The Macintosh Repository
Davo:
The Macintosh Repository is a community driven effort to preserve old software from the classic Mac OS era.
It has ~18k entries of software images from floppys & cds, scans, fonts, icons and everything in between.
If you’re planning on running the treasures of the past you’ll find here on real old Macintosh hardware from the 90’s, you sir/madame, deserve to win an Internet for doing it THE ONLY CORRECT WAY! But for others, there’s QEMU, a PowerPC emulator capable of (slowly) running Mac OS X 10.5 down to Mac OS 9.1, SheepShaver, a fake PowerPC emulator capable of running Mac OS 9.0.4 down to Mac OS 7.5.2, Basilisk II, a 68040 emulator, capable of running the 68040 version of Mac OS 8.1 down to 7.0. Finally, for everything older than System 7, there’s Mini vMac II (which emulates 68020/color Macs) and Mini vMac which emulates the original B&W 68000 Macs.
Previously:
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>SheepShaver, a fake PowerPC emulator
How is it fake? It's a real PowerPC emulator.
I am semi-retiring and trying to figure out what to do with my own collected Mac stuff. I have rare stuff that is probably worth something to somebody. I am scanning stuff to put on the Internet Archive. Other multmedia stuff is difficult to archive.
I sure wish there was an early MacOS emulator for iPadOS. I've seen it done, cloned the repository, and could not get it to run. The original MacPaint looked like a lot of fun with an Apple Pencil.
Unfortunately Macintosh Repository is well known for having hoovered the archive of another site (whose name I won't mention), not to mention limiting what you can download while soliciting donations.
> How is it fake? It's a real PowerPC emulator.
AFAIK Mini vMac, Basilisk II and SheepShaver emulate services and "managers" (like the ADB Manager) by patching drivers in ROM to point to each emulator's reverse-engineered implementation of said services and managers. Unlike, say, x64sc there is very little hardware, timing-critical or chip-level emulation.
There is also an impressive effort that intends to let you run classic Mac OS applications as double-clickable applications in macOS--see the MACE project which I can't link to here, apparently.
