About macemu
macemu puts classic Macintosh software one click away. Pick a title, it starts in a couple of seconds, and nothing is installed on your computer. That is the whole idea.
It is built and maintained by Andrew Nakas, a software developer with a long-running interest in software preservation, emulation and what the web platform can be made to do. It is the sister site to exebrowser.com, which does the same for DOS and Windows programs, and it is open source.
What it is built on
The emulation is not ours and we do not pretend otherwise. macemu uses WebAssembly builds of three long-standing open-source emulators — Mini vMac, Basilisk II and SheepShaver — packaged by Mihai Parparita's Infinite Mac project, which did the genuinely hard work of getting them running well in a browser.
What this site adds is the part Infinite Mac deliberately does not do: a page per title, written for someone who searched for that title by name, with the history, the controls, the licensing position and a button that starts it. Infinite Mac gives you a machine. This gives you a program.
If you find this site useful, donate to Infinite Mac. It is the layer everything here stands on.
What is hosted, and on what footing
Every title page states plainly whether the software runs here or needs a copy you supply. There are no pages promising a game we do not have.
Three categories, and each title page says which it is:
- Free and clear. Released by its author or publisher — Marathon, which Bungie put into free redistribution in 2005; Glider PRO, whose source John Calhoun published under the GPL; Kid Pix 1.0, which Craig Hickman gave away himself.
- Abandoned. Software whose publisher no longer exists or has not sold it in decades. It is preserved here for the same reason the Internet Archive and Macintosh Garden preserve it. This is not a claim that it is public domain, and the takedown page exists precisely because it is not.
- Still sold. Never hosted, under any circumstances. Those pages tell you where to buy it and run your own copy.
Contact
Corrections, missing titles, broken things, rights questions: get in touch. Rights holders should use the takedown page, which is a 48-hour promise, not a negotiation.