In its day, DOS didn't speak TCP/IP and couldn't mount CDs as writeable volumes. (You might have inferred some of this from the story about the release of FreeDOS 1.3.) It's easy to get DOS (or even, say, Windows 9x) running inside a VM on a modern OS, but it's then very difficult to get files into or out of that DOS VM. There are snags, though: Where do you find the ancient OSes to run on the emulated machine? And the apps or games to run on that OS? If you do find them, then how do you get them into an emulated machine that only understands long-obsolete media and – if you're lucky – network protocols?Įarly in his career, your correspondent was a bit of an expert in all things DOS, and still has some hobby projects involving resurrecting ancient, now freeware, versions of DOS. Even a low-end 21st century computer is so much faster (and more capacious) than one from 25 or 30 years ago that it can not only easily run a full-speed emulation of the older machine, you can also do tricks like running emulators inside emulators. All of them load inside a web page, but execute on your local machine their storage is online, streamed on demand, and comes preloaded with a swath of apps and games… but even so, they're set up to allow you to load and save files from your local drive, and they can even network with other instances of themselves.Įmulation is fun. That meant changing emulation engine, since MacOS 9 is PowerPC-only. It adds a MacOS 9 version to the existing System7.app and MacOS8.app emulators. MacOS9.app is the latest, and in some ways the most impressive, installment of "the Infinite Mac," a series of five web-based emulators of classic Macintosh computers. It turns out, unexpectedly, that a good answer to this is… run them in a browser. Friday FOSS Fest Emulators make it easy to run vintage software in a window on a modern machine, but without specialist knowledge of obsolete systems, it can be hard to do much with them.
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