Emulating a Mac with Basilisk II

The Apple Macintosh operating system, and the computers it powers, generates intense loyalty from its many users.

Many applications programmed for the Mac are indeed great. But because the MacOS was never designed to run on Intel PC chips, building an emulator, or even a virtual machine, is a difficult task. Credit Christian Bauer, the creator of Basilisk II, a free GPLed and stable MacOS Classic emulator, with rising to the challenge.

Basilisk II works on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, Amiga, and BeOS and will emulate any 68K version of MacOS up to 8.1 (although a port has been written for OS X). You need a valid ROM image from your Mac to make this work. This ROM image contains several applications, including the Mac Toolbox and QuickDraw, and is otherwise indispensable.

Basilisk II supports various Mac color displays and peripheral drivers. It will also connect to the Internet and your LAN.

But the task is not for the faint of heart. You will need to create Linux-readable Mac floppies to copy the ROM image. You will need to compile Basilisk II from source. You may have to download and install a new copy of the MacOS. Fortunately, you will find an excellent companion for this journey in "Basilisk II for Linux Getting It Going from Start to Finish," a tutorial from Marc Hoffman at http://os-emulation.net/basiliskII/system753_tutorial/linux. An active support forum also exists at http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=6132.