I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app.
[…]However, none of these setups replicated the true feel of using a computer in the 90s. They’re great for quickly launching a single program and playing around with it, but they don’t have any persistence, way of getting data in or out of it, or running multiple programs at once. macintosh.js comes closest to that — it packages James’s Basilisk II port with a large (~600MB) disk image and provides a way of sharing files with the host. However, it’s an Electron app, and it feels wrong to download a ~250MB binary and dedicate 1 CPU core to running something that was meant to be in a browser.
I wondered what it would take to extend the Basilisk II support to have a macintosh.js-like experience in the browser, and ideally go beyond it.
There’s countless of these, but this is definitely one of the nicer ones. It won’t be long before we move from running classic operating systems in local emulators, to just firing up a tab and booting up whatever we feel like playing around with today. I certainly won’t miss manually creating VMs or fiddling with purpose-built emulators.
I want this but for running windows 3.5 stuff. Preferably a linux desktop session that can also run a modern browser and steam without any gtk or gnome dependencies.
https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/3.10/
i can not find 3.5 on that site only 3.1
I will. Online emulators can be taken away at any given moment for any reason (for example due to legal action). After all, they are a form of SaaS. Let’s not forget that the main reason emulators require fiddling is that they require BIOS ROMs to work, so any website offering a pre-configured emulator (that is, with those BIOS ROMs) is subject to legal action. At least with local emulators, once they have been provided with a BIOS ROM, they work forever.
The only solution I can think of is having the emulator render server-side (in a Stadia-like fashion), but this creates other questions like lag and who’s going to pay for the server resources, and even then it’s a legally grey area.
Agreed. What they would need to do is release the code so you can run it on your own web server. Not to mention then you could set it up as a persistent system. But then again, you could just set up a VM instead and have more power / accessibility…