#Pikmin mac osx emulator archive
#Pikmin mac osx emulator software

IвЂ™m not the person to ask why вЂ“ IвЂ™m assumingВ that the shift from PowerPC to Intel processors (starting with OSX 10.6, Snow Leopard), shifted the system architecture dramatically while the operating system remained relatively the same, resulting in a particular hardware/software configuration that just confuses the heck out of current setups, even through an emulator.

#Pikmin mac osx emulator software

Emulators for early Mac systems (anywhere from 1.0 to 9.x) areВ relatively simple to set up in OSX 10.10 (Yosemite) or 10.11 (El Capitan), likewise virtual machine software like VirtualBox (all topics for another day).Д«ut right now the early, PowerPC versions of OSX seem to beВ something of an emulation/virtualization dead zone.

#Pikmin mac osx emulator archive

Emulation has gotten incrediblyВ sophisticated recently вЂ“ the Internet Archive has even made it possible to run thousands of vintage MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 programs from an emulator inside your web browser, no additional downloads required, which is really an incredibleВ feat of programming. In order to accessВ software or digital files createdВ for obsolete systems, the primary solutions these days are emulation and virtualization вЂ“ two slightly different methods of, essentially, using software to trickВ a contemporaryВ computer into mimicking the behavior and limitations of otherВ hardware and/or operating systems. They could (and might still, if it comes to it) just bring the laptops to the site and run the software in the native environment, but thatвЂ™s unideal for a couple reasons: first, IвЂ™m always somewhat hesitant for department equipment to leave campus and second, having old hardware running these old operating systems natively is something of a luxury, which our students may very well not have in the future as equipment continues to age, or if they work at an institution with shallower pockets for digital preservation. However, the students would only have access to the digital materials on-site at the partner institution for this project, and could not bring the software back to NYU. Normally, this wouldnвЂ™t present much of an issue, asВ MIAPвЂ™s вЂњOld Media LabвЂќ still has several old Power Mac G4 desktops and even a couple Macbook laptopsВ running various early versions of Mac OSX. Yes, as it turned out, the students were working with a piece of multimedia artwork/softwareВ that required a PowerPC version of Mac OSX (10.0 through 10.5) in order to run.

Going back to the lab, I had a hint of what was coming from the whiteboard: Uh oh. A couple weeks agoВ Mona Jimenez asked me to step into her course on Handling Complex Media, to help a student group with a tech request (business as usual).