Older OS's atop 10.3 (7.6.1-9.2.1)

[boicraig]

I have a new 12" iBook G4 / 1GHz / 30GB / 768MB / AirPort Extreme (which I love so much, i'd sleep with it if my boyfriend would tolerate it ...he already dislikes Airport in bed, lol). It came with 10.3.5 installed along with classic.

Now on Wintel box (P4 3.06HT GHz / 200GB / 1GB RAM / AIW Radeon 9600) I use(d) software like Basilisk II and PearPC untill I got my iBook. I wanted to know if there was a way to run older os's in a window, like 7.6 or 8.5. Basicly I want Basilisk II for OS X. I like some of my older apps that I dont want to run with classic, I want a "Virtual Mac" inside of my Mac. Any ideas? Or do I ramble too much.

Thanx,
Craig

[staypuft]

Well, I'm not sure what is available now... but Mac on Linux should do what you want with it's next release. I say next release because the developer noted at the release of the current version that Mac on Linux would soon run on OS X and not just on PPC Linux.

http://www.maconlinux.org/news.html

I have no idea when the next version will be released, but from the developer's history of releases it could be several months away.

[AHunter3]

The following are available to you, although with the exception of Classic you'll need the ROMs just as you would to run them on a PC:

Classic (duh!): MacOS 9.2.2 and nothing but; runs at rull speed instead of emulating a PPC CPU; no Finder though, and moderately integrated into the host OS X environment. Does not have to boot from diskimage (although it can), and has access to networking via pass-thru from OS X as well as limited access to printers using OS 9.2.2 printer drivers; some limited access to various peripheral devices also.

SheepShaver (Aqua port or source code): MacOS 8.6, MacOS 9.0, possibly 9.1; runs at full speed instead of emulating a PPC CPU, just like the Classic environment. For functions requiring the actual MacOS 8/9 Finder (e.g., extensions that provide functionality through the Finder) or apps that worked under OS 8 but broke under the later OS 9, SheepShaver is a good alternative to Classic.

Basilisk II (Aqua port, or X11 available for build under Fink): MacOS 7.0 thru 7.6 (68K apps only). Rumor has it that older versions of Basilisk, still available, are backwards-compatible with System 6 but I couldn't ever get it to work. I found the Aqua port unstable but the X11 version is nice.

Mini vMac (Aqua port): System 0.97 thru System 7.5 (24 bit mode black and white only, 4 MB RAM limit). The limits are a bit confining for running System 7 stuff — Basilisk is better for that — but it's a very good emulator for the older stuff, going all the way back to the OS that shipped in January of '84.

Aside from Classic, none of these emulators properly supports networking, printing, or the driving of peripheral devices. You get mouse and keyboard, that's about it. All three of them boot from diskimages.

The PC version of Basilisk will run at usable speed under VirtualPC using an older, more lightweight Windows OS such as NT, and the PC version is networkable. Source code is available for the ethernet drivers for SheepShaver, developed for use on Unix, and again rumor has it that you can compile them to work with the Mac version of SheepShaver but, again, I had no success.

[boicraig]

I can't believe I forgot about SheepShaver...my faithful x86 Linux companion...

Thanks for all the progy's.

Craig