I’m not the person to ask why – I’m assuming that the shift from PowerPC to Intel processors (starting with OSX 10.6, Snow Leopard), shifted the system architecture dramatically while the operating system remained relatively the same, resulting in a particular hardware/software configuration that just confuses the heck out of current setups, even through an emulator. Emulators for early Mac systems (anywhere from 1.0 to 9.x) are relatively simple to set up in OSX 10.10 (Yosemite) or 10.11 (El Capitan), likewise virtual machine software like VirtualBox (all topics for another day).īut right now the early, PowerPC versions of OSX seem to be something of an emulation/virtualization dead zone.

Emulation has gotten incredibly sophisticated recently – the Internet Archive has even made it possible to run thousands of vintage MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 programs from an emulator inside your web browser, no additional downloads required, which is really an incredible feat of programming. In order to access software or digital files created for obsolete systems, the primary solutions these days are emulation and virtualization – two slightly different methods of, essentially, using software to trick a contemporary computer into mimicking the behavior and limitations of other hardware and/or operating systems. They could (and might still, if it comes to it) just bring the laptops to the site and run the software in the native environment, but that’s unideal for a couple reasons: first, I’m always somewhat hesitant for department equipment to leave campus and second, having old hardware running these old operating systems natively is something of a luxury, which our students may very well not have in the future as equipment continues to age, or if they work at an institution with shallower pockets for digital preservation. However, the students would only have access to the digital materials on-site at the partner institution for this project, and could not bring the software back to NYU. Normally, this wouldn’t present much of an issue, as MIAP’s “Old Media Lab” still has several old Power Mac G4 desktops and even a couple Macbook laptops running various early versions of Mac OSX. Yes, as it turned out, the students were working with a piece of multimedia artwork/software that required a PowerPC version of Mac OSX (10.0 through 10.5) in order to run. Going back to the lab, I had a hint of what was coming from the whiteboard: Uh oh. If I remember correctly, I have an old version of VirtualPC somewhere, if that might be a better option.A couple weeks ago Mona Jimenez asked me to step into her course on Handling Complex Media, to help a student group with a tech request (business as usual).

So if I understand correctly, WINE will not work on a PowerPC Mac as it does on an INTEL Mac and I could use it only in combination with a CPU emulation like Q?!įurthermore there seems to be Q or Qemu, which seems to emulate a guest PC and therefore needs an installation/license for Windows (and maybe more ressources?) VirtualPC.

Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator, nor does it include Older Macs using PowerPC processors are incompatible with codeĬompiled for x86 (Intel and AMD) processors, unless the code is run I already found the PowerPC section in the WINE project, see PowerPC Mac, but I don't fully understand which options do exist in my case and which should be the best one. MintPPC ), to have a more recent OS, if that would help or make any difference…) Darwine (I had also considered to install Linux on the machine (e. Or is there something like WINE which lets me install the.

What is the best way to run Windows Software on this old Mac?.

I'd like to give it to my son, but he likes (among others) to use learning games/software, which are made for Windows (.exe). I have an old PowerBook G4 12' with 1,25 GHz and 786 MB RAM, actually MacOS X 10.4.11 is installed.

Best emulator for mac g4