All of us know how great the Macintosh is, so it's no surprise to us when other systems emulate Macs. Surprisingly, some Mac emulators are even being ported to the Mac OS. They are indeed useful, also--many classic titles which refused to run on newer machines should be fully usable under these emulators, which currently emulate only a minimalistic Macintosh system.
 | the vMac Macintosh Emulator 0.1.9c, Carbonized for Mac OS X or classic Mac OS. |
| a System 6.0 boot disk, which is necessary for vMac to begin booting. |
This Mac Plus emulator is quite faithful to the original! Many software titles run at full speed with sound effects and no glitching. Full source code is also included. This application is no longer updated regularly.
 | the vMac Home Page. |
 | of vMac. |
| Mini vMac 2.8.2 for Mac OS X. (Power PC) |
| Mini vMac 2.8.2 for Mac OS X. (Intel) |
| Mini vMac 2.8.2 for classic Mac OS. |
| Mini vMac 2.8.2 for 68k Macs. |
Mini vMac is a derivative of the vMac emulator, with the goal of being a smaller and simpler version of a Mac emulator. As such, it is not necessarily faster or better, but it is very compact code which should be easier to understand.
Mini vMac now has two variations that emulate the original Macintosh 128K and the Macintosh SE. The Macintosh Plus emulation of Mini vMac can run almost all of the oldest Macintosh software, but some of the very earliest systems versions and applications will not work with it. Most of these will now work in the Macintosh 128K emulation. The Macintosh SE emulator is currently being used to test the emulation of different systems (such as ADB) which regular Mini vMac does not use.
| the Mini vMac home page. |
| the Alpha page, with the latest Mini vMac beta source and application. (3.0.0 for PowerPC and Intel) |
| the Official sourceforge.net download site for Mini vMac. Source (and application) available for every version of Mini vMac created. |
 | to Paul C. Pratt, author of Mini vMac. |
| Mac-on-Mac 0.2. Does not work with Mac OS 10.4. |
Mac-on-Mac is the userfriendly port of the Mac-on-Linux Project to Mac OS X. It makes it possible to run Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, OpenDarwin or Linux for PowerPC in parallel with your Mac OS X installation in a Virtual Machine. Due to the fact that there is no actual platform emulation being performed, it is very fast!
Currently, Mac-on-Mac requires X-Windows to run.
| the Mac-on-Mac homepage. |
| Mom 0.1. Does not work with Mac OS 10.4. |
Mom is a Cocoa user interface and OS X friendly packaging of the OS X port of Mac-on-Linux. This port only supports Mac OS 9 in a virtual machine. However, this app often yields better results than Mac-on-Mac. Like Mac-on-Mac, there is no actual platform emulation being performed and it is very fast. Also like Mac-on-Mac, Mom requires X-Windows to run.
| the Mom homepage. |
| to Ted Bonkenburg, author of Mom. |
| Basilisk II v16 with audio for Mac OS X. Audio added by Dave Vasilevsky. |
| Basilisk II v17 for Mac OS X. |
| Basilisk II "Classic" v16 for Mac OS X. |
Basilisk II is an open-source 68k Macintosh emulator newly ported to Mac OS X. It can emulate a Mac Classic or Mac II-series computer and runs MacOS 0.x through 8.1.
| the Basilisk II for Mac OS X Home Page. |
| the Basilisk II Home Page. |
| to Nigel Pearson, author of Basilisk II OS X. |
| SheepShaver 2006.05.14 for OS X. |
SheepShaver is a MacOS run-time environment that allows you to run classic MacOS applications in a sandboxed multitasking environment. This means that both Classic and MacOS X applications can run at the same time (using full hardware support, not the Classic environment) and data can be exchanged between them. Using a PowerPC-based system, applications will run at native speed (i.e. with no emulation involved). There is also a built-in PowerPC emulator for non-PowerPC systems.
SheepShaver is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). However, you still need a copy of MacOS and a PowerMac ROM image to use SheepShaver. If you're planning to run SheepShaver on a PowerMac, you probably already have these two items.
SheepShaver for OS X has merged the BeOS/Linux SheepShaver code with the Basilisk II environment code for OS X.
| the SheepShaver home page. |
