'Infinite Mac' Project Lets You Boot Up Mac OS In Your Browser (arstechnica.com) 10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What makes the ["Infinite Mac"] project unique isn't necessarily the fact that it's browser-based; it has been possible to run old DOS, Windows, and Mac OS versions in browser windows for quite a while now. Instead, it's the creative solutions that developer Mihai Parparita has come up with to enable persistent storage, fast download speeds, reduced processor usage, and file transfers between the classic Mac and whatever host system you're running it on. Parparita details some of his work in this blog post.
Beginning with a late 2017 browser-based port of the Basilisk II emulator, Parparita wanted to install old apps to more faithfully re-create the experience of using an old Mac, but he wanted to do it without requiring huge downloads or running as a separate program as the Macintosh.js project does. To solve the download problem, Parparita compressed the disk image and broke it up into 256K chunks that are downloaded on demand rather than up front. "Along with some old fashioned web optimizations, this makes the emulator show the Mac's boot screen in a second and be fully booted in 3 seconds, even with a cold HTTP cache," Parparita wrote.
CPU usage was another issue. Old operating systems and processors didn't really distinguish between active and idle processor states -- your computer was either on or off. So when you emulate these old systems, they'll ramp one of your CPU cores to 100% whether you're actually using the emulator or not. Parparita used existing Basilisk II features to reduce CPU usage, only requiring full performance when "there was user input or a screen refresh was required." Infinite Mac won't run later releases of classic Mac OS (including 8.5, 8.6, and 9) because those releases ran exclusively on PowerPC Macs, dropping support for the old Motorola 68000-based processors. Emulators like QEMU are capable of emulating PowerPC Macs, but (at least as far as I am aware) there are no easy browser-based implementations that exist. Not yet, anyway.
Beginning with a late 2017 browser-based port of the Basilisk II emulator, Parparita wanted to install old apps to more faithfully re-create the experience of using an old Mac, but he wanted to do it without requiring huge downloads or running as a separate program as the Macintosh.js project does. To solve the download problem, Parparita compressed the disk image and broke it up into 256K chunks that are downloaded on demand rather than up front. "Along with some old fashioned web optimizations, this makes the emulator show the Mac's boot screen in a second and be fully booted in 3 seconds, even with a cold HTTP cache," Parparita wrote.
CPU usage was another issue. Old operating systems and processors didn't really distinguish between active and idle processor states -- your computer was either on or off. So when you emulate these old systems, they'll ramp one of your CPU cores to 100% whether you're actually using the emulator or not. Parparita used existing Basilisk II features to reduce CPU usage, only requiring full performance when "there was user input or a screen refresh was required." Infinite Mac won't run later releases of classic Mac OS (including 8.5, 8.6, and 9) because those releases ran exclusively on PowerPC Macs, dropping support for the old Motorola 68000-based processors. Emulators like QEMU are capable of emulating PowerPC Macs, but (at least as far as I am aware) there are no easy browser-based implementations that exist. Not yet, anyway.
Links for reference. They are missing in TFS (Score:5, Informative)
https://system7.app/ [system7.app] for Mac OS 7.
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Some games (e.g., Prince of Persia) don't work and require specifc setups. :(
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Prince of Persia worked fine for me all the way up to MacOS 8.6 at least on 68k and PPC Macs. I wouldn't give it as an example of a game that's finnicky about your setup.
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Hmm, their games work in your web browser? Interesting.
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I haven't tried in this browser-based emulator. I've actually never had good experiences with Basilisk II at all, so I wouldn't have high hopes for it. Prince of Persia is just a game that I remember surviving OS updates and underlying hardware changes very well over the years. If it doesn't work in this emulator, I'd put it down to bad/inaccurate emulation, not Prince of Persia being finnicky.
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I have to say this runs a whole lot better than QEMU and somehow does it in a browser via scripting. WTF
It seems to have more compatibility issues though.
Do you mean "faster" or "crashes less" or "less CPU" than QEMU, or what? And what compatibility issues are you experiencing? (Thanks for info.)
Cloudintosh.com (Score:2)
Spaceship Warlock, with sound... (Score:3)
Please.
Thank you.
(What is needed, specifically, is the updated version of either the CD or the patcher, long lost, that fixed the audio on 68040 Macs, where the program runs much better but audio is bad because of changes in System 7.5.1 or 2. Trying to find that patcher, or a correct CD, is next to impossible. I own the older version, v1.1.1, but never had gotten the patched version, v1.1.2. So I can't get it running properly on newer emulators.)