Would it be the mountains? Or the sea? It had been a long time since he had seen the south-facing beaches, so he decided it would be the sea. He would go west, west toward the sunset, following the ancient road leading out of the city, the King’s road, though no king ruled any longer.
He found it strange how an old song that his dad always used to listen to on his cassette player had embedded itself so deeply into his brain that when he heard it again, it instantly took him to a time and place he could scarcely remember, a past that never was, memories that had faded into a story, into lore, more akin to fantastic fiction than to anything he had actually lived through.
Where was I? Where had I been? How did I get here? It wasn’t that he didn’t know the narrative of his life story. It was just that every time he rehearsed it in his mind, it sounded more and more like something that had happened to someone else, to someone perhaps who had never existed, just another character in some novel, existing only in his mind. He remembered the admonition of José Rizal, the martyred revolutionary who had stated that if you didn’t know where you came from, then you’d never figure out where you were going. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember, exactly. But he wondered if these were his memories, and even if they were, were they really memories, or just idealized narratives of events long passed, long ago divorced from any modicum of authenticity? And he started thinking, maybe I don’t want to know where I’m going, anyway, except that he knew, and of course, everyone knew. The end was obvious. Sooner or later, he would die. It was the getting there that was the complication, the thing that would remain mysterious and opaque so long as his memories continued to feel fake, as if they had been implanted all at once by some sinister band of conspirators.
That’s just paranoia. Everyone has that, he paraphrased a line from a book he had once read, a line that he repeated often, each time being amused by it, even though he didn’t actually remember the exact phrasing. My brain is just full of holes, that’s all, he told himself, as if somehow such a statement should be soothing. He was too young to be having these kinds of bouts of forgetfulness. But he didn’t want to look at it too closely. Because then he’d be stuck between two unpleasant possibilities. Either there really was an evil cabal deliberately falsifying and obscuring his memory, or he had actually done it to himself.
I was never much of a Mac user before OS X came out, mostly because I thought Macs sucked, and until OS X, they never had preemptive multitasking. But I did use System 7 quite a bit in college, because if you wanted to go to the printer and publish a magazine, you had to send them a QuarkXpress file, and the only machines we had access to that had the specs to run Quark were Macs.
The computer labs on-campus were, from what I remember, still mostly running either Win 3.11, Mac OS 8, or BSD, and the biologists seemed to favor Macs, probably because all the genomic sequencing apps only ran on Macs at the time, but since I never did any bench research as an undergrad, I just eyed the real scientists working from a far.
Fast-forward to 2002, when I bought my first notebook, which was an iBook G3 733 MHz. It came with Mac OS X 10.1 Puma and Mac OS 9.2.2 pre-installed, but I never really used Classic mode much. Then I destroyed my iBook by leaving it in the back of a trunk in 90°F weather. I paid Apple $300 to try and fix it, but since they couldn’t, they gave me an iBook G4 933 MHz with Tiger pre-installed, and I didn’t bother installing Classic mode. I never really missed it.
So when Steve Jobs extirpated Classic mode from Leopard because it would’ve been a pain in the ass to try and port all that cruft to the x86 architecture, I didn’t particularly care.
But what got me thinking about running retro software again was a Friendfeed post by Mona Nomura discussing running Netscape 4 on Windows 95. Any version of Windows excluding XP and possibly Win 7 are toxic waste as far as I’m concerned, so I’d never try anything like that, but I wondered if it would be possible to run Netscape 4 on a modern Mac system. Of course, the binaries are only available for OS 9/Classic, so on an Intel Mac I was out of luck.
Or was I?
The only known way to get OS 9 to run in Leopard on an Intel Mac is to use SheepShaver, which is basically a Power PC emulator. I tried to follow the instructions on using SheepShaver to run Mac OS 9 from Dan on uneasysilence. The problem was the ROM file. The link to it is dead. Like Dan says, Apple actually has the necessary ROM available for download, but unfortunately, you have to either already have a running install of OS 9 or Classic to extract it with Tomeviewer, or you had to do things the ridiculously hard way.
The hard way involves getting an emulated installation of System 7 up and running. Yes, this does in fact sound like a ridiculous waste of time, but, hey, if you’ve gotten this far, clearly, you’ve got plenty of time anyhow.
The way to do this is through Basilisk II, a Motorola 68k emulator. Like SheepShaver, you still need a ROM image to be able to get to work, but the older images are more readily available. This is probably technically copyright infringement, but if you happen to own an old school Mac, then this may actually technically still be fair use. But I am not a lawyer. The 1 MB Mac ROM image will probably sufficient.
If you’re a masochist, you can try and compile Basilisk II from source. Macports even has a portfile for Basilisk II, so that may be slightly less insanity-inducing, although when I tried it, the compile crapped out with an error that I had no intention of tracking down. But what I did was just download the universal binary of Nigel Pearson’s port of Basilisk II to Mac OS X. Gwenole Beauchesne also has Mac OS X binaries but I haven’t tried them.
I was able to pretty much follow the instructions on how to setup Basilisk II and System 7.5.3 on Windows from e-maculation, except, of course, I was doing this on OS X instead of Windows. The System 7 boot disk is key. As far as the disk image goes, what you can do is use Basilisk II to create one with a .dmg extension so that you can later mount it in OS X and transfer files that way until you get System 7.5.3 running, because without System 7.5.3, Basilisk can’t mount your home directory in your emulated installation.
Once System 7.5.3 is running, you need to install an old version of Stuffit in your emulated installation, copy over the TomeViewer Stuffit archive to your disk image, then decompress and run TomeViewer on the Mac ROM Update 1.0 file to extract the Mac ROM image, which you can then copy back to your OS X partition
Once you have the ROM, you can follow Dan’s instructions exactly and have Mac OS 9.0.4 running. From there, you can install Netscape 4, or even NCSA Mosaic, and surf the web like it’s 1999.