Infocom Games on OSX Catalina

[jwse30]

This is pretty far removed from 68k Macs as far as hardware goes.

MY wife has decided that she wants to revisit an Infocom game she played as child. It doesn't look like Activision ever made these in an OSX flavor, and our laptop we currently use is running Catalina, which of course has no OS 9 support.

So I am looking for an emulator that can run OS-9 or earlier I guess. What's the latest and greatest these days? I've never tried to emulate a Mac before, as I've got a few too many in the basement, but the lil Mrs. doesn't like going down there.

Ease of use trumps power for this case, as this is going to be to run text adventure games.

Thanks in advance!

J White

 

[treellama]

The easiest way by far would be Mihai's infinitemac.org. All you need is a browser, and modern ones are still available for Catalina. You can even save your progress to a hard disk that is stored in your browser.

 

[sfiera]

Depending on the game, it may be possible to run it in a Z-code interpreter like Spatterlight or Frotz. Infocom games run in a portable interpreter, and there are several fan-made reimplementations of the interpreter for modern systems.

 

[aladds]

Theoretically UTM can run OS 9 but I’ve not managed to make it work on my M1 MacBook Pro, it gets a fair way into the installation process but then gets stuck in an infinite loop or something and never finishes (although it doesn’t crash).

I’ve not tried a pre-installed copy, that would probably work.

 

[sfiera]

I had a hang installing OS9 in UTM too. I think what solved it for me was unchecking “update Apple disk drivers” in the installer.

 

[jwse30]

The easiest way by far would be Mihai's infinitemac.org. All you need is a browser, and modern ones are still available for Catalina. You can even save your progress to a hard disk that is stored in your browser.

Thanks for the tip! I got the infocom game my wife played as a child running using this website, ad I got to look like a computer genius in the process.

She used to play it on an Atari 520 or 1040 though. I am working on convincing her we need to add one to my retro collection, for authenticity.

Thank you again,

J White