1991 Macintosh Quadra with Mac OS 8.1 as an Electron App

https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js

by yboris • 6 years ago

556 154 6 years ago

github.com

asveikau2• 6 years ago

Somehow I thought OS 8 was the first major release to be PowerPC only. Wikipedia says they cut off 68K in 8.5 though.

virtue3• 6 years ago

likewise, I had a powerPC running on 7.x and 8.x. ooof, takes me back.

asveikau2• 6 years ago

My friend had a power mac 6100 with system 7.1. It seemed pretty awesome at the time.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

8.0 and 8.1 do require an '040, cutting off any MacⅡ or 1xx-series PowerBook. It's especially important to have access to OS 8.1 for HFS+ filesystem support!

sabellito• 6 years ago

  you'll find various games and demos preinstalled, thanks to an old MacWorld Demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons.

Oh this is not just looks, which would already be nice, but it actually runs stuff.

setgree• 6 years ago

Are all these games abandonware? Even if not, I can’t imagine anyone pursuing a legal case, but it would be the kind of thing I worried about.

dylan6042• 6 years ago

It was stated that they originated from a MacWorld demo disc, so the companies were fine with giving the software away.

indrax• 6 years ago

Demo CD's would often feature shareware versions of software.

dimitar• 6 years ago

They are from a demo CD, their whole point was to encourage distribution

tambourine_man2• 6 years ago

It’s hard to explain the excitement that those CDs packed to newer generations. The internet was 14.4 or 33.6kbps. My HD had 250MB.

That meant that 650MB was just colossal. Thousands of exquisite icons, games, productivity, utilities, etc. It was vast.

Besides, the drivers were 2X or 4X, so it really took you a while to browse the whole thing. Every reading noise would correspond to another portion of the screen being partially painted, something to look forward to.

IggleSniggle4• 6 years ago

I swear I'm into computers because stuff took forever. Listening to that floppy drive, listening to that hard drive, watching that loading bar fill, swapping out the disk, anticipation and excitement growing ever greater. The result maybe wasn't that important, but the PROMISE of the result...that was special.

Same thing hit again later with Napster and building up collections of albums. I didn't even care about the music, but those loading bars hit a primal spot of "acquire," "forbidden fruit," and "anticipatory glee."

duopixel• 6 years ago

MacFormat, a UK based magazine with a CD full of shareware and demos, would unexplainingly appear every month at a magazine shop in my hometown of Puebla, Mexico, at around ‘94-98.

Without a doubt I would have a different career should I have not have access to this information.

This is what I do today https://method.ac

josh2600• 6 years ago

This was the first graphical user interface I saw as a kid. Thank you for the trip down memory lane.

aduitsis• 6 years ago

The graphical user interface still looks gorgeous! And it brings me a slight shudder that the look and feel might be more consistent that what we have today, even on the Mac.

athenot• 6 years ago

Right until you open the AppleCD Audio Player… Music apps never followed the UI guidelines. :(

projektfu• 6 years ago

Q: Does it run my favorite game?

A: Even a Mac Plus runs Glider.

gaze2• 6 years ago

glider really was an incredibly fun game. Still a favorite of mine.

savoytruffle3• 6 years ago

Glider Pro probably didn't run well on a 68040. Of course with this emulator, speed is irrelevant if a copy can be located.

ErikAugust• 6 years ago

Glider. And Shufflepuck for good measure.

codecamper• 6 years ago

Shufflepuck!? Really?????

archgoon• 6 years ago

Title: Quadra, not Quandra.

dang• 6 years ago

Fixed. Thanks!

caiobegotti• 6 years ago

Downloading it right now! But...

Can I connect to the Internet? No. For what it's worth, the web was quite different 30 years ago - and you wouldn't be able to open even Google. However, Internet Explorer and Netscape are installed [...]

If IE and Netscape are available I'd assume this would be alright, unless it's some Electron thingy going on... how's that so?

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

This may be helpful [1]. It's not exactly modern but far more up-to-date than IE and NS. Last updated 2014 I think [2].

[1]. https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classilla

Lammy2• 6 years ago

Classilla requires a PowerPC and CarbonLib, and this machine is an emulated 68040. The best browser you can get is probably iCab, but even then it won't display many modern pages. Think of how many sites require TLS 1.2 to do anything at all.

mattl• 6 years ago

Seems like the author is conflating the web and the Internet?

duskwuff• 6 years ago

I suspect the real problem is that implementing SLiRP in Javascript was more work than the author wanted to take on.

The emulator this is based on (Basilisk II) does support networking, FWIW.

sbierwagen3• 6 years ago

Certainly they can be installed on the VM, doesn't mean that the VM has network drivers installed.

Separately, very old browsers only talk HTTP 1.0 (No Host: header support, so they can't connect to non-dedicated servers) and no modern ciphersuites. (Can't connect to HSTS servers that disallow insecure ciphers)

anthk5• 6 years ago

But they support Gopher. And Clazilla exists.

hnlmorg• 6 years ago

HTTP 1.1 was released before Mac OS 8 so I'd be surprised if the installed browsers didn't have header support (shared hosting was already common when I used to support Mac OS 8 systems and those users certainly never had a problem).

TLS would be a bigger issue at the protocol layer and with the web moving to HTTPS everywhere, you'd expect a great deal of sites not to load.

On the rendering side, HTML 5, CSS 3 etc weren't around. In fact I don't even think HTML 4 was around (or if it was, it would have been extremely new so still unlikely to be well supported -- remember how long it took browsers to pass the ACID tests?). Back then it was still common to use framesets and tables for formatting.

Ironically, you'd probably get a better experience elinks or lynx.

rzzzt• 6 years ago

There was a project floating around recently that rendered the website as an image using a modern browser backend, transmitted it back to any old browser (was demonstrated using IE5, I think), and also mapped mouse clicks to the appropriate locations in the document so the page remained more or less interactive. The UI looked like an extra navigation bar.

Can't remember the name, though (and it's also hard to search for).

edit: browser history to the rescue, it's https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice

anthk5• 6 years ago

You could be surprised on which browsers does Google still work. It will work under IE5 and Windows 98 for example.

sbierwagen3• 6 years ago

Really? When was that last tested? I wouldn't expect google.com in 2020 to support SSL2.0, what with MITM downgrade attacks.

dylan6042• 6 years ago

i wonder what sites like APOD would do. they have intentionally left that site as a simple HTML1.0 layout to not wreck compatibility

kanobo2• 6 years ago

Projects like these remind me that there are people in this world live in a different intellectual plane than us. For them, time probably moves slowly and the average person's intellect must surely amuse them. Because how is it possible for this to be made by one human?

steviedotboston3• 6 years ago

This is really just a repackaging of work thats already been done. It uses the BasiliskII emulator which was compiled to Javascript with Emscripten by someone else a few years ago.

Still pretty cool but not some crazy technological feat.

kanobo2• 6 years ago

Oh, that would nice to include in the README - changes my entire perception of this project. Thanks for the context!

felixrieseberg5• 6 years ago

Author here. You're 100% right, I do consider Basilisk and the Emscripten compiler to be the "real" work here. I added that in a Credits file in the repo, the app, and even _in_ the virtual machine - because I think that's important to know.

gaze2• 6 years ago

don't sell yourself short.

lostmyoldone• 6 years ago

Maybe not this project is the best example aa other have pointed out, but oh yeah, people like that exist.

If you want to mildly astonished of project(s) in a similar vein, look at all the stuff Fabrice Bellard have made! It's really quite impressive.

IggleSniggle4• 6 years ago

Seconded. That guy is great. I've been following the QuickJS project with great interest.

coldnose• 6 years ago

Like that GAN that simulates Pac-Man, this is an exciting new level of inefficiency I couldn't even conceive of a couple decades ago.

Twixes• 6 years ago

We need to go deeper! Soon we'll have a machine learning algorithm conjure Mac OS by calculating the next frame to display, taking into account user input, based on watching thousands of hours of normal Mac OS usage

sillysaurusx• 6 years ago

Weirdly I don't think there's a machine learning algorithm that can actually do this. pix2pix loses cohesiveness quickly, and GANs require mostly aligned input to make any sense of reality. BigGAN is the closest, yet even that doesn't seem to work very well for continuity.

peterkelly2• 6 years ago

Prediction: Spinning beach ball (92% confidence)

dunnevens• 6 years ago

That's brilliant. Gave me the funny thought that GPT-3 could solve one problem we used to argue about back in the day. What's the right order for loading extensions? I don't remember the details, but I do remember my old office would discuss it endlessly. The black magic and superstitions to keep the system going as long as possible before the inevitable crash. Maybe, 25+ years later, there could be a definitive answer.

pjettter• 6 years ago

You must like running Doom on Windows 95 inside Minecraft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960028

bwip• 6 years ago

This is really nice. A little easier and more modern for someone just looking to run retro games than minivmac or qemu.

If you're looking for games or other software for this check out the always excellent Macintosh Garden. https://macintoshgarden.org/

dilap• 6 years ago

Alas, it doesn't have Excel on it. I want to test my theory that Excel 5 in an old mac emulator would be more snappy for basic input tasks than Excel 16 native on a MBP.

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

Looks like you either get the German version or an alpha 5.0 version [1].

[1]. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x

balaksakrionon2• 6 years ago

On the bright side we may be saved from just such an infuriating realization

ebg132• 6 years ago

I have a theory that modern Excel forces the display to redraw too much. It's the only thing I can think of that would cause my 2018 MBP CPU to peg at 100% while (jankily) resizing the window on my external monitor unless I play games with the OS resolution settings to disable retina upscaling.

orbitingpluto• 6 years ago

As soon as you start to vary, accidentally or not, the heights of cells, you're in for a bad time.

Sorting large datasets with varying cell heights will bog down your system. Force uniform cell height and sorting can easily be twenty times quicker.

snazz• 6 years ago

I feel like old stuff always feels way slower than I remembered when I revisit it years later. I couldn't believe how slow of an iPhone I lived with when I booted my old one up recently.

Plus, most of modern Excel's apparent slowness comes from the animated text input and the animations between cells in the spreadsheet. I think that the text animations could be safely removed, but animations that give users a sense of relativity on the 2D plane when they make movements are very useful for UX.

jonpurdy• 6 years ago

As someone who regularly uses old Mac emulators on modern hardware, most programs are hundreds of times faster (despite emulation overhead). As someone who regularly uses an actual old PowerBook 2400 from 1997 for fun, I can say that Photoshop 4 is by far snappier on that than the latest Photoshop CS on my MacBook Pro...

IggleSniggle4• 6 years ago

This is depressing, but hardly surprising. The dedication to "just ship it" has really built up. The market pressure to build efficient software approaches zero.

All software will approach "human speed," whether it's adding two integers or getting near instant predictions from a GAN. All available resources will be used until it's "good enough. Just ship it," and efficiencies will multiple as in any natural selection: defensive measures like "confusing code," and "unrelated system fails when this one is changed" allowing mostly harmless dumb code to survive and propagate.

Some intrepid learner comes to study the code one day. "Huh, I guess this is how you're supposed to do it. Seems kinda weird but I'm sure it was written this way for a reason. It's been like this for a decade!" And so they copy the procedure into their greenfield project.

Efficient code will always be sacrificed to the god of "Just Ship It" as long as the overall performance is "Good enough." And why not?

felixrieseberg5• 6 years ago

It's worth a try ;-)

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/195-microsoft-excel-1-03...

boogies2• 6 years ago

So basically https://bellard.org/jslinux/ but with a macOS iso and Electron packaging?

wmf• 6 years ago

JSLinux doesn't emulate 68K, but something like that.

balaksakrionon2• 6 years ago

My experience with the .deb version seems to be stuck during startup on "Loading emulator dependencies"

Glyptodon• 6 years ago

Same for me.

Arathorn• 6 years ago

It's got Photoshop 3 on it! And it's... faster than it was on my old Quadra? This is awesome :D

EamonnMR• 6 years ago

This is extremely cool. Would be interested to see OS9 too; the emulator situation is kind of a hassle at the moment.

Applejinx• 6 years ago

I'd like to file a bug report: running Photoshop and using my wacom tablet, the lines are somewhat twitchy. On the other hand, it's responsive as hell: how nice to upgrade to a Quadra running inside Electron inside Mojave inside a pretty gnarly iMac Pro :)

I wish my old Performa 575 booted that fast or ran Photoshop 3 that well. I am old enough that I started with Photoshop 3 on such a machine, so this really was a trip for me. How utterly cool.

Now if I could run Photoshop 3 natively on THIS box… hoo boy would that be responsive.

retreatguru• 6 years ago

Yikes! I started with Digital Darkroom which I think was a Photoshop precursor.

cenal2• 6 years ago

I was a Macromedia fanboy. Photoshop is still a second class citizen in my mind to Fireworks. Even though Adobe felt different and nuked their best editor I still run it.

girvo• 6 years ago

Amen! I ran my entire first business from Fireworks. Damn was it excellent. I hated what Adobe did to Macromedia’s products after they bought them.

glaberficken• 6 years ago

In the mid 2000s I spent years converting bitmap mockups into html table designs using Fireworks (using the slice->export workflow). My managers were perpetually in awe of how much faster I churned out the work when compared with the Photoshop wizards we had in the house.

Really miss Fireworks.

perardi5• 6 years ago

Base hard disk size of a 1991 Quadra 700: 80 MB

Size of this .app on my Mac: 866 MB

Yes, I know, it’s silly to snark on Electron app sizes by this point. You want to see some real bloat? Let’s compare the included Adobe Photoshop 3 and Adobe Photoshop 2020:

Photoshop 3.0.5: 8.9 MB

Photoshop 21.2.1: 2.76 GB

Now that is some bloat.

baddox• 6 years ago

Isn’t the “Electron bloat” just that a version of Chrome has to be bundled in, and shouldn’t that only be like 25 MB?

perardi5• 6 years ago

Well let’s explore the app package.

Electron Framework takes up 174 MB.

Past that, the big one is “disk” in Contents/Resources/app/src/ — which I will be completely honest, I don’t know what that is exactly. Is it a disk image? If so, does it have to be set to a reasonably large size at build time so you don’t run out of space in the emulator?

felixrieseberg5• 6 years ago

Hi, author here! This is silly, but I'm allocating the entire size of the _virtual_ disk on your actual hard drive. There's probably a smarter way to do this, but that's how it is right now. PRs would be lovely!

monadic2• 6 years ago

Have you considered using qcow?

Sadly I’m not terribly knowledgable if this is easily implementable or not but theoretically you don’t need to allocate all the disk space, just the parts you’ve written to.

II2II2• 6 years ago

Some of that bloat is legitimate, or at least dictated by consumer expectations.

Consider graphics resources: modern screens typically 9 to 16 times as many pixels per square inch. Even though Macintosh computers have always been known for their graphical interfaces and use in publishing, user interface elements did not always exploit increased colour depth in the early 1990's. A graphics resource in a modern application can use an additional 4 to 32 times more memory just for colour. Software also tends to incorporate more graphical elements these days, thus adding more bulk. We shouldn't be surprised by Photoshop being 310 times larger. Since people tend to notice the visual quality of software, whether it enhances the software or is pure cosmetics, it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Other aspects of software will also influence its growth. Modern software tends to support more languages and regional variations in how data (numbers, time, etc.) are represented. This virtually always produces a noticeably larger program. More features means more code and associated data, while optimization tends to focus upon speed at the expense of size. Again, programs will be larger. When it improves accessibility and functionality, this "bloat" is a good thing.

I am not saying that bloat is always a good thing and I appreciate how much developers of the past could do so much with so little. My favourite example are early versions of Clarisworks, where a stripped down installation could fit on a single floppy disk while offering a word processor, spreadsheet, database, paint program, vector illustration, and telecommunications software. It also addressed the needs of most home and home office users, even considered in the current context. That being said, most people would consider the presentation stark by modern standards and anyone who takes the time to actually learn how to use their software would find the features skimpy.

perardi5• 6 years ago

Oh I know and accept that, it’s just always a little funny to see that much of a difference in size.

I use Photoshop every day, and I know that features added since version 3 that I use take up size:

* Layer styles

* Adjustment layers

* Smart objects

* Camera RAW

* Machine learning selection tools

* Generator for assets

So they have added real, valuable features for me. And I don’t particularly care about application size. Just funny to think you couldn’t even fit Photoshop on a CD at this point.

fmakunbound2• 6 years ago

Photoshop 3.0.5: 8.9 MB Photoshop 21.2.1: 2.76 GB
Now that is some bloat.

Yeah, but you're roughly 310 times more productive now.

chrisco255• 6 years ago

Oregon Trail should be mandatory curriculum for passing the 3rd grade. Kids these days don't even know about dysentery.

the_af3• 6 years ago

Agreed. And if that's not enough, there's always the retro remake Organ Trail -- as brutal as the original, but with zombies!

felixrieseberg5• 6 years ago

Developer here! I'm so excited to see that people like this toy. I'm happy to answer any questions, if you have any.

But first, some important credits: Emulator: Basilisk II, a 68k Macintosh emulator, by Christian Bauer et al, modified and compiled with Emscripten by James Friend. Installed software from vintage computing archives: WinWorldPC, Macintosh Garden, and Macintosh Repository.

paultopia• 6 years ago

This is so cool!

keyle• 6 years ago

Beyond how cool this is, I appreciate the sorry part :)

brian_herman__• 6 years ago

this is one of the best posts of mac history on hacker news in a while someone should try this on their developer arm mac

a_band• 6 years ago

This made me so happy. Thank you for doing it!

tikwidd• 6 years ago

how easy is this to get running in an actual browser, rather than Electron*? I want to host some Hypercard stacks (some of which need Quicktime support, hence colour Mac emulation).

thomond• 6 years ago

It appears to use this as the emulator: https://jamesfriend.com.au/basilisk-ii-classic-mac-emulator-... You can just directly use that instead.

felixrieseberg5• 6 years ago

James Friend is the one who got the C compiled with Emscripten, and as long as you're able to serve an entire disk image from a server (and don't crumble under the bandwidth), a browser is good enough.

Electron is only here to ensure that state is saved (save a game, quit the app, start the app, your save game is still there) and to make the mounting of disk images and transfer of files from your local machine super easy.

mzs• 6 years ago

Cool, but isn't this problematic? Maybe you should have the user provide a ROM

https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/blob/master/s...

simias2• 6 years ago

That's indeed probably a bad idea if the author wants the repository to last, embedding unlicensed content is always a risk. Morally I'd argue that it's absurd that such old software isn't in the public domain yet, but legally it's pretty clear that this can't be redistributed freely, although I doubt that Apple is likely to enforce it.

vaxman• 6 years ago

This running MacWord+MacExcel in 1997 would have prevented the dystopia from coming true. (Of course, the dystopia is necessary to even conceive of doing this!)

Now put down the keyboard, raise your arms slowly and back away from the NodeJS interpreter. ;)

cornett• 6 years ago

Love playing with this! Thanks for creating it. Fun to see my name again in the secret About box credits. :)

barochoc• 6 years ago

This is amazing. Thank you. Now to find a few of my favourite old games!

kaurryal• 6 years ago

Hey

mambodog• 6 years ago

if electron is not to your taste, you can run the emulator in your browser here: https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/

coincidently today firefox 79 was released, which brings back support for SharedArrayBuffer, which is a key part of the browser port of this emulator

IggleSniggle4• 6 years ago

Just feel like mentioning that the "old" version (without SharedArrayBuffer) works just fine on my iPhone 7 Safari browser. What a time to be alive.

cdubzzz• 6 years ago

It's crazy to me that somehow "Alley 19 Bowling" has been lingering around in my brain for 20+ years. All of a sudden I feel like I played it yesterday.

funman7• 6 years ago

Why the “I’m Sorry” ?

peterkelly2• 6 years ago

I miss the spatial Finder

ngcc_hk• 6 years ago

The thing is a developer software and go back to the future.

Pascal ...

0xDEEPFAC• 6 years ago

Imagine the system requirements of this versus the original OS ; )

Cool toy though!

philliphaydon• 6 years ago

I was convinced when I saw "Oregon Trail"

plun9• 6 years ago

I love playing with the MacinTalk (text-to-speech) voices. Be sure to enable talking alerts in the Speech control panel.

orionblastar2• 6 years ago

Any chance of emulating a PowerMac running MacOSX using PearPC or something that emulates PowerPC? It is so old that Apple should not care about it running in an emulator since they are moving from Intel to ARM.

anthk5• 6 years ago

Last Qemu suports PowerMacs. Check Emaculation.

orionblastar2• 6 years ago

Thanks

gcbw3• 6 years ago

Where exactly is the disk image? can't find it on the repo (also, github redesign removed file size?!?!)

cgufus• 6 years ago

Does it theoretically also run A/UX ? I remember the Quadra machines were able to do so...

trevorg16• 6 years ago

Unlikely, since it's based on Basillisk II and so does not actually emulate the MMU [1].

1: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=34664#3466...

mietek2• 6 years ago

Shoebill is an emulator built specifically to run A/UX.

https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill

denki39• 6 years ago

Amazing! Seeing the interface with an auto CRT filter within my eyes.

drrotmos• 6 years ago

Finally! A way for a 68k Mac to use more than 1 GB of memory! Jokes aside, this is a neat tech demo :)

adamzegelin• 6 years ago

Missing the best Mac classic game: Lemmings!

tomduncalf• 6 years ago

Ha, this is pretty cool. I remember the Macs of this era always seemed so exotic to me as a young PC user. I had one friend whos family had a Quadra and the OS seemed so cool and exciting and colourful the one time I used it. I also clearly remember how the floppy drive ejected with a motor rather than manually!

Even now, the OS seems really thoughtfully designed, you can clearly see the lineage to MacOS of today.

Small bug report, my cursor seems to jump around a bit after I've been running it for a few minutes!

theandrewbailey• 6 years ago

The first time I encountered a Mac was in school. Because I had experienced cassette players eating tapes (along with other forms of device failure), I was never comfortable with any floppy drive without an eject button. Ditto for those CD drives, too.

mnl• 6 years ago

A few comments. This is a port of Basilisk II. If someone feels uncomfortable using an Electron app, they can still install plain Basilisk, which works just fine.

I don't know if you can distribute OS 8.1, but there certainly might be a legal issue with the original ROMs. You're including one and the thing is people used to look elsewhere for those. They're easy to find, and there are tools to dump them if you happen to own such a Mac which would make this issue disappear.

About some posts here. I've never had decent performance with Hypercard in Basilisk II, on the other hand Mini vMac works great for that.

Lemmings run nicely in Executor, which happens to be a nowadays free compatibility layer for 68K Mac software that doesn't need neither a dumped ROM nor any copy of the Macintosh System Software.

swiley• 6 years ago

Holy cow. The online version is more responsive than most of the native apps on my phone.

fmakunbound2• 6 years ago

Anyone recall why some applications on Mac OS have a stylized "f" suffix?

mietek2• 6 years ago

“RandomMacApp ƒ” stood for “RandomMacApp’s folder”.

fideloper• 6 years ago

My father had a Quadra 610 that I used for hours when growing up. I have some huge nostalgia for Hellcats Over the Pacific and A-10 Attack!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Attack!

Wonder if I can play these@

aeries• 6 years ago

A-10 Attack! was a truly wonderful game- the flight model was so impressive.

jakearmitage• 6 years ago

Sure, great.

Let's take a fully functional emulator that works well on mac OS (https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7361) and all 3 major platforms (https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basilisk_ii) and port it to JS using Emscripten, and then wrap that into an Electron app, and ship it again on mac OS.

Is this an exercise in how many layers of abstraction one can do things?

1991 Macintosh Quadra with Mac OS 8.1 as an Electron App

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