Emulator 'Infinite Mac' made to completely reproduce the Mac of the 1990s on the browser

Infinite Mac , an emulator that extends Basilisk II , an open source Mac 68K emulator , for use on browsers has arrived. The author is Mihai Parparita, who blogs about the development process of Infinite Mac.

persistent.info: Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in Your Browser
https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html

Attempts to emulate older operating systems have become popular in recent years, and v86 allows you to run a variety of older operating systems on your browser. However, v86 wasn't available for emulating older Macs, so Parparita said he was investigating what would be a good way to emulate these on modern PCs. The first thing I found was Basilisk II, a well-known emulator for the Mac. Although Basilisk II worked well, it was very troublesome to set up ROM, boot image collection, and configuration file operations.

There are various Mac emulators such as PCE.js , Internet archive Macintosh emulator , RetroWeb Vintage Computer Musem as well as Basilisk II, but 'all reproduced the true feeling when using a Mac in the 1990s. It wasn't a thing. '' The emulator for Mac is great for quickly launching a single program and trying it out, but it's not possible to move data in and out or run multiple programs at once. I can't do that, 'he said.

So, 'Infinite Mac' is an extension of Basilisk II that allows you to run Mac OS 8 on your browser. Infinite Mac is available from the link below.

Infinite Mac
https://macos8.app/

You can also check the actual use of Infinite Mac in the following movie.

Infinite Mac Demo-YouTube


Parparita said that he aimed to reduce the time it takes to download the disk image to be used in order to shorten the startup time of the emulator. It seems that the ideal was 'to use Brotli to compress the data in the storage and delete unused data', but it seems that there were multiple unmanageable problems with this. Also, the method of 'using Brotli to compress data in storage and delete unused data' seems to be incompatible with another goal of 'running multiple programs at the same time'. It seemed like, Mr. Parparita. The reason is simple: the more software you have to boot, the larger the disk image you need.

Therefore, Parparita will switch to the method of 'downloading disk images on demand rather than pre-downloading them.' As a result, Infinite Mac succeeded in designing to download only the required chunks over the network when it detects unloaded chunks from the request to the file system. By applying some web optimization to this, Infinite Mac seems to be able to operate as fast as it can display the startup screen in just one second.

He also wanted a sustainable and reproducible way to build disk images with multiple Mac software installed. You could launch the native version of Basilisk II and copy it manually, but then you would have to repeat everything, for example if you wanted to repeat the process on a different base OS. Since this is a troublesome and error-prone method, Parparita said, 'I was looking for a more effective method.' So Parparita arrived at using a Dockerfile to build a disk image. Various software is implemented by copying what was saved as a disk image in the Internet archive to Dockerfile using machfs, or decompressing and copying the software archived in StuffIt using XADMaster etc. It seems that he succeeded in doing so.

The source code for Infinite Mac is available on GitHub.

GitHub --mihaip / infinite-mac: A Mac with everything you'd want in 1995.
https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac