The Quadra 900 was replaced by the Quadra 950 a year later in 1992, but both were supported until Mac OS 8.1. The Quadra 900 was a beast in its day – expandable up to 256 MB of memory, five NuBus expansion slots and one PDS (processor direct slot) and could be ordered with a hard drive as large as 400 MB. Both used the Motorola 68040 processor, which would be the most powerful and last Motorola processor used by Apple prior to the PowerPC transition. The Quadra 900 was one of the most powerful Macintosh models Apple sold at the time, along with its little brother (and my personal grail of vintage Macs) – the Quadra 700.
Macintosh.js emulates the same machine Basilisk II does (in most cases) – a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900. On top of the three major players in the classic Macintosh emulation business, there’s now a JavaScript-powered solution that allows you to emulate Mac OS 8 without jumping through lots of hurdles to get it setup (like you do with Basilisk II and SheepShaver.) (On the upside, apps that run well in Mini vMac should run well on the 1991 Macintosh Classic I’m working on reviving back to life.)
I’ve been running Mini vMac with some luck, but I hate the limitations it presents. Basilisk II ran perfectly on the 2014 MacBook Air (which is still on Sierra), but I always hit a brick wall when trying to install it on my 2019 MacBook Pro. As we know, Catalina drops support for 32-bit applications, and I’m guessing Basilisk II was somehow one of them. My go-to classic Mac emulator was Basilisk II until Catalina hit. (Note: I have not yet covered SheepShaver on this site.) Mini vMac covers the compact Mac/System 6 era by emulating a Macintosh Plus (circa 1986.) Basilisk II covers the later System 7 era by emulating a Macintosh Quadra 900 (circa 1991.) SheepShaver’s specialty is PowerPC Macs running OS 8 or OS 9.
However, recently, there’s a new kid on the block.Įach emulator has its era of specialty. On this blog, I’ve covered Basilisk II and recently Mini vMac, two of the more popular classic Macintosh emulators.
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