Advanced Mac Substitute is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS

azinman2

This is quite the feat. I’d love to know more about the process to make this, the motivation, how much time was spent, etc.

homarp

how does it compare to executor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)

homarp

related discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40338443

davidfstr

Wine for classic Mac OS? Amazing. Well done.

shermantanktop

But will it run Dark Castle?? Many hours were wasted on that game.

hyperhello

I'd like to see something like Carbon for old apps so that they boot in modern window frames (without the missing Tahoe corners) and can save to files.

hagbard_c

make ams-vnc ./build.pl -i exhibit graft skif minivx xv68k freemountd listen vnc-interact ... Daemon starting up... done. T=0.037s ERROR: OpenDF is unimplemented Hm, doesn't seem to work. Let's try the X11 version: make ams-x11 ./build.pl -i exhibit graft skif minivx xv68k freemountd interact-x11 ... T=0.275s ERROR: OpenDF is unimplemented Nope, it seems to be missing something. OpenDF? All I find is this: https://github.com/PrjEnt/OpenDF , a long-abandoned project which seems to be a more compact version of another abandoned thing.

imoverclocked

I can't imagine how fast this is compared to the original hardware that ran it. I remember using a Mac 512k with a single floppy drive (no hard drive support) and doing the insert-floppy-dance. Computers were far more mechanical then. It would be fun to have a "slow it down" feature that also has the various floppy read/write noises paired with it. Bonus points for different generations of hardware and having the OG HD noises to pair with those too!

Batbird

This triggered flashbacks. I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but I think we sometimes also used used Pascal, and it was optional for some toolboxes. It's been a long time though so I could be mistaken. That might have been pre-Mac? But good times, though. Boy, is the world a different place.

londons_explore

I am amazed that 1980's software works on binary API compatibility rather than relying on API quirks like timing, memory alignment quirks, memory layout from specific allocator behaviour, etc. It only takes one unintentional reliance on an implementation detail to make an application not run on another OS implementation...

msephton

So has this beaten MACE to the finish line? Or are the goals different? https://mace.home.blog

rcarmo

This is pretty neat. I have been spending the past few months adding an ARM64 JIT to Basilisk II ( https://github.com/rcarmo/macemu ) and totally appreciate what's involved (I'm currently stuck patching a Quadra ROM to bypass NuBus hardware detection...) Will definitely give it a try, since I would _love_ to have a Classic Mac environment with some modern creature comforts (like file sharing) in tiny machines.

andai

Very cool. If it's built on SDL2, it should be straightforward to make it run in the browser via Emscripten, right?

anthk

Executor from autc04 was fine until I tried to open Nethack 3.6.7 for m68k Macs. It crashed, but it was a fun exercise. AMS might work better, but it's a pain to setup.

flenserboy

Efforts like this could be a nice way to get old apps to run "natively" on current hardware, as there are a ton of them out there which are perfectly good for work, but which cannot run today.

epenn

Very cool! This reminds me of ARDI Executor [1] - a piece of (discontinued) commercial software first released in 1990 that took the same API-level reimplementation approach used here. And it did so jaw-droppingly fast considering that it was running on 90s PC hardware. As a little kid using it to play a few Mac games on my Windows PC, it was genuinely inspiring to me to see that this was possible at a time when I was first learning how to code. :) Great to see something with a more modern implementation doing this as well! It was discontinued in 2005, but the developers subsequently open sourced it and put the code on GitHub a couple years later. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software) [2] https://github.com/ctm/executor Bonus: One of the engineers from ARDI, the startup that created Executor, was very briefly featured in Bob Cringely's 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds talking about the lifestyle of working at prototypical mid-90s Silicon Valley startup.

keepamovin

This is super cool. I love that look. Something about classic black & white macos has a timeless "alternative timeline" L'Air de Panache aesthetic that to me says credibility and stability. Maybe it's the memory of the rows of Macintosh SE or Plus, those solid little upright beige bricks, in the computer room at my elementary school. I made a MacOS system 7 web desktop UI with real web browsing: https://win9-5.com/macos/ A re-imagining.

msie

Wow! Who is the madman that created this?