The biggest current difference is that Mini vMac emulates the earliest Macs, while Basilisk II emulates later 680x0 Macs. So what’s the difference between Mini vMac and Basilisk II? The FAQ page for Mini vMac has a great explanation. It’s also open source and unlike Basilisk II is still being maintained. Mini vMac is capable of emulating up to Mac OS 7.5.5. It has a focus on the early Macs with the default build emulating a Macintosh Plus. Mini vMac is a spinoff of the vMac project. It is also open source, however it is no longer being maintained. This is another very popular emulator and a lot of people looking to emulate 68k Macintoshes choose this one. It’s capable of running up to Mac OS 8.1. Originally released in 1997 by the same developer as SheepShaver. Basilisk IIīasilisk II emulates a 68k Macintosh. Mac OS 7.5.2 was released in 1995 and in turn SheepShaver doesn’t fit my criteria of sticking to software and tools available prior to the 1990s.

If you’re interested in running the more recent versions of “Classic” Mac OS this is probably the emulator you should choose. It’s capable of running Mac OS 7.5.2 through 9.0.4. Since then, it has become an open source project. It was originally created for BeOS back in 1998. SheepShaver emulates a Power PC Macintosh. I’ll go over some of the more populator emulators and why I chose the one I did.

Since I no longer have any physical “Classic” Mac hardware I decided to turn to emulation. I chose to only look for tools that were available for Mac prior to the 1990s. I decided for this exploration that I wanted to stick to early Mac software as much as possible. This got me thinking that it might be interesting to spend some time re-learning “Classic” Mac OS app development.Īs I mentioned previously I didn’t really start programming until Mac OS 8 and by then CodeWarrior had solidly cemented itself as the IDE of choice for Mac developers. While System 6 was the first Mac OS version I used, I didn’t start really writing Mac apps until the Mac OS 8 era. I was recently having a conversation with another developer who grew up using Macintosh computers and we were both reminiscing about some of our early development experiences on Mac.

Finally, after the PowerPC transition, I used a Power Macintosh 8500 which ran all of the later versions of “Classic” Mac OS. Then I moved up to a Macintosh IIsi running System 7. I started using a Mac with System 6 on a Macintosh Classic. It includes System 1 all the way up to Mac OS 9.x. This is often referred to as “Classic” Mac OS.

Before macOS, and before OS X, there was just Mac OS.

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