What actually runs here, and what cannot
Short version: classic Mac OS runs — System 6, System 7, Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. Mac OS X and macOS do not. That line is not a matter of effort or ambition; it is a line between two entirely different computers that happen to share a brand. This page explains where it falls and why, because the question gets asked constantly and most answers on the web are either hand-waving or wrong.
The three machines on this site
| Emulated machine | Runs | Emulator | How it feels |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macintosh Plus | System 1 – System 7.5 | Mini vMac | Instant. 512×342 black and white. Runs happily on a phone. |
| Quadra 650 (68040) | System 7 – Mac OS 8.1 | Basilisk II | Quick. 640×480 in 256 colours. The workhorse for most of the catalogue. |
| Power Macintosh G3 | Mac OS 8.1 – 9.0.4 | SheepShaver | Heavier. Needed only for PowerPC-only software. |
Picking the wrong machine is the most common reason a program refuses to start. Software from 1987 written for a Mac Plus will often not run under Mac OS 9; software compiled for PowerPC will not run on a 68k Quadra at all. Each title page on this site says which machine it uses and why.
Why Mac OS X is a different problem
In 2001 Apple replaced the Mac OS entirely. Mac OS X is a Unix system descended from NeXTSTEP, with a different kernel, a different API, a different binary format and — after 2006 and again after 2020 — different processor architectures. Emulating it is not an extension of emulating System 7; it is a separate project.
It has been done. The Infinite Mac project runs Mac OS X 10.1 through 10.4 in a browser using PowerPC emulators, and it is an impressive piece of work. It is also slow: minutes to boot, and sluggish once there. That is not a criticism of the implementation — a pure interpreter emulating a 1990s PowerPC in JavaScript-adjacent WebAssembly is simply working very hard.
Modern macOS on Intel or Apple Silicon is further out of reach again, and would require Apple's licence besides. If somebody promises you macOS in a browser tab, they are selling a remote desktop to a real Mac in a datacentre, which is a perfectly good product and a completely different thing.
What about a .app or a .dmg?
A .app is a folder holding a compiled macOS binary. It runs on macOS and nowhere else. No emulator on this site changes that.
A .dmg is a disk image, usually containing one of those. You can open it here and take out documents, images or data — see the DMG page — but an application inside will not run.
The files that do run here are from the earlier era: .sit archives, .hqx and .bin encoded files, and floppy or hard disk images in .img, .dsk or DiskCopy format. The loader takes all of them.
The honest limitations
- Speed. These are interpreters, not recompilers. A drawing program or a 2D game is fine. A 1994 first-person shooter on a phone is not.
- No printing. There is no printer attached to the emulated machine and no plan for one.
- No internet inside the Mac. The emulated machine has no network. Old Macintosh browsers cannot reach anything, which is a shame, because watching Netscape 3 fail to render a modern site is genuinely funny.
- Getting files back out is limited. Files go in easily. Getting them onto your real computer is not wired up yet.
- Saves are local. They live in your browser, not in an account. They do not follow you to another device, and clearing site data deletes them.
- Audio needs a click. Browsers refuse to play sound until you interact with the page. Click inside the emulated screen once.
Where to go for more
This site is a catalogue with an emulator attached: one page per title, built to be findable and to start in one click. If what you want is the whole machine, other projects do it better and deserve the traffic:
- Infinite Mac — every system release from 1984 to Mac OS X, plus NeXTSTEP, with a large built-in library. The emulator builds used here come from it. Donate to it.
- Macintosh Garden — the Mac abandonware archive, twenty thousand titles with screenshots and manuals.
- Macintosh Repository — the other great archive, strong on later and PowerPC software.
- E-Maculation — the forum where people who actually maintain these emulators talk.
- exebrowser.com — our sister site, which does the same job for DOS and Windows.