#Mac classic emulator for mavericks mac os#
First I found ’s still-active Mac OS 9 Google group, and from there I was pointed to the abandonware archive at Macintosh Garden.Ībandonware (a handy portmanteau of "abandoned" and "software") is one of those software “gray areas,” sort of like old-school PC and console game emulation. For any product that was sufficiently popular in its day, you'll still be able to find some group of people, somewhere, that continues to sing its praises (remind me to tell you about the time I dissed the Apple Newton in an article). The best way to get started if you're revisiting a relic is to find the pockets of people on the Internet who still use it. Even back in the earliest, slowest, buggiest days of OS X, it brought much-improved stability and memory management to the table, and it's something we've come to take for granted. That is, unless you get a pop-up message that momentarily freezes the OS, or you have an odd, possibly memory-related crash that requires a restart.
![mac classic emulator for mavericks mac classic emulator for mavericks](https://www.jamesbadger.ca/images/2018-11-07-apps.png)
Mac OS 9 feels much faster on the 800MHz G4 than does OS X 10.4 or 10.5, and when the system is working smoothly things open and close pretty much instantaneously.
#Mac classic emulator for mavericks mac os x#
I can understand why some people wanted to stick with Mac OS 9, especially in the early days of Mac OS X when extra clock speed and memory were expensive and harder to come by. And connecting the PowerBook to my router required a trip to the TCP/IP Control Panel to get things working-the OS didn't just detect an active network interface and grab an IP address as it does now. The concept of "Control Panels" that are installed and used like individual apps is alien to someone used to the all-in-one convenience of System Preferences. Niceties like scroll wheels and right-clicking aren't supported, even with an external mouse, and the third-party software created to enable those features didn't like my Logitech wireless mouse.
![mac classic emulator for mavericks mac classic emulator for mavericks](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/IRC-os-9.png)
There are oddities to get used to, though.
![mac classic emulator for mavericks mac classic emulator for mavericks](https://img.gadgethacks.com/img/61/76/63492128686208/0/run-really-old-version-mac-os-your-android-device.w1456.jpg)
It looks like the Windows 98 version of Mac OS. Even for someone who has primarily used OS X, this is still recognizably Mac OS, even if its underpinnings are much different. I booted to the classic Mac OS desktop, thanks to Mac OS 9.2.2 install media from Ars Senior Science Editor John Timmer.