That was a bit of a hassle, but it worked. IMG files out of them which I could then transfer to my MacBook via a USB drive (ironcially FAT32-formatted) and then mount into SheepShaver. As a work around, I had to use the Disk Copy utility on my old iMac to create. I was able to install most of my old games and software on it, although I did run into an issue with getting macOS 10.15 to mount some of the old Apple HFS-formatted CDs so that I could install them. It runs with 512 MB of RAM and has 4 GB of hard drive space. I now have a bootable, usable Mac OS 9 instance on my modern MacBook Pro.

I was able to get it to work with the Mac OS 9.0.4 Universal Install image. Instead, I ended up downloading an image of an install CD from Macintosh Garden which is an excellent website to download vintage Mac software. SheepShaver only works up to Mac OS 9.0.4 because it does not emulate the MMU (Memory Management Unit) which was a requirement for Mac OS 9.1 and above. My iMac came with one, but it doesn’t work with SheepShaver because it came with Mac OS 9.1. The next piece that was missing though was a Mac OS 9 install disk. With the ROM I was able to get SheepShaver running, Next, I needed to install the operating system itself. I followed the instructions on their website for setting it up which worked well and I was, with a bit more research on other websites, able to use my iMac in order to extract a valid ROM which is required to run an older Macintosh operating system. SheepShaver seemed to be what people were using to emulate Mac OS 9, however, so that is what I went with. The most commonly run emulators for older Macintosh systems are SheepShaver and Basilisk II, both of which I have used before to emulate System 7 just for fun. The first thing I did was to look around online for other people’s experiences with emulating Mac OS 9.

(the last version of Photoshop I purchased). Not to mention I could then also run Photoshop 6 again.

Plus, I figured I could really jack up the specs on the emulator which would allow me to play a few more games that my iMac won’t run (it only has 64 MB of RAM). I decided to try to emulate Mac OS 9 on my MacBook Pro so that I wouldn’t always have to start the iMac whenever I felt like playing Age of Empires, Civilization III, the original Tomb Raider or Railroad Tycoon II. Whenever I sit in frontend of that old CRT screen listening to it hum, I always feel a bit like I did back then when I was in school and using AppleWorks on one of these colorful machines to type up my homework - usually some essay first written by hand.īut I digress. Emulation cannot, of course, replace the experience of actually using the iMac though since it doesn’t give you the full immersion experience of using an authentically vintage computer.

Emulator on mac os