All OldOs fans will know that there is little more satisfying than getting that old computer or Operating System up and running. What's even better than getting that old version of NT up and running is running an OS that shouldn't work; that wasn't intended to work on your hardware.
What's in this How-To?In this how-to, you be guided through the full process of setting upUnder OS X or macOS, software written for the 'classic' Mac OS (i.e. Versions 6 through 9) can only be run through software that emulates Macintosh hardware from the 1980s and 1990s. The most advanced of these emulator programs is SheepShaver. System 6 (also referred to as System Software 6) is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers. It was released in 1988 by Apple Computer and was part of the classic Mac OS line of operating systems. System 6 was shipped with various Macintosh computers until it was succeeded by System 7 in 1991. The name itself is a play on 'ShapeShifter', a 68k Mac emulator for the AmigaOS. The hardworking open-source programmers behind the SheepShaver project explain: It enables you to run PowerPC Classic Mac OS software on your computer, even if you are using a different operating system like Mac OS X for Intel. “Classic” was not an emulator and hence ran at native speeds. 2) Semantic: Mac OS 9 is not “Classic”. The first is an OS version, the second is a virtualization application/ambient provided by Apple with Mac OS X and previously with Rhapsody on PPC chips. Edited 2006-08-21 17:17.
MacOS 7.5.3 and optionally the 7.5.5 update on Basilisk II, the freeware Mac II emulator designed by Christian Bauer, from scratch using only freeware, downloadable items. The end result will be a fully working MacOS system.Tools:To accomplish these tasks you will need to download the following sets of tools:
- Aladdin StuffIt Expander for Windows 5.0 (It is important to use a version such as this as the new version offered on Aladdin Systems website does not support the decompression of MacBinary files under Windows, and we will be doing that here)
- HFV Explorer (A free utility to use HFS volumes under Windows)
- Basilisk II Mac Emulator (Windows NT/9x Version)
- Install CD Image Part: (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)
- System 7.5.5 Update for 7.5.3, Disk: (1)(2)(3)
- iCab Net Browser (the only browser in development for 68k Mac's - it's fast and it's not MS :) )
- WinImage Trial Edition (This is only if you are a purist who prefers using slow floppy disks compared ultra-fast disk images ;) )
You can download a Mac Quadra 650 ROM here: Download. Note that you may only download the ROM if you have an actual Macintosh. Using the ROM without owning a Macintosh is illegal.
Method
1) Preparation:
Obviously, the first step is to download the files that are required and any optional extras you wish to use in your emulated or Macintosh system. Once you have downloaded all the files you will be using, follow the instructions below and you will soon be looking at the smiley Mac that either know and love, or will soon learn to love!
Install the applications for Windows, and create a directory to keep all the Apple files you will be using later.
2) Start Up Disk:
Run StuffIt Expander for Windows. You will be greeted with a screen like the one shown below.
Locate the file you downloaded earlier called 'Network_Access_Disk_7.5.sea.bin', and drag it into the StuffIt Expander Window. This will decompress the file and create a new directory below the one in which 'Network_Access_Disk_7.5.sea.bin' was stored. This will be called 'Network Access', and contains The Network Access Disk Readme and a file called Network Access.Image. It is the latter which we shall concern ourselves with.
2 a) Writing the Boot floppy;
To physically write a boot floppy for Basilisk II then use WinImage Trial Edition that you downloaded earlier. From the 'File' Menu, select 'Open'. Select to show all files in the dialogue at the base of the window. Open the newly made Network Access folder, and Select to open the 'Network Access.Image' file.
When you open this Image, NOTHING will be displayed in the WinImage Window, as shown below, DON'T WORRY ABOUT THIS. The Image is there.
From the disk menu, select to write a disk.
Insert a blank 1.44Mb floppy disk into the disk drive you gave ticked under the 'Disk' menu.
You have created your startup disk for a Macintosh Computer!
3) Preparing Hard Files for Basilisk II:
Open the program HFV Explorer from the folder you installed it to. Now, to format a new Hard Drive File for use in Basilisk II. For a start, lets format a 500 Megabyte Apple HFS Hard Drive. In the 'File' Menu in the HFV Explorer Window, select the option to 'Format New Volume'
The Options selected in the Picture above will create a new 'Hard Disk' for use in the Emulated Macintosh. The 'Mac' will see this as a 500Mb Hard Disk Partition named System7, whereas it is really a file, stored in D:system7.hfv. Get the picture? (NOTE: The volume names and file names do not have to match, I merely do this for the sake of consistency. For example, if you name the file the same as the volume name in the emulated environment, it is easier to keep yourself right when opening volumes in HFV Explorer.)
Locate all 19 parts of the System 7.5.3 Install CD Image you downloaded earlier. Copy all these items to your Macintosh Disk volume (System7 in this example by dragging them to it). It is a good idea to create folders from within HFV Explorer in the same way as you would in Windows Explorer, just to keep track of all the files. Copy all the Macintosh files you will be using later on at this point as well.
Help! I downloaded HFVExplorer and they won't copy for me, I just drag them into the disk but nothing happens, if anyone knows how to correct this e-mail me at borstalbreakout@gmail.com
When the above dialogue is shown, always select 'Automatic; let the program decide' and 'OK to All' as is shown above.
4) Configuring the Basilisk II Emulator:
Once you have unzipped Basilisk II to your chosen folder, open the program 'BasiliskIIGUI.exe'. This is the configuration utility for Basilisk II. Since Basilisk II emulates a a Macintosh system with a 68020, 30 or 40 Central Processing Unit, you will need a ROM file from one of these computers. You are only allowed to use a ROM from the computer you legally own. There are detailed instructions in the Basilisk Installation regarding dumping a rom from a real 68k Mac. There is a Quadra ROM available from the Downloads Section for Quadra owners only, and is provided for convenience only.
In the 'General' Tab:
set the Boot Driver to '0: Boot from first bootable volume'
Set the Model ID to '14 (Mac Quadra 900)' (No matter what ROM you are using, the Windows port of BII is optimized to use this model ID.
Set the CPU to 68040, and check the use of FPU Emulation.
In the 'Memory' Tab:
Set the RAM size to something that won't cripple your PC, but won't leave the Mac short either. 64 Mb is fine for most 68k work.
Click browse at the 'ROM file path' section to find your ROM file.
Information about the ROM will be displayed in the box at the base of the Window, if you 'Corrupt' or 'Unsupported', then you have incorrectly obtained the ROM from your Macintosh.
In the 'Screen' Tab:
Completely your preference. I always like to set the 'Colors' value to 16 bit or 32 bit though.
Next, move to the 'Disk' Tab:
Firstly, click on browse, enable all files in the file types field, and find the file 'Network Access.image'.
Next, find the Hard Disk File you created earlier.
Set the Network Install Image to hive higher boot priority by putting it up the list.
Your end result should appear similar to this:
Go to the floppy and CD tabs to configure which of your host PCs removable disks you want to use in the same manner.
We are now ready to boot the Emulated Mac.
5)First Boot
When you boot your Macintosh for the first time, the best thing to do is to copy the system folder from the Network Access disk Image to your System hardfile.
You can then, if you chose to do so, shut the Mac down from the special menu, and the remove the Network Access Disk from list of installed disks in the BII GUI program. This will serve to make things slightly tidier, and also test if your copy of the System Folder was successful.
When you restart, you are now ready to install System 7.5.3.
Open up the folder in which you imported the 19 Installer part images. In my example, this folder was called 'System 7 Installer'
Double-click to open the first part (the Self Mounting Image or .SMI file).
Agree to the terms of the license. This will mount the image of the CD Installer on the desktop.
Double click to open the CD Image.
You are now ready to install The System Software. You will be greeted with a screen like this one:
From here on in, it is pretty much follow the bouncing ball. However, you should make sure that installation disk is selected as the one you wish to use in BII. Also Select Custom Install. My Setup looked like this:
Chose the components you want to install. I chose pretty much all, except A/Rose under Networking and Extensions, as BII is incompatible with this.
When you have installed the system reboot the 'Mac'.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you wish to install the Macintosh System 7.5.5 update YOU MUST chose 'Easy Install'. There is a bug in the Emulator which causes any custom or other types of installs to fail when updated to 7.5.5.
HOORAY!:
6) Configuring the System
You can now start to install all the optional software you like.
If you are installing The System 7.5.5 Update, it is best to do it now, when there are no applications installed on the system.
To install the Update, you will also need the Disk Copy Application listed above.
Locate the DiskCopy Image and open it. This will mount a floppy disk called Disk Copy onto the dekptop.
Open that image.
Copy the lower file onto the desktop, you will get a warning about a locked disk most likely, this is referring to the disk image. Just click OK.
Now, go to the folder with the update disk images, there are three self extracting archives. Open them all.
You should now have something very similar to the above set up. Drag the three files on the bottom row to the Disk Copy Application we moved to the desktop before.
NOTE: You can again, create update disks to use on a real Mac or for reference. Format three floppies to Mac 1.44Mb and simply copy the contents of the three images shown above to the three diskettes.
Open up the 'disk' Update - 1' and double click on the installer. This will automatically update the system to 7.5.5
CONGRATULATIONS:
The groundwork is now done for making your Macintosh System. The OS is set up and you have a number of Applications installed.
Please visit the download section of OldOS for more high quality Macintosh freeware and abandonware programs updated regularly. :)
- Categories: Apple - HowTo - MacOS - Microsoft - Windows
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Recently, a reader of this blog submitted a comment regarding an earlier post. Following links in the comment, I stumbled upon an article about solutions to the “Appleworks problem”. My interest was piqued. What WAS “the Appleworks problem” and how DO you solve it?
The “Appleworks problem” turned out to be fairly easily stated. If you have an older Appleworks based document that you need to regain access to, how do you do this if you don’t have an older Mac to facilitate that access? The answer? Run a Mac OS 9 emulator on your modern Mac, install Appleworks into the emulator and then use it to recover full access to the document of interest.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it turns out to be anything but simple. Installing and setting up either of the two major Mac OS emulators presently available is a bit of a chore. The curiously named Sheepshaver application is the best supported Mac emulator currently out there. Sheepshaver is followed closely by the equally oddly named Basilisk II. Sheepshaver emulates a PowerPC Macintosh; Basilisk II emulates a 68K Macintosh.
I looked into installing and setting up Sheepshaver on my Intel iMac and quickly found that the number of steps involved, and the amount of work involved in each step, was daunting to say the least. I won’t comment on the effort required to install and set up Basilisk II – I found the idea of an emulated PowerPC Mac far more attractive than the idea of an emulated 68K Mac.
This is where another curiously named package came to the rescue. There are a LOT of curiously named applications in this post! 🙂 “Chubby Bunny” is a pre-configured version of Sheepshaver, with all of the setup already done. What a great idea!
Installing Chubby Bunny is as simple as dropping its executable into your Applications folder (the application is called Classic.app, and it sports the “classic” Classic.app icon – a nice touch) and placing one of the three included disk images into your /Users/Shared folder. That’s pretty much it! Launch Classic.app and Mac OS 9 pops up in all its glory.
Here is a screen shot of Chubby Bunny running Mac OS 9.0.4 (Mac OS 9.0.4 is the highest version of Mac OS 9 supported by Sheepshaver) on my Mac OS X Mavericks 3.4 GHz 27” iMac (click the image to get the full size screenshot).
There are only a small number of preconfigured applications in the Mac OS 9 instance you get this way, and oddly, given how this whole thing started, Appleworks is NOT one of them(!), but you can install more, just as you can with a real Mac OS 9 installation.
That SHOULD be the end of this post – mission accomplished! I now know what the “Appleworks problem” is AND how to solve it, and as an added bonus, I have discovered how to run Mac OS 9 Classic on my modern iMac – Classic on Intel. I was delighted to learn all of this, and wanted to pass it along to you, the readers of this blog.
HOWEVER, I wasn’t entirely pleased with the configuration of Chubby Bunny. Two things didn’t quite meet my needs. The virtual screen size was limited to 1024×768 (I wanted 1280×1024) and the maximum disk image size you could use was limited to just 1.2 GB (a wee bit small for a well-stocked Mac OS 9 system in my opinion – I wanted something much larger). The rest of this post concerns the resolution of these two issues.
Installing a larger disk image into Chubby Bunny turned out to be quite easy. The three supplied disk images are standard Mac OS X .dmg files, and are simply recognized by name. When Chubby Bunny sees a .dmg file in /Users/Shared with one of the names it recognizes, it mounts it as a disk into your Mac OS 9 instance and that is that. Banking on Chubby Bunny not checking anything but the .dmg file name, I created a 12 GB .dmg file using Disk Utility. I gave this new disk image the same name as the Chubby Bunny 1.2 GB disk image, and then replaced the 1.2 GB disk image in /Users/Shared with this new but same-named 12 GB disk image. Bingo! It worked. Chubby Bunny happily mounted the 12 GB disk image into my Mac OS 9 instance and all was well. First problem solved!
Below is screen shot showing a Chubby Bunny Finder window open on the 12 GB disk.
Now onto the screen resolution. This was a much harder nut to crack. While Chubby Bunny’s Mac OS 9 emulator is running, there is a (Mac OS X) menu bar selection that allows the user to adjust preferences. One of those is screen resolution, and the menu allows you to enter pretty much any two numbers you want. Well, this is going to be easy, I thought! I entered 1280 and 1024 and confidently restarted Chubby Bunny. Regrettably, my confidence was misplaced – the virtual desktop still came up at 1024×768. Checking the preferences, I found that my previous entry had disappeared, and once again the maximum choice was 1024×768. I repeated this exercise several times to be sure, but the result was always the same.
Stymied, I reached out (via email) to Chubby Bunny’s author, one Jon Gardner, and asked him if there was any simple way to make preference changes “stick” across restarts. I was not hopeful of getting a response, but much to my surprise and delight, Jon got right back to me. He suggested directly editing the file .sheepshaver_prefs, which is created in your home directory when you run Sheepshaver. There, he indicated, you could adjust video resolution and lots of other things as well.
Excellent. This made perfect sense. I found .sheepshaver_prefs in my home directory, edited in my new video resolution and restarted Chubby Bunny, once again confident that I had now resolved the problem. Once again I was wrong! Chubby Bunny stubbornly came up at 1024×768 again, and didn’t even reflect my newly edited selection of 1280×1024 in the available preferences. I tried this a few times as well, to be very sure the behavior was always the same, and it always was. Some experimentation revealed that no matter WHAT changes I made to .sheepshaver_prefs, they were always returned to the original settings after I ran Chubby Bunny.
This observation led the way for me. Clearly, there had to be a copy of .sheepshaver_prefs INSIDE the Chubby Bunny Classic application file, and the app had to be overwriting the existing .sheepshaver_prefs with this internal copy each time it ran. SO, to fix my problem, all I had to do was find that internal copy and make my changes there. If this sounds complicated or dangerous, don’t worry, it is not. It is actually quite easy.
The inquisitive among you will have long since noticed Mac OS X’s “Show Package Contents” right click context menu selection. This is visible whenever you right click a .app application file. Select “Show Package Contents”, and Finder opens the .app file and does exactly what the name suggests – it shows you the contents of the .app file in a simple directory/file paradigm. The below screen shots show this selection for Chubby Bunny’s Classic.app, and the view that results:
Hmmm… no .sheepshaver_prefs here. Following my instincts, I repeated this step on the COI.app file that you see in the above view. Here is what I saw this time:
Hmmm… once again, no .sheepshaver_prefs. HOWEVER, there was a curious looking file there, simply titled “hih1”. What exactly was THAT file? I dropped it into my favorite Mac OS X text editor (I use the excellent Smultron) and voila! I was rewarded with nothing less than a full copy of .sheepshaver_prefs! I had found what I was looking for.
I edited the 1024 and 768 numbers, making them 1280 and 1024 respectively and saved the file back. I closed up COI.app and then Classic.app and crossing all my fingers and toes, re-launched Classic.app. Success! The virtual desktop came up at 1280×1024 and now even included 1154×862 as a possible selection between 1280×1024 and 1024×768. Second (and last) problem solved.
OK, this then IS now the end of the post. If you want to play with Mac OS 9 on your Intel Mac pick up a copy of Chubby Bunny at
and try it out. If you are happy with the defaults, you are “good to go”. If you want a larger disk, or a larger screen, the notes above should provide the guidance necessary to achieve those results.
Now just before you trundle out and do that, a note about legality. Chubby Bunny incorporates a fully configured copy of Sheepshaver (the COI.app you saw in the steps above includes Sheepshaver.app, with the whole thing renamed to reflect “Classic On Intel”). Sheepshaver requires, and Chubby Bunny thus includes, two pieces of protected Apple Intellectual Property: Mac OS 9.0.4 itself and a Macintosh ROM. You MUST have legal access to both of these yourself if you are to be on the right side of the law when using Chubby Bunny. Practically speaking, this requirement is satisfied in full if you have an old pre Mac OS X Macintosh lying around loaded with Mac OS 9.
Here at the Happy Macs lab, this is not an issue. We literally have almost a dozen or more old Macs in legal residence, two of which are running Mac OS 9. For you however, gentle reader, I cannot say whether this is an issue or not. I will leave that to your good judgement. However, you have been duly notified of your legal obligation!
p.s.> OK, so where DID the name “Sheepshaver” come from??? What an odd name for a Macintosh emulation application! Well, there is a weird sort of geeky logic to the selection of the name. I have read that it is a play on the name “Shape Shifter”, a well-known Mac OS X application that allows users to completely reskin their Mac GUI if they wish to. Sheepshaver sort of does the same thing, but with a twist. It not only reskins the GUI, it takes it back 15 years or so, give or take a year or two here or there. So… Shape Shifter, Sheep Shaver… they both sort of do the same thing, at least from a very abstract perspective. There you go! That is where the name is reputed to have come from, and now you know! Don’t you feel better now? 🙂
Mac Os 9 Emulator Browser
p.p.s> An astute reader of this blog pointed out to me that while the above “urban myth” is correct (SheepShaver *is* named after ShapeShifter), it is not the Mac OS X ShapeShifter skin changing application that is being referenced, but rather an older 68K Mac emulator for Amiga, also called ShapeShifter. If you are curious, you can look into it at:
Mac Os 9 Emulator Raspberry Pi
Thanks to reader “ClassicHasClass” for this valuable update!
Mac Os 9 Emulator Ios
p.p.p.s> Basilisk II? I haven’t got a CLUE where THAT name came from! 🙂