This Free MacOS 8 Emulator Lets You Play the Oregon Trail
macOS 8, not to be confused with OS X 10.8, which you’re probably much more familiar with, is a 1990s-era operating system that found its way into older Apple systems with clearly outdated names such as Power Macintosh. and PowerBook. But now you can use it for free on any modern Mac or Windows PC – or at least until Apple gets angry and takes on a project that makes this possible.
Felix Rieseberg, who is also responsible for running a similar universal appfor Windows 95 , created this fully electronic version of macOS 8 . It runs entirely in JavaScript, which is a polite way of saying that the experience you get from using it won’t be as great as if you installed it natively, or better yet, in your own virtual machine. However, it is fun to play with and easy to get started on your modern system.
To get started, just download the “offline download” if you don’t want to mess with the real installer (although one is available too, and both packages are 32- and 64-bit). Start the emulator and you will see:
That’s all! It’s macOS 8! Now, if you want to access certain files in macOS 8 that exist elsewhere on your desktop or laptop, you only need to copy or move them to the appropriate folder – since I use this on Windows, this is the macintosh.js folder in my user folder C:\Users\[name] .
Is this the perfect recreation of the operating system? Yes and no. Try using the Internet, for example, and you will find that you have no connection; You could probably fix this by running macOS 8 in your own virtual machine, but then you’ll have to spend even more time troubleshooting compatibility issues, which is probably not worth it.
However, you can get by with a few pre-installed applications, including Adobe Photoshop 3.0.5, Adobe Illustrator 5.5, and Adobe Premiere 4.0.1. I hope you are not trying to do any real video editing on your virtual operating system, because you might be slightly shocked at the tiny resolutions you can play with:
My advice? Skip the apps and jump straight to the games. And you know exactly what I suggest you play first:
Time to shoot more meat than I can carry. But if you need a little more action, there are also the classics:
I’m surprised these games even provide a decent experience for a virtualized version of the late 90s operating system. Not the best implementation, but something. (I found it really impossible to use a mouse to look around, if that was at all what you could do back then – admittedly, it’s been a while since I played good old Duke3D.)
But that’s the point of running macOS 8 like this. You are not doing this experiment because you seriously think you will have a productive day traveling around such an old OS. This is real nostalgia. And it’s great that Rieseberg allowed everyone to spend an hour or so studying an operating system that was created so many years ago.