Mac OS on a PC

This is a long shot - I suspect this will not be practical for everyone
but...

Only the hardcare classic Mac enthusiasts would be interested in this.

There are a number of Mac emulators that run on top of PC platforms -
Windows, Linux. It may be possible to use a PC with a functioning SCSI
card to run your favourite older Mac OS and use all your cherished SCSI
hardware.

Apple provides earlier versions of its systems for free download. Many of
these emulators depend on this.

Few of these are simple to install.

There is a free mac emulator called basalisk, that will run OS 7.1 to 8.1
on a PC. (running Windows or Linux) It emulates an older pre powerpc
mac. (also called a 68k Mac - they all used a 68000 series Motorola
processor)

See http://os-emulation.net/basiliskii.html for windows
See http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/B2Main.html for Linux and other
platforms

It does work - I have done it two PC's in the past. The advantage of this
is that you can provide this emulator with lots of RAM. Its easy to get a
PC with 500 MB of RAM - this amount of RAM was not possible on the
original MACs. It requires access to a 68K mac in order to copy the data
from the MAC's ROM chip.

I have no idea if this would support/interface with a SCSI card on a PC

There is softmac - I've never used it.
http://www.emulators.com

Softmac also provides Fusion a classic Mac emulator that runs on top of
MSDOS. Fusion PC 3.0 runs System 7.0 and 7.1, as well as Mac OS version
7.5, 7.6, 8.0, and 8.1.

Executor http://www.ardi.com/executor.php - I've never used it.

There is also Sheepshaver that is supposed to allow one to run classic
MacOS applictions on linux (32bit and 64 bit and) and PPC (new Mac)
machines. It supports MacOS 7.5.2 to 9.0.4 . Its free - haven't used it.
It may be possible to run this on a new Mac to provide classic support
without using apples problematic classic mode. It has a scsi manager so
it should interface with scsi cards.

See http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/SheepShaver.html

There is also PearPC - a powerpc emulator - but this is still in its
development stage - It may let you run OS X on a PC - but people seem to
be wanting a way of running pre OS X Mac software.
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/about.html

Probably others that I have never heard of.

Gord

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Gordon J. Holtslander Dept. of Biology
holtsg@duke.usask.ca 112 Science Place
http://duke.usask.ca/~holtsg University of Saskatchewan
Tel (306) 966-4433 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Fax (306) 966-4461 Canada S7N 5E2
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Received on Wed Nov 24 12:14:24 2004