'Ars Technica:
What makes the ["Infinite Mac"] project unique isn't necessarily the
fact that it's browser-based; it has been possible to run old DOS,
Windows, and Mac OS versions in browser windows for quite a while now.
Instead, it's the creative solutions that developer Mihai Parparita
has come up with to enable persistent storage, fast download speeds,
reduced processor usage, and file transfers between the classic Mac
and whatever host system you're running it on. Parparita details some
of his work in this blog post.
Beginning with a late 2017 browser-based port of the Basilisk II
emulator, Parparita wanted to install old apps to more faithfully
re-create the experience of using an old Mac, but he wanted to do it
without requiring huge downloads or running as a separate program as
the Macintosh.js project does. To solve the download problem,
Parparita compressed the disk image and broke it up into 256K chunks
that are downloaded on demand rather than up front. "Along with some
old fashioned web optimizations, this makes the emulator show the
Mac's boot screen in a second and be fully booted in 3 seconds, even
with a cold HTTP cache," Parparita wrote.
CPU usage was another issue. Old operating systems and processors
didn't really distinguish between active and idle processor states --
your computer was either on or off. So when you emulate these old
systems, they'll ramp one of your CPU cores to 100% whether you're
actually using the emulator or not. Parparita used existing Basilisk
II features to reduce CPU usage, only requiring full performance when
"there was user input or a screen refresh was required." Infinite Mac
won't run later releases of classic Mac OS (including 8.5, 8.6, and 9)
because those releases ran exclusively on PowerPC Macs, dropping
support for the old Motorola 68000-based processors. Emulators like
QEMU are capable of emulating PowerPC Macs, but (at least as far as I
am aware) there are no easy browser-based implementations that exist.
Not yet, anyway.'
-- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/22/04/01/2032251
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174 (office)
+64 (7) 577-5304 (home office)
https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
