Infinite Mac

February 12, 2023 4:01 PM

Browse around the Infinite HD to see what using a Mac in the mid 1990s was like.
posted by Fiasco da Gama (63 comments total)

Not bad. The little seatbelt thing with the controls is still kinda cute. Was expecting an error message saying the same Photoshop license was already being used on another computer, but Photoshop quit before it loaded for some other reason. Startup time is about 5 minutes too short.
posted by snofoam at 4:09 PM on February 12, 2023

I stayed with OS 9 until the third release of OSX because the first release was really alpha and the second was beta. I remember all the hype being around the dock and the genie effect.
posted by perhapses at 4:29 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't consider myself very nostalgic, but seeing Chiral in the games folder makes me want to cry.
posted by mittens at 4:31 PM on February 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm impressed. If you turn on Help balloons it even has the original Easter egg when you mouse over the QuickTime extension in the System Folder. And you can even bless/debless the System Folder by pulling out the System Suitcase! Very nice.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 4:35 PM on February 12, 2023

For even more nostalgia, there's also a System 7 version.
posted by hanov3r at 4:37 PM on February 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Cosmic Osmo, check... wait, no Lode Runner or Bugdom?

Sadly Civilization didn't work well. Besides, Civ II was mid-90s!

Anyway, it's mind-boggling that this can run in a browser.
posted by zompist at 4:41 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought Word on OS 9 was pretty much the pinnacle of word processing. After that, it just started getting ridiculously bloated.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 4:44 PM on February 12, 2023 [13 favorites]

Aiperion doesn't seem to work (it runs fine but I can't control it other than shooting). 🥲
posted by aubilenon at 4:49 PM on February 12, 2023

No Quark Xpress? Really?
posted by moonbiter at 5:01 PM on February 12, 2023 [16 favorites]

I'm actually more impressed that KPT Bryce was able to do what it could do given the resources it had available than I was at the time. It was very good at SciFi landscapes, but I realised i only had a limited need for SciFi landscapes and I wasn't sure it wasn't non-zero.

Also, I don't remember so many of the programs refusing to work, but that may be me blocking out traumatic memories.
posted by Grangousier at 5:04 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Avara! Bryce! This rules.
posted by brundlefly at 5:06 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think I put too many negatives in a sentence there: my need for generic sci-fi landscapes is, sadly, not non-zero.
posted by Grangousier at 5:06 PM on February 12, 2023

KPT Bryce

Oh my GOD...I didn't even see the graphics folder. Infini-D?!?! Could I install Ray Dream on this thing?
posted by mittens at 5:07 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

aw man, where my flying toasters at
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:10 PM on February 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

Impressed this loaded up absolutely fine on mobile, so I could see my iPhone running macOS 9
posted by caution live frogs at 5:22 PM on February 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

L33T MAC TIPZ

Upon startup, the blue note lists sites where you can access other systems: System 6, System 7 (plus a Japanese version) and Mac OS 8. Games that don't work on one system may work on another.

The purple note (which you can resize or scroll etc. to show more info) describes how to add more games/programs, and mentions a couple of sites. Those sites, plus a few others, are:

Macintosh Garden
Macintosh Repository
Mac GUI
Vintage Apple Mac (note: files were mainly obtained from Mac magazine coverdisks - at one point, the organizer stopped storting new ones into Games and Utilities and just put them into Misc, so check that too)
Internet Archive (CDs, other stuff)

Not just archive images (.sit, etc) but also disk images (.img, .dsk, .iso. .toast etc.) can be loaded. While the former will appear in Downloads in The Outside World, the latter will work differently. You'll be prompted to restart (NOT reload - a button will appear in the lower right corner), and they'll appear on the desktop instead of the Outside World, but only one at a time. Reload the page to unmount a disk so you can load another - this will also reset everything except for what was put in the Saved page (possibly - it does its best).

Don't know where to start? Try the magazine MacFormat's coverdisks: 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and one each from 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2008.
posted by BiggerJ at 5:28 PM on February 12, 2023 [14 favorites]

Escape Velocity! Warcraft! Simcity! Oh gracious the nostalgia. What a lovely thing.
posted by Wretch729 at 5:29 PM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Has anyone build an equivalent for something like Windows 3.1?
posted by Wretch729 at 5:31 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Got a IIcx in '89 and a 7500 in '96 so this was my computing life.

Windows was a non-starter for me, just a thin UI over a rather dodgy 16-bit OS.

Not that Mac system software was all that elegant, they produced a lot of substandard (hacky / drain-bamaged) code in the 80s they had to somehow patch and replace, but Wintel just wasn't my scene.

Isn't now either . . . it was also nice playing Prince of Persia for the first time in 30 years, on an ARM Mac!

Gotta say if the me of 1993 would be seeing macOS on my 2020 MBA I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest with the evolution the platform has seen these 30 years (NeXTOS derivative running on an ARM derivative . . . checks out!)

The first trackpad Powerbook came out in 1994 and the Mac laptops you can buy now aren't all that different.

Here's to the next, and uh, final (for me at least) I guess, 30 years!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:32 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Y'all need to get an AppleTalk network game going.
posted by aramaic at 5:58 PM on February 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

For those interested in the included Marathon games, the second download here is the second disk from the original box set (a .iso in a zip), which contains a ton of mods (including the legendary Missed Island - puzzles! In Marathon!).

Marathon is also available for Windows here, but that's just the start of a WHOOOOOLE rabbit hole, so I'll just let TVTropes lead you down it re: the trilogy and its greatest mods and where to find them.
posted by BiggerJ at 6:09 PM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh man, if we could get Bolo AppleTalk discovery plumbed through to some sort of TCP relay… I would so be there for that.
posted by graphweaver at 6:10 PM on February 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

anyone install kaleidoscope on this?
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 6:15 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

USB Overdrive and SNES9x
posted by infinitewindow at 6:19 PM on February 12, 2023

Taking me back to a lot of time playing SimCity 2000 on the school library computers...
posted by Zargon X at 6:31 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’d played SimCity 2000 so much that I’d see it on the inside of my eyelids while falling asleep.
posted by slogger at 7:06 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I mean, other than column view, what have we really gotten in the last 30 years?

besides the not crashing 3 times a day thing.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:29 PM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’d played SimCity 2000 so much that I’d see it on the inside of my eyelids while falling asleep.

Totally, with the tetris pieces.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:29 PM on February 12, 2023

Cool. Back when Photoshop was installed on like five floppy disks.

I think we all took turns stealing the disks from work so we could use the latest software at home.
posted by freakazoid at 7:50 PM on February 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I recently re-discovered my Photoshop 3 floppies in a drawer. I wish I had some way of determining if they're functional.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:57 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

ESCAPE VELOCITY. I never had a Mac but my friend used to let me play EV on his. Iconic.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:02 PM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Infini-D

I can't believe I just launched, in my browser, a piece of software I worked on, can't believe I just opened the "About Infini-D" popup and saw my name scroll by along with all my old friends and co-workers from more than a quarter century ago. I can still see their faces, when they were young, when we were all so young.
posted by gwint at 8:12 PM on February 12, 2023 [35 favorites]

This is almost too much to take.

ESCAPE VELOCITY! You cut me, I bleed Ambrosia software (from my Resource Fork, of course).

AND INFINI-D! I made the cover image for our high school yearbook in Infini-D. Hi, gwint! Thank you!
posted by TangoCharlie at 9:52 PM on February 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

The original Civilization theme...sigh.
posted by praemunire at 10:48 PM on February 12, 2023

Just discovered a quirk with an easy fix: if you drag a .sit file onto the Mac screen and double click-it, the included Stuffit Expander program will extract the content into whatever folder the file was in. However, the contest won't show up until you use Restart under System.
posted by BiggerJ at 11:49 PM on February 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I really miss old System 7 - 9. I realise that under the hood lurked co-operative multitasking horror and C pretending to be Pascal and whatever, but for an ordinary user the UI was so consistent and wonderful. It all made sense in a way that I haven't really ever felt with another UI or OS.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:08 AM on February 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

One missing aspect of the emulation is the physical weight of Macs in the era. I am specifically thinking of carrying an SE/30 (or, worse a Mac "Portable" with its lead acid battery) in one bag, an LCD panel in a second and a portable overhead projector in a third - (say, while crossing London on the tube in the rush hour).
posted by rongorongo at 2:22 AM on February 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just lost 1.5 hours to playing Civilization.

We never had one of these, but the UI is so intuitive. I saw some video on YouTube of Gen Z folks trying to make sense of Windows 95. Everything here is so much cleaner. It just feels satisfying. I'm severely tempted to revert to word processing circa 1992.
posted by lookoutbelow at 2:45 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

For those fans of Escape Velocity, Endless Sky is a modern alternative.
posted by vitout at 4:03 AM on February 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Impressed this loaded up absolutely fine on mobile, so I could see my iPhone running macOS 9

It loaded for you? It kept crashing on my iPhone (iOS 15) and never loaded.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:21 AM on February 13, 2023

Just lost 1.5 hours to playing Civilization.

I lost 1.5 years to Civ.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:21 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

This felt a teense newer than my freshman year Mac, but it totally made me want to check my college email and then log in to Foothills.
posted by thivaia at 7:24 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

There's a certain irony in that, in order to successfully run an emulation of OS9, I apparently need to be running a far newer version of OSX than I have on my iMac.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:12 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I lost 1.5 years to Civ.

Amateur.
posted by praemunire at 8:16 AM on February 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just want to see my beloved Cyberdog one more time.
posted by sudama at 8:35 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I remember Mac Risk having a great interface, and being extremely disappointed in the Windows version. The one I played was black and white, while the one on this is color; I wonder if it's the same interface, and if it still holds up.
posted by Happy Monkey at 9:56 AM on February 13, 2023

aw man, where my flying toasters at

Infinite HD > Control Panels & Extensions > After Dark > After Dark Files > Flying Toasters

After Dark isn't installed though.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:15 AM on February 13, 2023

anyone install kaleidoscope on this?

Infinite HD > Control Panels & Extensions > Kaleidoscope > Kaleidoscope 2.3.1 Installer
posted by kirkaracha at 11:17 AM on February 13, 2023

Yay, Hypercard! The thing that kept me interested in tech as a learning tool in those basic times.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 1:36 PM on February 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I just got sucked into playing a game of Oregon Trail. [*Shakes fist at irresistable metafilter links*]
posted by umbú at 2:00 PM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Bruce Atkinson was || (this close) to beating TB-L to the www, just needed the ww component.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:00 PM on February 13, 2023

Too bad the Netscape Navigator doesn't seem to work – I was going to try to use it to come back to this thread and then see if I could launch the emulator again. Still, what an amazing nostalgia trip!
posted by Crane Shot at 5:02 PM on February 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Risk's interface was as good as I remember.

Some of the games don't work on https://macos9.app/, but do work on https://macos8.app/
posted by Happy Monkey at 9:04 AM on February 14, 2023

uh oh SNOOOOOOOOOOOOOD
posted by nightcoast at 4:32 PM on February 14, 2023

OS/X (I resist calling it "macOS") is good technically, but it doesn't feel as much like a classic Mac to me? Part of it is the absence of that sharp sharp pixel art for the icons. There's also the absence of some of the interesting UI metaphors, like dragging in a new System folder around and having the OS recognize that as updating the OS.

One thing OS/X does still have is that thing where Applications are secretly folders that contain all their files, yet still work regardless of how you drag them around, meaning your Applications folder is both the launcher window that contains your software and the Mac's version of Program Files at the same time, which I always thought was very cool. I'm surprised that other OSes never adopted that, although I guess Linux could do something like it now with Flatpaks or Snaps, where software is entirely self-contained but consumes more storage in order to do it. I recognize that in this direction lies something like how, with mobile software, apps regularly take up much more room than their desktop counterparts despite those devices usually having much less storage to hold them in.

Some surprising things haven't changed. Last week jessamyn on mefi.social mentioned in order to fix something miscellaneous on her machine, I think to do with graphics, she had to reset the NVRAM... that's right, we're still zapping the PRAM in 2023.

If you want some more nostalgia, here's the user interface war host segment from classic Mystery Science Theater 3000.
posted by JHarris at 6:40 PM on February 15, 2023

I don't consider myself very nostalgic, but seeing Chiral in the games folder makes me want to cry.

Chiral is so 90s shareware it's hurts me. Those sound effects!
posted by JHarris at 2:54 AM on February 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm late with this, but some additional notes:

I've discovered that multiple CD and/or disk images CAn be loaded at once. This might enable multi-disk games to be played.

Game that requuire PPC Macs (aka PowerMacs) can be played on macos9.app or on this undocumented-except-in-a-blog-post emulated PPC with System 7.

Many of the MacFormat disk images I linked are inside archives. Just drag the file on the Mac desktop, find it in Downloads in The Outside World, and double click it. When you get to the CD or drive image file, drag it into Uploads in The Outside World, then wait. The download won't be 'passed' to your browser until it's done, at which point your browser will instantly declare it both begun and finished - then just open the resulting ZIP file, find the CD or drive image file inside, extract it, and drag it onto the Mac desktop. (In the case of issue 17, at least, you'll need to add .iso to the end of the file. If that doesn't work with any others with missing file extensions, dry .dsk,and/or .img).
posted by BiggerJ at 3:00 AM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Some of the software doesn't seem to work? Also, anything that requires installation that needs a reboot is beyond the system's capability since all changes that don't involve the Saved folder are obliterated. Still though, these are all awesome. I always wanted a Mac back in the classic days, in a way that doesn't seem to have carried to OS X.
posted by JHarris at 4:45 PM on February 17, 2023

Some more tips:

An easier way to make files shows up after unstuffing them if they don't immediately appear: close the window, then open it again. (If it was on the desktop, you'll still need to use Restart under System).

If you get a Type 10 error when trying to run something, this is SUPPOSED to work: under the Apple menu in the upper left, pick Control Panels, then Memory, turn off 32-bit addressing, then from the top menu, select Restart under System. But currently, it doesn't seem to remember it's supposed to have the feature turned off. Instead, try such games in system6.app.

Speaking of which, in system6.app, dragging CD and disk images onto it not only works, but doesn't require a restart - just be patient (good general advice when emulating old computers, especially System 6, by the way). Dragging compressed files onto it won't work, though.
posted by BiggerJ at 6:16 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wait. DARK CASTLE? I can try and finally finish that game ??!?
posted by zenon at 10:54 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

OS/X (I resist calling it "macOS")

Muphry's Law strikes again with a mangled mis-remembering that combines "Mac OS X" with "OS/2," heh
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:57 PM on February 21, 2023

Well if you're committed to the Roman numerals, it's now OS XIII, since they stopped pretending major releases were minor releases, and moved on from OS X a few years ago. I think that's the main reason they're consistently calling it MacOS now.
posted by aubilenon at 10:56 PM on February 21, 2023

Pronounced Ossckhsseeee Ventura.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:59 PM on February 22, 2023 [1 favorite]