is my favorite all time Mac OS, but it's also where the games start to just be PC ports. Mac OS 9 can run on a G4, and I own hardware to run it, but it's still mostly ports, and I hate 9. If you want early Mac World Builder Soul, you want 7.1. maybe 6. If you want shareware mania, you want 7.6. Archive.org has all sorts or amazing Magazine CDs that include shareware and fun games. https://archive.org/search.php?query=macintosh+shareware&sin=

Play Taskmaker. It owns. Soooooul. Also I spent way too much fucking time writing this, so do me the honor of making your shit work based on this info.

>>9394516
Mac emulators are obsolete and incomplete.
look 86Box

>>9394516

>>9394516
Almost forgot. Here's a Mac OS 7.6.1 image. https://archive.org/details/mac-os-7.6.1 There are more images of the OS in there, but I can't be arsed to dig them up. ALso, you can just run this shit in the browser: https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation

Good luck!

>>9394568
Apple is very unlikely to give a shit about 25-30 year old OS ROMs.

>>9394516
MacOS, even the earlier 6 and 7 versions, are far more complex and tied to the hardware/BIOS than MS-DOS ever was.

>>9394554
Yes, but it was never fully compatible. There is a modern project to do similar, but it's not very far along.
>>9394568
Plus is more typical for Sys 6.

>>9394516
Why would anyone care?

>>9394975
Same reason anyone cares about any legacy software, you're on fucking /vr/ bro. It's easy to run legacy Windows, Amiga, Atari ST, etc —the Macintosh has absolute shit emulation options in comparison.

>>9394998
There are so many models of Mac it's horrible to try and emulate them.

>>9394568
>Apple is litigious.
Truer words have literally never been typed on this website.

>>9394516
roms and installer images are easy enough to find, but yeah the state of mac emulation is pretty pitiful. even early OS X versions were horrendous at running legacy software. Macs suck at even emulating themselves. At least Sheepshaver and the like are good enough to fuck around on the desktop with, I guess.

>>9395093
They really don't give any fucks about hobbyists sharing ancient Mac ROMs; if you tried to do a commercial project I'm sure they wouldn't be particularly happy about it.

>>9394998
>Same reason poor babies cry about any legacy software
I've got a solution that solves all our problems

>>9395193
¿?

>>9394516
For what? Marcos community trained to abandon old software after another change of architecture.

>>9394516
>To run an OS you need the OS
WOOOOOOW!

>>9395262
You don't need an original copy of MS-DOS to run MS-DOS software. See DOSBox, or FreeDOS.

>>9395267
MS-Dos is SIGNIFICANTLY more simple then System OS.
And DOSBox does not emulate many parts of MS-DOS (many of the built in drivers, etc) as it's focused explicitly on gaming.
Apples and oranges mate.

luv me G3
luv me OS9
'ate OSX
just do

when i see the mac versions of Warcraft 1 and Dark forces running, then i say is good.

Unironically the best emulator for old Macs right now is MAME. They have made massive improvements lately.

>>9395302
If you had the right system you could use both. Suck to be you I guess.

>>9395385
no real reason I can think of to use OSX if you're using a G3, too slow. maybe if you're using an emac or something.

>>9395428
No reason I can think of to have the wrong system. That was basically the point of my post.

>>9395313
based mikhail

>>9394838
Plus is better for things prior to 6, IMO. SE/30 as the killer 6 machine.

>>9395162
>>9394615
Apple actually used to provide all the old versions of the MacOS on their FTP site/downloads section, round about 2002 and until... I dunno. Probably around when Steven the Lessor died. But yes, they actually are very litigious, and especially about their hardware. It's not like they would sue you for using their ROMS, but they would absolutely sue a commercial piece of software that included them. Like an emulator. Imagine Nintendo. Apple is the same way. They are Bastards. And very protective ones. So, best bet for everyone, is to keep emulators, ROMs and OS separate. The only thing in this list Apple really truly does not care about anymore is the old classic Mac OS, but even redistributing that would probably be grounds for them saying "Hey, knock it off" if it got big or profitable enough.

>>9395320
Wuuuuht? How do I even mount a hard drive?

>>9395320
i also want to know about this

>>9394518
This
>>9395281
And this. Classic macOS is fun but can also be a gigantic pita, which is why they created OS X to solve so many of its problems and basically start over. Also, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy for a big chunk of the 90s; software development (minus desktop publishing) really dropped off during that decade. Jobs had to kill 90% of the company’s products and sign a special deal with Microsoft to keep office on the Mac, just to convince the dev community and the markets that Apple was a platform worth developing for.

>>9396678
classic Mac OS was a hackjob that started out with the really simple single process OS 1.x on the first 1984 Macs and then got more and more crap hacked onto it for later, more powerful machines but it still lacked basic features like memory protection and was using outdated concurrent multitasking.

>>9395820
>2002 and until... I dunno. Probably around when Steven the Lessor died.
There are only a handful for people on /vr/ who were born let alone out of diapers then. Also, zoomies can't google. Their motto is literally "how the fuck was i supposed to know"

>>9394516
because it's far more complicated, dum-dum. Get over it, Nancy. It's not that hard to set up.

A better question is why isn't IOS even remotely emulated, even legacy iPhone 3 era shit?
>no one cares
Bull fucking shit, huge platform + Apple zealotry, enough time for nostalgia and enough talent around it to churn up. Why is it so hard?

>>9396890
isn't it emulated in QEMU somewhat? but anyway maybe there's enough crossover with Android which is already so well emulated that it's not worth the effort. i wouldn't really know what was special about early iOS software, but i feel like it wasn't really much of a game platform or host to anything that couldn't be found somewhere else.

>>9396960
Just googled it. Looks like IOS16/iPhone 11 is emulated, but I'm not sure if that would run the legacy stuff I'm thinking of. Android covers a lot, yes, but there are definitely great IOS exclusives especially from the early days. Definitive Ghost Trick for instance. Some still unported Jeff Minter games. Neat though, definitely wanna look into it as iOS emulation is very new.

>>9396960
Looks like it only boots to the console.

>>9395820
I think the SE/30 is overkill for 6, it's more of a 7.5.5 beast with the RAM maxed out. To each their own of course. That whole FTP is mirrored on Archive last I checked as well.
>>9396717
memory protection is a bummer, I should be able to do whatever I want with my RAM.
>>9396976
The only official english version of Shin Megami Tensei is an abandoned 32 bit iOS app. The translation was backported to GBA recently, but the original is unplayable without an "old" iOS device.

>>9396890
Because things one dumb kid doesn't know about don't exist? Jesus.

>>9394605
Explain. 86box can emulate Mac games?

>>9394568
>Apple is litigious
but Microsoft and Nintendo aren't?

>>9395820
>Steven the Lessor
lol

>>9397249
>memory protection is a bummer, I should be able to do whatever I want with my RAM.
Apple were really ass-backward. The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1985, Windows had memory protection (although not very good memory protection b/c limitations of the x86 architecture) since Windows 3.0. Preemptive multitasking arrived with 32-bit versions of Windows.

>>9399164
>The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1985
Sure, but it wouldn't have existed in the first place had the Macintosh not launched in 84, and the Lisa before that in 83. It's easy for imitators to add features years later.

I tried out Mac emulation a while back and fucking hated it
I own half a dozen old Macs, none of which are compatible with the game I wanna play, and not a single fucking one of which can spit out a ROM that's compatible with any of the emulators
Add to that how the official Apple provided copies of System 7 are packaged in some horrendous Mac-specific manner that's impossible to understand for anyone that wasn't a Mac user in the early 90's and it just becomes an annoying clusterfuck
So finally I give up and use pirated shit I found online and the damn thing still isn't working because the way it accesses CDs isn't compatible with my game and at that point I finally gave up

>>9399259
>Add to that how the official Apple provided copies of System 7 are packaged in some horrendous Mac-specific manner that's impossible to understand for anyone that wasn't a Mac user in the early 90's and it just becomes an annoying clusterfuck
It's literally just multiple floppy disk images anon, or even a single CD-ROM image.

>>9399269
>This software is available as 20 parts of a self-mounting Disk Copy image. Download all 20 parts to your hard drive and then double-click on the first part to mount the compressed disk image on your desktop.
I certainly couldn't manage to turn it into a format that Basilisk II would accept

>>9397249
i bought smt on the iphone when i had one. its bullshit that i cant download it anymore even if i had an old iphone

>>9399282
You want the separate images, it's 8 1.4MB disks for System 7.5. Should be drag and drop. You can also use mini vMac for image building and then migrate over to Basilisk. In reality you should just download the pre-built images here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html

Windows links are on a different page, but these are very well made "starter" images.

>>9394516
>Why isn't Classic Mac OS as reverse enginereed as MS-DOS is?
cant reverse engineer soul

>>9394518
Wrong, zoomer scum. I'd estimate 90% of Mac OS games are exclusive. You have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

>>9394568
Apple hasn't given a fuck about Mac OS since Steve Jobs threw it in a coffin. The reason Mac emulation sucks is because there isn't much interest in it and the few programmers who work on it aren't very good. Want to run classic Mac software? Get a classic Mac.

>>9400409
>Apple hasn't given a fuck about Mac OS since Steve Jobs threw it in a coffin.
Yeah they are very lawsuit-happy, but mostly with current products they're making money from now. They're very unlikely to care about anything from the 20th century at this point, especially as they've never been big believers in legacy support the way Microsoft is.

>>9394607
hey that Shufflepuck game is really addictive, is there a modern version of it?

>>9400409
>The reason Mac emulation sucks is because there isn't much interest in it and
God only knows how many different Mac models and hardware revisions there are. It's not like a ZX Spectrum where there's just two hardware configurations (48k ZX and Spectrum 128). Emulating that would be an absolute nightmare.

>>9400297
kill yourself

>>9399259
>Add to that how the official Apple provided copies of System 7 are packaged in some horrendous Mac-specific manner that's impossible to understand for anyone that wasn't a Mac user in the early 90's and it just becomes an annoying clusterfuck
And they used to tell you Macs were so easy to set up compared to typing COPY A:*.* /B

>>9399259
I remember an old Usenet post about Microprose's Pirates! and how the Mac port did not like machines with DirectDraw in ROM. What is DirectDraw and which Macs have it and which don't? God only knows. Maybe two retired Apple engineers and one guy on VCFED could tell you.

>>9400409
Fuck you, the programmers who work on it ARE very good. They are just untangling a mess of ROMS, OS versions, and hardware variance across simple things like SCSI controllers and ethernet ports.

>>9400473
As I said. Go look on Wikipedia and see just how stupidly many different Mac variants there are. Actually that was one thing Steve Jobs reigned in after he came back. They had too many models and sub-models of computer most of which weren't needed and cost money that Apple was then very short on to manufacture. He vastly simplified the product line to only a few models.

Microsoft in the mid-90s also made PC manufacturers standardize things a little bit when they used to be a horrible clusterfuck of proprietary hardware and incompatibilities. People used to also shit on Windows and Microsoft's programming talent back in the 90s but that's just as unfair because the PC architecture was a terrible mess and they did the best they could. I had a book "Secrets of Windows 3.1" which showed just how fucking bad it was in the early 90s. Imagine things like Compaq just arbitrarily moving the start of extended memory a little beyond the 1MB line for no reason in particular. How using a PS/2 mouse on certain Packard Bells would cause weird shit to happen in Windows so you had to use a serial mouse instead. Little fun things like that.

>>9400448
This anon gets it.

>>9400460
The toughest thing was picking a Mac. They had 100 different versions under Scully Mike and Gil. The Performa series was fucking insane. I put hands on just about every Mac that ever there was as a computer recycler, but I think there are still Performas I've never seen.

OK Mac-Dorks, here's the rare Macs I sent to the grinder over the years. Sorry. Photo relevant, and let me know if you want me to post more old-Mac's-I've-Fucked-porn.

PowerMac 4400
Macintosh Television
Pippin
Mac Quadra 900 with 128 MB of RAM!!!!
Quadra 840AV
Plenty of teeth. You know which ones I mean. The molars. G3 molars.
Endless iMacs, all colors and varieties.
iPods.
Mac 128ks, 512ks, +'s, SE/30s.....

I regret my transgressions. As penance, I never owned Apple stock and thus am a pauper, despite demanding people buy it in 1998, claiming it would become the biggest company in the world eventually. If only I'd listened to myself. But then, also, fuck Apple. they suck now...

>>9400507
It's actually not as bad to figure PCs out because PCs were always fairly DIY/ad hoc and you could buy vanilla motherboards from all different sources and assemble your own PC from parts bin stuff. Most dedicated manufacturers like IBM, Compaq, etc did stupid and proprietary stuff or oddball hardware behavior like that bit with the Packard Bell PS/2 ports but most of that can be ignored for emulation purposes.

>>9400530
If you mean like the IBM PS/2 line, that got pretty bad, Almost Mac level of bad but again for playing games on emulation 90% of it doesn't matter and you never need to worry about the SCSI controller in a particular PS/2 or things like that.

Apple were trying to match PCs 1v1 in the early 90s which explains the absurd proliferation of Mac models. Steve killed all that bullshit because he wanted to go back to his original vision of a simple one-configuration appliance computer instead of trying to make 10 different workstation models to take on Sun.

You wonder why they almost went under in '96. The sheer cost of manufacturing and supporting all those machines must have been horrendous.

>>9400558
I remember calling them for tech support and listening to the endless menu options for choosing the Mac you owned. It was nightmarish. Total disillusion of the product, with some models having high margins and others have low ones. Some models were usable, some weren't. It was a fucking shit show.

>>9394518
it had all the better ports of edutainment games, actually. the better graphics/music version of treasure mountain for example

Apple traditionally used serial printers and never bothered with Centronics ports. This had been the case going back to the Apple II. I believe they did have a parallel port on at least one Mac II model (was it the IIx?) Nobody remembers exactly though. And they used RS-422 serial ports not the RS-232 standard on PCs just to be contrary.

>>9400472
DirectDraw sounds like some kind of OS toolbox routines for fast drawing of graphics primitives, like a proto-DirectX.

>>9400460
They did. They never claimed that decades in the future retarded zoomies who totally own half a dozen macs yet don't have a clue how to use one wouldn't cry about being retarded on the internet.
lmfao when zoomies get filtered by what were universally considered to be the easiest computers to use. I'm literally just waiting for the dumb fucks to call it artificial difficulty.

post you're favorite macintosh

>>9400808
I'm your favorite? Thanks!

>>9398109
Yes, Microsoft isn't. There's a leak repo of Windows XP source code on fucking Github of all things and they haven't even bothered taking it down.

>>9400513
>They had 100 different versions under Scully Mike and Gil.
that also doesn't include numerous minor hardware and firmware revisions in each of these 100 models

>>9400487
>>9400558
>>9400584
>>9401721
Killing almost the entire product line and the clones was the best thing Jobs did upon returning, and still there were legions of “very serious people” demanding he sell the company to Dell or some other boomer nonsense.

>>9400409
>get a classic Mac
This, if you can find a good one. I really don’t see the appeal of emulating much before 8-9.2, there just wasn’t that much going on with Mac software worth emulating. And I say that as someone who grew up with a classic Mac in the early 90s and has full nostalgia goggles for that period.

>>9401751
There's a lot of games on classic Macs including quite a few exclusives or else unique ports of games that aren't like any other ports. For example the Mac versions of Wizardry that had full graphics and GUI interface against the primitive wire frames and keyboard controls of every other version. But getting them to work is a huge bitch because of incompatibilities between different Mac models and firmware revisions. You can pick any random model and find that 1/3rd of your software doesn't work because of arcane reasons.

Did you know Archon was ported to the Mac 128? It won't work on anything after the Plus because they ignored Apple's programming guidelines and read directly from the keyboard and mouse hardware registers which broke the game after the switch to ADB on the SE.

>>9394516
Is it just me or does the necessity for a rom bring a bit of the original soul to the emulation? Setting up the xbox emu with an Xecuter bios, picking the right workbench rom for Amiga, the right bios for PS2. Getting all that shit is part of the fun.

>>9401857
The Macintosh ROM is quite literally the soul of the Mac, so in this case absolutely.
>>9401838
The Wizardry titles are drag and drop to run in mini vMac. I wish there were more titles like Archon that were programmed "to the metal" on the OG Macs against Apple's guidance.

>>9401838
I mean it's not like an 8Mhz CPU was that fast so they probably didn't see any issue if it improved performance, especially in a game like Archon that demands twitch reaction times.

bump

>>9395267
MS-DOS is pretty unique in that regard. You need the actual ROMs and OS for AmigaOS too, and Atari TOS, and RiscOS, and so on.

Once I had to talk an NPC lady out of buying a mid-90s PowerBook at a thrift store because she was like "oh that's a nice laptop how much they want for it?" and I said "That's from like 1996 you don't want something that old" and she said "oh well alright then."

>>9400513
>Mac Quadra 900 with 128 MB of RAM
It might have been used by a TV studio for video editing or some other memory-intensive task.

>>9401838
>getting them to work is a huge bitch
Exactly. My brother and I tried to start emulating years ago when apple began brutally deprecating and discontinuing support for older software. It was just such a pita that we gave up, and that doesn’t seem to have changed much. It’s a roll as to what will work, crash, or not even run.

>>9404182
It would be just as bad on hardware as emulation. Pick any random Mac model and there's no guarantee that the particular software you're trying to run will work at all.

>>9403480
DOS is not as intimately tied to the PC BIOS as the Mac OS is.

>>9404189
>It would be just as bad on hardware as emulation.
Completely wrong. Real Macs at their worst are still far more compatible than Mac emulators.

>>9400808
Based Bugdom and word processing machine

>>9404189
There is a lot of total nonsense being spouted here. The Classic Mac OS has pretty damn good backward compatibility, OS 9 will even run a lot of monochrome 68k software, not to mention it has no problems at all with System 7 software onwards. I guess if you're trying to use a first gen PPC machine or something with OS 8 things get weird, but it's really not that hard. Buy a G4 machine, run 90% of the software you'd ever want to run. If you want System 6 stuff (this is my main area of interest), mini vMac is excellent.

>>9400808

>>9405278
where does the screen go?

>>9405382
This particular machine had a battery-damaged analog board and pretty badly burned in monitor, so I threw them out. I wired up the AT PSU to the right pins on the logic board, and I ran the video pin through an RGB2HDMI with a Mac Plus video profile; pin sharp digital video. It's not attached in that shot, that was when I was checking that it still booted at all. I really want to put it all in a big PC case and cable manage it, etc, but right now it's all still stuck in the original case with an HDMI cable hanging out the back.

>>9401721
>>9400513
>>9400448
You're blowing the hardware revisions out of proportion. Yes, every Old World ROM Macintosh had a slightly different ROM. But generally speaking there was very, very little software that required a specific type of ROM. So long as you met the hardware requirements (eg 68040, PowerPC 601, PowerPC G3) then the ROM was kind of irrelevant as far as compatibility went.

>>9399259
>I own half a dozen old Macs, none of which are compatible with the game I wanna play

Is the game you want to play something from the very early days of Macintosh software, when people ignored Apple's programming guidelines? Generally speaking, there is very, very little that will not run on something newer than a Macintosh Plus.

>>9405274
I have a 6100/66 DOS compatible. I've never run anything more recent than System 7 on it in order to maintain the DOS-switching capability. What sort of weird things happen with NuBus Macs and OS 8? Personally, I found OS 9 broke some older games for some reason, but unless you were using some of the very few computers that could run OS 9 but could not run OS 8.6, then this was not really an issue.

Agreed that there is a lot of uninformed shit being spouted in this thread.

>>9394568
>8.6 is my favorite all time Mac OS, but it's also where the games start to just be PC ports

8.6 has the benefit of running 95% of Classic Mac software while also not crashing as much as either System 7 or OS 9. It was like all the conflicting system extensions, arcane 15-year-old 68k code and grafted-on multiprocessing services and Carbon APIs existed in perfect harmony. And then Apple added more shit in OS 9 and brought the whole house of cards crashing down.

>>9405880
I'm not sure why you'd bother with a PPC desu. The only games that are PPC compatible or require PPC are all on Windows and run a lot better. Just get a 68K machine for SOVL
How does PPC handle 68K software anyway? Does it have an interpreter or something?

>>9394516
you need a specific MAC OS for specific APPS

it's fucking garbage

>>9394568
So what's the cause for this?
MacOS getting away with being stingy with some shit because it's not made with any PC compatibility in mind or something?

>>9406131
Yes it is a software 68k emulator built into the Mac OS.

>>9405880
>Is the game you want to play something from the very early days of Macintosh software, when people ignored Apple's programming guidelines
That's kinda like the very early days of the IBM PC when games used the CPU for timing or bit banged the CGA graphics registers directly which broke them on later machines.

>>9394516
>>9406834
DOSbox doesn't contain any of the original code and due to how IBM compatibility worked DOS programs didn't require a specific ROM (even back in the 1980s IBM compatibles were developed by clean rooming the IBM bios and sticking in similar hardware and this was enough to provide compatibility, especially since Microsofts deal with IBM to provide DOS as an OS for the IBM PC included the stipulation that Microsoft could sell MS-DOS to as many manufacturers as they wanted. In essence this meant that IBM PC and clones shared hardware and an OS with a similar BIOS and this was enough to lead to compatibility and avoid legal problems, since technically none of IBM's copyright had been infringed upon). In comparison to this, Macs from back then bundled a lot of its system functions and software onto the ROM, meaning that any attempt at emulation or creating a compatible system would need to reverse engineer the ROM. It was a lot more expensive and difficult than just creating a BIOS that functions roughly the same as was the case with IBM compatibles. And back then for the most part there was little point in spending so much time and money to create a Macintosh compatible system when it'd invariably lead to a lawsuit anyway. Why bother with all that when you could simply clone the IBM PC and make a lot more money for a lot less effort and avoid basically any legal problems? Nowadays thats less of an issue, certainly, but it would still be so much of a pain in the ass and the original ROMs are so widely available..

Even when Apple during the 90s started allowing for a small number of clones those clones afaik basically just used Macintosh ROMs rather than their own versions.

In short, IBM compatibility doesn't require ROMs and can be obtained relatively easily without as much hassle. Old!Macintosh compatibility requires specific ROMs and to reverse engineer those ROMs is a pointless, fruitless hassle. Apple autism yeh.

>>9404189
As others have pointed out, the hardware is much more resilient than the various emulators for whatever reason. I learned that through trial and error.

>>9405274
>Buy a G4
Exactly what I did. I have a 20” iMac g4 (the sunflower one), a TiBook G4, and one of the first Intel core duo flatscreens. They’re only good for playing older games and doing word processing with older versions of Office. Can’t connect to or process today’s web at all. My kids are going to be using them for schoolwork without internet distractions.

>>9405880
>Is the game you want to play something from the very early days of Macintosh software
It's Shadow Wraith from 1995, a game new enough to advertise itself as PPC compatible
Trouble is that the audio is borked in various ways on every Mac I've tried it on
Some have no music, some have no sound at all and one machine just has horrifying noise. Otherwise the game plays fine though.
Tried it natively on MacOS 9 on a Powerbook G3 Pismo, Powerbook G4 Titanium and a Powermac G4 Quicksilver. Even tried an iBook G4 with the classic mac environment in Mac OSX. Haven't played it on a native 68k machine since my only one is the Powerbook 190CS that I don't have a CD drive for and I haven't managed to properly rip the disc in a way that works.

>>9407016
You can use a proxy to make these things work with modern ssl sites.

>>9405274
The OS is one thing, but software on the Mac is soooo finikey. World Builder shit doesn't work outside of 7.1, lots of games work on 7.6.1 but nothing after. There's all sorts of weird pockets of shit to get old shareware games working. And a LOT of stuff won't work unless it's on an OS earlier than 7.

>>9407215
I've been doing weird Mac shit for 15+ years and I've never had issues as bad as you're describing. I pretty much exclusively run System 6 or OS 9 and have always been able to run everything I needed without much of a hassle.

>apple

EVER ONWARD -- EVER ONWARD!
THAT'S THE SPIRIT THAT HAS BROUGHT US FAME!
WE'RE BIG, BUT BIGGER WE WILL BE
WE CAN'T FAIL FOR ALL CAN SEE
THAT TO SERVE HUMANITY HAS BEEN OUR AIM!
OUR PRODUCTS NOW ARE KNOWN, IN EVERY ZONE,
OUR REPUTATION SPARKLES LIKE A GEM!
WE'VE FOUGHT OUR WAY THROUGH -- AND NEW
FIELDS WE'RE SURE TO CONQUER TOO
FOR THE EVER ONWARD I.B.M.

>>9407329
Yeah, just pointing out that you actually can't run everything on 9. 6 stuff really requires 6...

Also, try running some of this stuff in 9: https://archive.org/details/macformatcd-1995-12-xmas

Most of that shareware wants 7-ish. I think. Maybe you can run all those things on 9 but then you're a better man than I.

>>9394516
DOS was compiled to run on x86 processors and Classic Mac OS runs on Motorola and PowerPC CPUs. /thread

>>9407413
haha I'm not trying to argue with you, it will definitely depend very heavily on what software you want to run. And agreed about System 6, I keep Mac Plus(es) around for that reason. This one is my boy >>9405278. I use a hacked G4 Mac mini running OS 9 on a PATA SSD with 1GB RAM, and the Plus — covers all my bases.

>>9407437
>I keep Mac Plus(es) around
>gore is <1/2 mac plus
What did the cringelord mean by this?

>>9395193
Bloody Catholics. Filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed.

>>9409197
I have another complete one dumbass, and the franken Mac plus works great, it's just ugly. Better than being in a landfill.

Sam & Max: Hit the Road (1993) had a literal VR scene.
https://youtu.be/WqDclb3mYvw?t=614

>>9409336
init bruv

>>9409737
>i totally have a complete one pic unrelated
lmaooooo

>>9401662
The xp source is too widely spread for it to be worth bothering to take it down. Plus, having the source for xp easily available further comprises reactos. One thing though, you try and fork xp, and then they will take your fork down.

>>9400808
shouldn't it be spelled ijMac in dutch?

>>9410473

>>9394518
Hellcats alone was worth it.

>>9395302
>>9395428
>>9395573
I have an iBook G4 running Leopard, which I keep around for my iPod. And just late last year, I bought an M1 Macbook Air and started sucking the Mac dick for the first time in 20 years. OSX is nice, for day-to-day things I personally think it's better than the alternatives, and it's interesting to go back to look at old versions to see how the UI evolved. But from a /vr/ perspective there is very little reason to look backwards with OSX. By that point, basically no games were Mac exclusive, and anything that runs on OSX probably runs on Windows. Unlike OSX, you can actually run many early 2000s titles on Windows 11. So yeah, in conclusion, I agree. If you have an older Mac that can run Classic Mac OS, you may as well run Classic Mac OS.

>>9406131
PPC runs 68k software flawlessly. The early NuBus Macs had some issues because with emulation overhead, 68k code would run slower than it would on an actual 68040. But there were never any issues actually getting 68k software to run. Anything that ran on an LC or a IIsi will run on anything with a PPC 601. And by the time the PowerPC 604 showed up, you could run 68k programs faster than any 68k Mac could possibly hope to accomplish.

Fun fact, the 68k emulator included in Classic Mac OS took up around 600 kilobytes. The thing was a masterful bit of programming.

>>9407109
I just installed ShadowWraith from the Macintosh Garden on my 7600 and it runs flawlessly, sound and all. PowerPC 604, OS 8.6. There is a floppy version that you can try on your Powerbook. Is it possible that this is one of those things where Mac OS 9 inexplicably broke compatibility? Also why are you not running the best version of Classic Mac OS? Cool game by the way, not sure how I missed this one.

>>9407413
I tried some of the programs on this CD and they seem to work on OS 8.6

Fucking OS 9 needlessly breaking shit, why

>>9401902
>I wish there were more titles like Archon that were programmed "to the metal" on the OG Macs against Apple's guidance.

There's at least two other really good ones...

MacCommand only works on 128 and 512
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/maccommand

Lunar Rescue only works on 512Ke to SE
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/lunar-rescue

>>9406928
>>9413326
>PPC just runs a 68K Emulator
Why even bother desu just use an emulator on literally anything else.

I was watching 8 Bit Guy's video about the Apple II line vs Macs.

Apple apparently had better computers with the Apple II but they went with the Mac shit.

Then Steve Jobs years later brings in the OSX which only for a few generations had classic mode.

People really get boned with Apple and compatibility.
I remember anecdotally that a grandaunt of mine who only knew a little bit about computers bought them anyways.
The way my uncle described the story, it seems she was using an Apple II based system, and went to Mac, and just about nothing was compatible.

>>9414225
>went with Mac shit
You can’t blame them. The GUI was revolutionary and the key to creating mass mainstream adoption of PCs. Plus it enabled desktop publishing, which was the killer app back then. Macs quickly outstripped the Apple’s capabilities, too.

>people really got boned with Apple and compatibility
Yes, this used to be a huge issue, even up into the late 90s. But I think they handled the os9 to osX transition mostly well, even better for PowerPC to Intel and Intel to ARM.

>classic mode
Essential from 2001-late 2002, but once Jaguar came in, you very quickly started seeing software transition to take advantage of OS X. I think pretty much anything I was using/playing had been completely upgraded by 2003.

>>9413564
The emulator is transparent and a part of the operating system, much like Rosetta was. You’re still going to get superior results with a PPC Mac running 68k code than you are with a 68k emulator on something else.

>>9414225
>The way my uncle described the story, it seems she was using an Apple II based system, and went to Mac, and just about nothing was compatible.
Sounds like nonsense; "Oh no my new Macintosh which cost as much as a used car isn't compatible with my computer from 1977!" If you had the money for a Macintosh, you knew what you were getting into, and it wasn't an Apple II.
>>9414519
Not to mention you could still run PPC OS X software on Intel Macs for a while longer even after they dropped Classic Mode. I used AppleWorks all through college on my then fancy pants 2007 C2D MacBook Pro.

>>9401857
>>9401902
i always felt this way too. something sort of satisfying about finding and setting the BIOS for systems like PSX and FDS.

>>9415163
I remember being so cheesed when Apple killed off Rosetta because it meant that I wouldn’t be able to use AppleWorks anymore. I kept using Snow Leopard long past its best before date.

>>9415163
> Not to mention you could still run PPC OS X software on Intel Macs for a while longer even after they dropped Classic Mode
Yes. I don’t think any of the transitions were ever bad after Jobs came back.

>>9416261
Snow Leopard was worth hanging onto for a long time. I did the same thing because Lion was very disappointing in the sense that it was the beginning of Apple trying to lock down your computer and make it more and more like an iPhone. Kind of the anti-“bicycle for the mind” concept, seeing how smartphones tend to retard people’s capacity for thought these days.

Been reading this page about the development of the original Mac
https://www.folklore.org/
Was a PC kid from the UK and never actually saw a Mac until the 2000s (not sure if this was common outside of america) so this has actually made me interested in these early Macs
Seems like that early team who developed it was really good0

>>9416261
I thought I was alone, based anon.
>>9417243
Agreed on both fronts.
>>9417665
Really an awesome site, and yeah the OG Macintosh team was a "right place right time" thing that has never really been matched. The first computer I ever used was a compact black and white Mac, but my understanding is that outside the US they were extremely uncommon. My Mom was a teacher and they would send her home with a Mac over the summer to work on lesson plans so I was fortunate in that way.

>>9417243
Snow Leopard was really the end of the "old" Mac OS X. It was the last version to be distributed on a physical disc, it was the last version to focus solely on the local, physical computer (the app store was an afterthought update add-on), and it was the last version that wasn't part of the bullshit annual release cycle. Hell, for a while, it was the last version of the OS that had "Mac" in it. I eventually upgraded to El Capitan but it felt like something died along the way.

>>9417665
Macs were actually fairly common in Europe during the early 1990s. I remember reading an NYT article from 1992 where they said that Apple was the third-largest computer company in Europe by sales volume, behind only IBM and Compaq. Maybe they weren't common in Britain because there was actually a fairly healthy domestic computer scene in the UK, whereas Europe really lagged behind in that regard, which allowed foreign companies to enter the European market.

Macs weren't exactly widespread everywhere in North America, though. When I was growing up in suburban Calgary in the mid-to-late 1990s, I was literally the ONLY kid in my class of 25-ish who owned a Macintosh. Our school had a few Apple IIs scattered around the classrooms, probably holdouts from an earlier time. We never used them because nobody knew how to work them. Everything else was IBM compatible (manufactured by DEC, interestingly enough) running Windows NT 4.0.

Great series of articles, by the way. It's interesting to read about all the times where Steve Jobs ran interference for absolutely no fucking reason at all (eg, refusing to work with Sony on the 3.5" drives, refusing to include expansion slots when technology was evolving rapidly). I'm actually kind of surprised to see how rehabilitated he's become in vintage Apple circles and even here on 4chan, because 10 years ago he was almost universally derided as a marketing man who purposely gimped his own products.

>>9418454
>I'm actually kind of surprised to see how rehabilitated he's become in vintage Apple circles and even here on 4chan, because 10 years ago he was almost universally derided as a marketing man who purposely gimped his own products.
His philosophy was always of making single configuration appliance computers that could be sold and used like a radio or microwave.

>>9418454
I can’t think of one macOS release in the past decade that has impressed me in a big way, whereas every few years from 2000-2009, each release was drastically changing the way you interacted with the machine or adding tons of visible, new features. I remember being blown away by how cool Tiger and Leopard were, and how far ahead they seemed compared to the frustrating Windows experiences at the time.

>>9418467
Jobs’s philosophy was a great idea back when understanding computers meant you had to be a tinkerer or just patient with a steep learning curve. He and Ive took it too far after 2007, though, with trying to make your Mac into the IT equivalent of a washing machine or refrigerator. And I wouldn’t have an issue with making it ever simpler if it hadn’t also come with Apple’s repeated attempts to lock users out of anything “under the hood.”

>>9415693

>>9419525
I remember being thoroughly impressed by Tiger, and it was definitely several steps ahead of Windows XP in terms of refinement. But I was absolutely blown away by Leopard, it was such a quantum leap forward. Even Snow Leopard, with "zero new features", impressed me because it was like Leopard but faster. A number of things have changed since then.

First, all of the older versions of Mac OS X had very long development lead times. Tiger was in development for 18 months, and Leopard was in development for over 2 years. Now, they're pumping out a new version of Mac OS every year. The Mac team doesn't really have enough time to refine the software or to fully think through the features, so we will often get a half-baked release like Yosemite which is followed up by a "stable" release like El Capitan. And speaking of the Mac team, the political environment inside Apple has now changed. The iPhone has eclipsed the Mac as Apple's flagship product. Anyone who wants to advance within Apple knows that they need to get on the iOS team, so all the best talent goes there. The core Mac team is comprised of the also-rans, and some of the lower performers from the iOS team are sent over to the Mac team. These people are not stupid by any means, after all they work for Apple, but they are not Apple's A-Team. Previously, Mac OS X releases were very polished because Apple had its very best and brightest working on them. That's not necessarily the case anymore. t. my brother worked for Apple for 3 years

>>9396717
It's funny that despite lacking memory protection and being theoretically unstable, in practice I remember Classic Mac OS crashing about as often as Windows 9x. I think the programming of the OS was generally pretty tight, which prevented it from devolving into a huge clusterfuck, whereas while Microsoft had a theoretically better design, their shit coding practices meant that in daily use it wasn't much better than something that SHOULD be massively inferior.

>>9419525
>trying to make your Mac into the IT equivalent of a washing machine or refrigerator.
The original Macintosh was a lot more of an appliance than the Unix boxes they've been selling since OS X launched. NeXT was as powerful and tinkery as you wanted it to be, and OS X still carries a lot of that """soul""". Things get more locked down as time goes on, for both good and bad reasons, but the Mac is not an iPhone, thank god.

>>9420510
Not sure I would agree with this. The original Mac could be opened up and repaired, and you could turn a Macintosh 128k into a Macintosh 512k or even a Macintosh Plus fairly easily. Have fun upgrading the new M1 Macs in the same way.

>but the Mac is not an iPhone

The Mac WAS not an iPhone, it very much is an iPhone now. Don't be fooled by the keyboard and the vestigial OSX bits.

>>9419697
My brother broke from the Mac camp earlier than I did, I remember he had a Dell running Windows 98, and that thing crashed all the fucking time. If you left the computer turned on for too long, the system would lock up. The system would randomly freeze when you were working on something. It would bluescreen at least once a month. If that thing had preemptive multitasking, you could have fooled me into thinking it didn't.

Apple games had a certain charm

>>9421209
You could absolutely NOT turn a 128k into a 512k or a Plus easily, they literally put in new logic boards for those upgrades. The RAM was soldered on the 128k and 512k, and nothing was socketed, the power supply is the only thing that's "easily" serviceable, and that can kill you. And the modern Mac is not an iPhone; you can install whatever the hell you want, you can run Unix binaries, it's just Unix with a pretty GUI.

>>9418454
>suburban Calgary
Connor?

>>9419697
Then Apple should lengthen the MacOS release cycle again and stop training customers to expect yearly releases. Even if the Mac people are marginally less talented than the iPhone teams, it’d be good because it’s still painful just how much more you can do with a Mac than an iPhone/iPad, despite Apple trying to merge all of them via software. My dad and brother have always been on the cutting edge and have every dumb accessory to make the iPad into a laptop, etc. They still end up relying on their MBPs. But Apple has certainly correctly identified the avg iPhone customer as someone who just needs an appliance to communicate, consume media, and shop online.

Using a Mac has become mundane, and it’s not because I’m older. The early-mid 2000s OS X releases (after Jaguar) were a real pleasure to use and made you feel like you really were at the cutting edge. And it felt personal, like it was MY computer that I fired up to accomplish things. You really have to grasp for that feeling now, what with all the connectivity and “intelligent” assistants and notification beep/bloops and subscription services calling home 24/7.

>>9422239
>Then Apple should lengthen the MacOS release cycle
Yes. At the risk of continuing this very not-/vr/ discussion, this is literally all Apple needs to do and everything would be great.

>>9422067
Sorry, mate. Not the Calgarian you're looking for.

>>9422239
However bad the subscriptions services and the phone-home telemetry is on Mac OS, it's orders of magnitude worse on Windows. I actually really liked Windows 7 since Microsoft didn't go full whore mode with the telemetry, but Windows 10 and 11 are just appalling. Agreed that the feeling of it being "your" computer has largely disappeared.

Anyways, to get back into /vr/, I just played Lunar Rescue for the first time on Mini vMac since the fucker won't run on my 7300. Actually a really awesome game, very unique mechanics, and it has a certain charm to it. Would recommend.

>>9414225
Is compatibility on other OSs any better? DOS stuff basically didn't work at all on NT kernels, win9x was spotty starting with XP, XP stuff is rough on win7... Windows compatibility is more about how people can monkey patch in hacks and workarounds for the stuff that microsoft breaks every release rather than the OS itself being good. Linux is all over the place. If you have the source chances are good that it will just compile, if you don't it's pretty much guaranteed to fail.

>>9422839
>>9423532
Truly

>back to /vr/
Last night I tried to run EV Nova on an emulated OS X 10.4 machine, fucker shit the bed upon startup. Great game, too bad that company died and never updated the game.

>>9424741
While I am a Macfag, let's not pretend for a second that the backwards-compatibility in Windows isn't far, far better than Mac OS.

Windows NT was basically stolen OS/2 code so it makes sense that it would not run DOS programs. The way Microsoft got around that when the time came for Windows XP was by using a DOS emulator that ran in the background (NTVDM, or "NT Virtual DOS Machine"). You basically paravirtualized the old DOS shit to get it to work with Microsoft's OS/2... I mean Windows XP code. This is not too dissimilar to what Apple did with 68k code in System 7 on PowerPC processors. I would not really call this solution a monkey patch, it's baked into the OS and it works pretty well. Meanwhile I can't even run 32-bit Intel OSX applications on the current version of Mac OS, let alone something like Brood War (which runs fine on Windows 10).

>XP stuff is rough on win7
I find that most non-driver software that was designed for Windows XP will run fine on Windows Vista/7/8/10/11. I just set up my nephew with a whole bunch of turn-of-the-millenium games (Rise of Nations, Rome Total War, Knights of the Old Republic, Sim City 4, Civilization IV, Combat Flight Simulator 3, etc) on his Win11 Costco laptop, and everything works flawlessly. This would be a fucking pipe dream on a Mac.

>>9425223
Oh man, it's been years since I played EV Nova. I have an iMac G4 that won't power on, I suspect the issue is with a dead battery or bad power button, but I would like to get it up and running so I can play this game again. I'm pretty sure there was a Classic Mac OS version, but my 7300 wouldn't be able to handle it. Anyways, great game. I would be tempted to say that this was the last good Mac exclusive. Everything from about 2003 onwards was just a Windows port, which we sometimes had to wait years to get (but if anyone knows good Mac exclusives from the early OS X era, I'm all ears)

>>9425602
>good Mac exclusives from the early OS X era

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/kill-monty
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/sketchfighter-4000-alpha
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/redline
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/gooball
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/airburst-extreme
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/return-dark-castle-aka-dark-castle-3
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/neon-tango

>>9414225
> Apple apparently had better computers with the Apple II but they went with the Mac shit.
Those architectures aren’t really comparable they both have their pros and cons

Hey, macfags

Remember this?

>>9409924
It really doesn't matter, especially since Microsoft OWNS Github. It's like if someone was putting up old Nintendo games for free on the Eshop and Nintendo doesn't bother taking it down.

>>9426246
of course we do; first game I ever "broke" my clipping out of bounds with the rolling thing. Blew my mind running around the empty non-mapped world.

>>9425602
Yeah, EV Nova released with versions for both Mac OS 9 and X. It came out during that in-between era where OS X was building towards complete reliability and software support, so a ton of stuff still required classic Mac OS. The two previous games only ran on Classic, but I remember being elated when ambrosia/atmos turned them both into plugins for Nova after everything switched to OS X for good. Overall, I like Nova the best, it’s the largest and most intricate, while Override is probably the weakest/most boring. Although it did have a few awesome TC plug-ins like the Star Wars EU one.

>>9426165
Always enjoyed this one and gooball. Ambrosia put out some nifty games. Very sad that they quietly went out of business. Their URL was gd Chinese gambling site for a while…shame.

since this is apparently the thread for it what games are best on Mac? Absolute best exclusives? Stuff that's better on Mac than DOS or Windows?

>>9394568
As a casual emulating fag who casually plays around with fucking around in Linux and VMs, I have always wanted to figure out how on earth to get those Mac emulators to work but the ROM requirements with the knowledge of how to install MacOS even with the disk images from Archive.org always eluded me. I have read consistently that it is way fucking easier on literal newer Macs with Sheepshaver or even Windows to get that shit up and running. I took a screenshot of your info and appreciate you Anon.

t. dude who has tried to emulate glorious Mac stuff but has failed horribly in the past since it was too hard.

>>9427930
marathon

>>9428757
>>9399417
Just download these pre-builds if you're on Windows or Mac, they work great and have file sharing. The Windows downloads are on another page.

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html

>>9426246
I remember playing this game in the school's computer lab.

Just got an iMac G4 today for 30bux.

>>9428783
Thanks bro. You have no idea, same retard but techy Linux anon here.

I have always been in awe with stuff like Archive.org where you can see different Mac programs from the '9 something era (forget the name since we have PowerPC macs in our school computer lab) and love the overall feel of the black and white desktop and software for it at the time.

There's something inside me that wants a similar easier like Archive.org's modern web browser experience where you just can boot into the fucker, dump roms of software for it into a folder on the simulated Mac desktop and the shit would work.

I know I might be asking for much but I'm more into that side of the experience and admit I'm a bit lazy in that respect and too used to using emulators of stuff since like 2003 on the fucking EMachines we had with XP when I was in middle school.

t. millennial

>>9428827
I meant System 7 era my bad

>>9428827
All good my dude. If you want to run System 6 or 7 in monochrome like a 9" 68k Compact Mac, just grab minivMac. It pretty excellently emulates a Mac Plus.

Emulator Download:
https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/

Bunch of disk images:
https://sites.google.com/site/minivmacapplicationsv6/home

You literally drag disk images onto the application window and if they're bootable, they boot. Otherwise you boot a System Disk and then mount the game disk or whatever.

>>9427930
Sim City 2000 on Mac was unquestionably better than the DOS version. While the Win95 version was a big improvement, the colours and sound on the Macintosh version are still the best. Come to think of it, most DOS ports to the Macintosh are better because of the better sound and higher resolution.

Robot City was a really cool adventure game, if I were trying to explain it to a zoomie I would probably call it "Cyberpunk 1995".

Marathon is sort of the classic Mac go-to

Also don't use Archive.org, Macintosh Garden is by far the best resource and your best friend as a Classic Macfgag.

>>9427930
There are lots of Mac exclusives, it’s just macs were and are such a small share of the computer market that they’re mostly not remembered as clearly.

>>9429061
This. Macintosh Garden is pretty good

>>9427930
Heroes of Might and Magic was better on the Mac of course. That game still holds up well today.

>>9395313
The most important thing people sleep on is that Mac got so many big DOS games a year late and at 640x480 resolution instead of 320x200
It was like the earliest version of a remaster

Most Macintosh emulation was done entirely by one German guy, who wrote Basilisk II and SheepShaver. Outside of him, just about nobody cares enough or has the smarts to actually figure it out.

>>9427930
Glider Pro. There's a source port of it called Aerofoil.

>>9426246
It recently received an SDL2 port along with Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally, and Otto Matic.
https://github.com/jorio/Bugdom

Going to replace the hard drive for my graphite iMac G3 tomorrow since it shit the bed, glad my shit finally arrived.

>>9431895
>Most Macintosh emulation was done entirely by one German guy
That would be me. Fragt mich alles.

>>9427930
>Stuff that's better on Mac than DOS or Windows?

Civilization
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat
Dark Forces
Descent
F-117A Nighthawk
NFL Challenge
Prince of Persia 2
Vette

>>9432173
all of these games should had been decompiled and reverse engineered at this rate.