Developers Simulate Macintosh System 7 in Flash

TheChocolatay writes "Two guys in Germany have worked to create a Macintosh System 7 simulation in Flash. You can watch the Happy Mac face as the system boots and it even has a working Control Pannel, After Dark screen saver, and games. Wired news has an article on the developers and the simulation can be viewed on-line."

Pfft..

[hookedup]

There's been a windows version [deanliou.com] of this for years!

FreeCache of Flash

[cybermancer]

Avoid the SlashDot effect:

http://freecache.org/http://myoldmac.net/webse.swf [freecache.org]

Brought to you by FreeCache.org [freecache.org]!

Re:FreeCache of Flash

[timothv]

Freecache doesn't cache anything less than 5 megabytes.

Don't forget Windows 98 Ebonics

[ModernGeek]

http://users.moderngeek.com/preston/movies/windows %2098%20ebonics.swf Yup, that's some good shit.

Ouch. That's an annoying bug.

[Hackie_Chan]

That's the first and the most annoying scroll script I've ever encountered. I hope I never see one again...

Ever. By the way, anyone have a copy of the flash or something? It doesn't load for me.

Re:hmm

[hattmoward]

It's not "some flash movie" check it out, you can load up Breakout, Pong, MacDraw, and more. You can browse folders too. This is some cool work, I'd love to see the code for doing the system so flexibly in flash.

It's certainly faster....

[Anonymous Coward]

...than PearPC 0.1 running Mac OS-X. ;)

Re:It's certainly faster....

[Wateshay]

... but how long will it take until someone tries to run this from a browser running in OS X on a PearPC, inside Virtual PC on a G5.

Re:It's certainly faster....

[Segway Ninja]

already been done. http://www.emaculation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=1 151 - screenshot at http://sveinbjorn.vefsyn.is/images/maconwinonmac.j pg

Re:It's certainly faster....

[dave1212]

that's not it, read more carefully.

Re:It's certainly faster....

[Segway Ninja]

Note to self, don't sleep and slashdot.

A little too realistic

[lawyer boy]

OK, I'll admit it. While trying to quit Space Invaders in the simulation, I hit cmd-Q without thinking and wiped out a bunch of research tabbed in Safari.

I'm off to hunt through the history...

Re:A little too realistic

[useosx]

Shoulda been running Opera [opera.com] (saves your browsing windows through restarts). No I don't work for them...

Re:A little too realistic

[Masque]

Yes. That's why having cmd-Q mapped to 'Quit' is a silly thing in Safari. Suggestion:

http://calmstorm.net/lj/safari_safety.png

Re:A little too realistic

[Hes Nikke]

wow, you used the same alternate shortcut as i did!

you know what they say.. Great minds think alike, but idiots seldom differ. ;)

Welcome to my friends list

Re:A little too realistic

[Pope]

How is it "silly," exactly? It's been the "Quit Application" keyboard shortcut on the Mac since 1984.

Re:A little too realistic

[andrewleung]

huh-huh... "research".

ya, that's what I tell the girlfriend too when i don't want to show her my "research".

Re:A little too realistic

[WCityMike]

Try Saft [dnsalias.com]. It has a very nice feature (similar to a Firefox extension I've seen) that will let you automatically save open windows upon quit, and restore them upon return. It also has a great deal of other goodies that really make Safari quite nice.

Any non-flash emulators out there?

[Radon Knight]

I'd love to be able to boot up into old (or ancient) versions of Mac OS which run in a safe little sandbox on my OS X machine - simply for the sake of nostalgia. Are there any non-flash implementations which can run as stand-alone applications?

Re:Any non-flash emulators out there?

[amdg]

I use vMac [bannister.org] whenever I want to run Dungeon of Doom. I got hooked on that game when I got my first Mac. It is still one of my favorite games of all time.

Re:Any non-flash emulators out there?

[jcbphi]

You should also check out Basilisk II, though I've not had any luck getting it to run anything prior to System 7. It will run well on many platforms.

Re:Any non-flash emulators out there?

[dave1212]

I really want to get Rogue going under any OS but have had no luck. I miss playing that game, can't find the disk with it for my 68k macs.

Re:Any non-flash emulators out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - aside from the Classic environment, there are emulators that will play at being a pre-PPC mac and run software written for System 7 and below.

VMac [vmac.org] runs under Classic.

There is also an OS X version of Basilisk [bigpond.com].

The bad news is that for either of these to run System 7 or below, you need a 68k MacOS ROM - which you can't obtain legally except from your own 68k Mac (of course, IANAL). Oh, and you need a copy of the OS - but System 7 is available for download here [apple.com].

Re:Any non-flash emulators out there?

[sg3000]

VMac looks Carbonized, but it's still asking for a ROM. Does this mean I have to go hunt down my original Mac 128k? Seems like a lot of trouble for me to be able to play Dark Castle on my PowerBook G4.

Re:Any non-flash emulators out there?

[shamino0]

VMac looks Carbonized, but it's still asking for a ROM. Does this mean I have to go hunt down my original Mac 128k?

IIRC, vMac wants a Mac Plus ROM. I don't think others will work with it (emulation of other classic Macs is on their to-do list.) Which is kind of annoying - I have a working SE at home, but not a Plus.

Of course, I could just go play Dark Castle on the SE....

Re:Any non-flash emulators out there?

[mr_tap]

Apparently Mac-on-Linux is meant to be close to running on OS X (refer http://www.maconlinux.org/news.html).

Before googling around, I had assumed that this already was working?

Hehehe. n00bz.

[Elwood P Dowd]

They made the oldest mistake in the book. The menus will not work if you use them like in System 7. You cannot click and hold on the menu, then drag to the item and release. You must instead click on the menu, then click and release on the item.

Windows let you do it either way, and Mac OS followed suit, but... System 7 didn't work like this flash thingy.

Re:Hehehe. n00bz.

[Anonymous Coward]

oldest mistake in the book is never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Re:Hehehe. n00bz.

[phraktyl]

And second is never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! HA HA HA HA! *thud*.

Re:Hehehe. n00bz.

[tbone1]

I thought it was working for the mob and expecting a retirement plan.

Re:Hehehe. n00bz.

[tim1724]

lots of other mistakes, too..

• dragging windows or icons should drag an outline, but instead it has live dragging.
• non-functional resize controls
• windowshade control instead of zoom box .. huh?
• selecting icons doesn't work right in the Finder
• non-functional scrollbars

plenty of other problems, I'm sure, but the above was enough to annoy me.. didn't feel at all mac-like so I closed the window after 30 seconds or so of playing with it. (although I do admit I did use the "shutdown" menu item first.. :-)

Re:Hehehe. n00bz.

[Stackster]

They haven't even got the startup sequence right, which should be the easiest part since there is no user interaction.
There shouldn't be any icons popping up at the bottom before the "Welcome to Macintosh" window is displayed.
And from that first impression, it just goes downhill. Sure, they have done a lot of work, but It would be nicer to have something that actually gives the _feel_ of an old mac, instead of implementing a lot of crappy games.

Re:Hehehe. n00bz.

[Anv*l]

You got it wrong, menus been click & release until MacOS 8.

OS X

[ModernGeek]

OX X lets you do it either way too. The first thing when I got into this flash, I started to try doing the click and drag, then noticed that flash probably didn't have a way to emulate this behavior.

I gotta say, that was nicely done

[daviddennis]

And it's even surviving a Slashdotting, which is pretty darn impressive considering how big that thing must be.

D

That is soft of cool

[ztirffritz]

I opened MacDraw and created some squiggles. It works just as I remembered.

Shutdown

[Draoi]

This is sad, I know, but I had to fight the urge to shutdown the 'machine' properly before closing the window!

Old habits die hard ... :-)

Re:Shutdown

[goombah99]

That's really funny. I did exactly the same thing. I was looking for the shutdown. Finally I realied I could just close the widow.

Re:Shutdown

[burns210]

i think... the shutdown should do a close window command.

and by the way, do you think they will add and apps that were a 'must have' from the era? maybe a game or two?

Re:Shutdown

[Dr. Smeegee]

Just so you know: I did it, it works. It shuts down. It restarts. It is the only use of Flash that I will condone. :-)

Re:Very Accurate if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey my father was system 7 you insensitive clod!

It's got a decent game of tetris however - so your troll is full of several metric tons of steaming shit.

Translation:

[Anonymous Coward]

Two guys in Germany have WAY too much time on their hands.

I wonder it realisticly crashes?

Worthless...

[shrapnull]

"preserving the beauty and legacy of Mac OS on the Internet..."?

The artists obviously did it because they could. If you want to preserver the "beauty of an operating system" archive them [kernelthread.com], or better yet, release them to the public free of charge (as some have already done).

This was the internet equivalent of building a model of the Eiffel Tower. Cute, but worthless. I must admit they did a fair job of accomplishing their goal, and they are obviously fairly talented with Actionscript.

I've been looking for this for years

[erikharrison]

I train Tech Support agents to use a Macintosh. Screenshots, to a tech support agent, means thorough screenshots that illustrate how to use and OS or application.

Recently, there has been a tendency to use image maps to simulate an OS using screenshots. But I've been looking for a decent flash based view of System 8 or 9 that agents could use at their desks. Kept meaning to do it myself, but I'd have to teach myeslf Actionscript . . .

Re:I've been looking for this for years

[z0ot]

Have you considered experimenting with VNC together with vnc2swf? Older versions of VNC exist for MacOS 8&9 (I understand the server may be shaky, though) and you may be able to turn the output of the viewer window into a Flash movie using vnc2swf. Haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising.

Why the old mac though?

[CrackedButter]

Did OS7 even run on it?

Re:Why the old mac though?

[trash eighty]

i was wondering that, i run OS6 on my SEs and thats slow enough. if OS7 could run on an SE (and i'm unsure of that) it would not be fun ;)

ah, looking at everymac's page for the SE it could run up to 7.5.5. shudder at the slowness of that!

pfft...

[jx100]

These [yaromat.de] guys have emulated Mac OS in HTML!

Re:pfft...

[nuggetman]

which doesn't work in Firefox

Re:pfft...

[jx100]

gah.. so it doesn't. Last time I used it (admittedly, a long time ago) was on IE.

Not quite.

[ActiveSX]

I'll be impressed when somebody emulates the hardware in flash/actionscript. Until then, this is just a quirky cartoon.

OS9 / Win95 / Win98 / OpenStep / NextStep emulator

[sarahbau]

A friend of mine made an emulator in Java several years ago, that emulates OS 9, Windows 95/98, OpenStep 4, and NextStep 5. It doesn't have working applications within it, but the menus and everything work very well. http://www.naness.com/

Re:OS9 / Win95 / Win98 / OpenStep / NextStep emula

[InfiniteWisdom]

That is a simulator, not an emulator

This is hardly anything special

[azav]

Not to toot but I've rewritten a windows 98 windowing system in Director and Shockwave in 1999 with:

Windows and floating windows.
Video support
Key shortcuts
32 bit graphics with alpha channel.
Window dragging with live content updating.
Multiple window states
Multi state buttons
Minimizable windows collapsable to a toolbar.
Subclassable windowtypes.

And I'm not the only guy to have done stuff like this. There are at least 4 other people I know who have done this.

Re:This is hardly anything special

[dave1212]

'Shockwave Windows'? Is that the one?

Re:This is hardly anything special

[azav]

RIGHT! Woo! I'll tell Jim (the author) that someone recognized his product!!

He'll be psyched!!

Rockin Dave!

Re:This is hardly anything special

[dave1212]

That's cool, I learned some stuff from the code. Found out about it through the Direct-L list and DOUG (director-online.com) and messed around with it a bit.

I need to do some shockwave stuff again.. maybe for my band site.

Re:This is hardly anything special

[azav]

Dude - buzz me if you need any help. I co-founded DOUG.

Nice to see another director guy online.

Zavpublic at mac.com

Re:This is hardly anything special

[Xyde]

Yes I found it the other day, it's lovely. As a matter of fact I'm now using it as my WinME replacement. And it's free! You can download it here! [deanliou.com] I can't seem to get FireFox installed tho...

Doesn't look like 7

[dthree]

More like 5 or 6. Windows and menubar in 7 have shading.

High Score of 21000 in Space Invaders!

[pikester]

OK, then I got bored and quit the demo...

Yaromat had a DHTML Mac sim for years too.

[MoebiusStrip]

http://www.yaromat.com/

pointless post

[foidulus]

pointless


post.


hoooray
hooray
this will never get read
esp. not by anyone with mod points