I am looking for a good MacOS emulator for my Thinkpad. Also if any of you know of any good window blinds skin that capture the essence of platinum, that would be awesome.

What version of MacOS are you looking to run? The main options for Windows are:

**Mini vMac - emulates a Plus, so small screen area and black and white only, runs up to OS 7.5.5 and 68k software. Very fast and stable.

**Basilisk II - 68k emulator, so up to OS 8.1 and 68k software only - very fast and stable.

**SheepShaver - PowerPC Classic emulator, can only run up to OS 9.0.4 (not 9.1 or 9.2) - pretty fast and fairly stable (in my experience), crashes occasionally.

**PearPC - PowerPC OS X emulator, can run OS 10.1 to 10.4 - useably fast on a fast PC, not especially stable (seems to depend a lot on which particular build you use though).

**VMware - x86 virtualiser - can run the hacked x86 versions of OS X, as long as your CPU supports SSE2 or greater.
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

Ok, sheepshaver looks good.

From where can I obtain a ROM file?

Thanks.

You get points for doing the preposition correctly, just by the way.

I don't know if this is totally legal, but versiontracker had a whole kit, with preinstalled stuff, you can grab the rom from that.

Also, the mac os rom updater files from Apple's website usually work if you intend to use 8.6 or 9.whatever.

Good luck, I hope this helps.
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[Insert Cool Signature here!]

Anybody ever heard of Fusion? It was supposed to be a PowerPC Mac "emulator" that used a PCI card with actual PPC hardware to accelerate it's performance. I imagine it would have worked somewhat like an OrangePC card for Macs only in reverse...

I did a little search, and all I could find was this site: http://www.emulators.com/softmac.htm. There are some references to a hardware card with the Mac OS ROM on it, but I didn't read it too closely...

Cory, FYI, that link appears to be broken. VersionTraker returns an empty page.

Peace,
Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

Don't touch softmac - it's utter garbage. Basilisk and Sheepshaver are best for most things, but Basilisk has gone downhill in some respects - things that used to work now being broken. Minivmac is the most accurate emulator - emulating hardware and so supporting MacsBug for example, but it only supports machines from the 128K to the SE.

I have tried to run Fusion but was not successful. I didn't try too hard though since it is a DOS rather than Windows program, so not too useful. It was spoken of very highly though.

Yeah, if someone could just send me a ROM for OS 9 that would be great.

Thanks.

Sorry, no swapping ROMs on this board. Ethical discussions aside, trafficking in Mac OS ROMs is illegal on this forum.

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Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

I remember using FUSION years ago under DOS. It actually worked quite well but at the time was only supporting 68K emulation. I don't think they ever got PPC emulation to work but by that time I had moved on from FUSION to other things, so I'm not exactly sure if they ever managed to get PPC emulation to work properly. I didn't know about the PPC card to accelerate the emulation. Good to know, alk.

I'm pretty sure the FUSION people failed to get PPC emulation going. They sold the 68K version to the softmac people and put a "PPC emulation coming soon" message on their website - and it stayed there for years!

I'm not entirly sure, but Microcode's iFusion did actually get released, and can be used on an Amiga with a PPC card, e.g. Blizard PPC, but it is not for windows, and doesn't actualy emulate anything.

SheepShaver is best for PPC emulation.
BasiliskII is best for 68k emulation.