Emulation and the Mac
Now, your first thought is probably: “Emulation? Huh? Why would I want to emulate anything? I mean, yeah, I use a Windows VM every so often, but aside from that…”, right? Well, in this post I’ll give you a few use cases for miscellaneous emulation, and list a few sites to get emulators from.
So, emulation. Here are a few questions you might have right about now.
What is it?
Well, Emulation is the process/concept of a software program pretending to be a piece of hardware. For example, Mini vMac emulates, AKA pretends to be, a Macintosh Plus with 4MB of RAM.
Why do I want/need it?
Well, I can tell you why you might need it. If, say, you were to find a box of floppy disks from your original Macintosh with important data on them, and you sent them to be converted to disk images, you wouldn’t be able to read those disk images on your Mac without something that can read MFS. Enter the emulator! Mini vMac, running System 6.0.8, would be very capable of reading those disk images. As for why you might want it, if you ever owned a Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, and miss the fun of playing Super Mario World, fear not! SNES emulators, combined with a gamepad or just your keyboard, can solve this problem! There are lots of other emulators out there, such as Catakig, Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DOSBox, Einstein, Frodo, KEGS, SNES9x, and many more.
Cool! Now where can I get an emulator?
There are a bunch of places, such as Pure Mac’s Emulators Page and MacScene’s Emulation Page, although the latter is more of a discussion board. Also a quick Google search will turn up the more legally-gray-area’d parts of emulation (hint-hint, nudge-nudge, *COUGH* ROMs *COUGH*) so you should be able to get a complete emulator set up. I’ll write a future post on how to set an emulator up.
