macemu — run classic Mac games and apps in your browser

The Mac you grew up with, in a tab

macemu runs classic Macintosh software the way it actually ran: the real System software, the real applications, emulated in WebAssembly. Pick a title and it starts in a couple of seconds. Nothing installs, nothing is uploaded, and your saves stay in your own browser.

Got a file of your own — a .sit from an old download, a .img off a Zip disk, a .hqx from a Usenet archive? Drop it in the loader and it opens on an emulated Mac.

What this is, exactly

Three emulators, all long-standing open-source projects, compiled to WebAssembly: Mini vMac for the compact black-and-white Macs, Basilisk II for the 68k machines that ran System 7, and SheepShaver for the PowerPC era of Mac OS 8 and 9. They execute real 68k and PowerPC instructions and boot Apple's real system software, exactly as the hardware did.

Each title here gets its own machine, chosen to match what it was written for. Software from 1987 will not run under Mac OS 9, and software compiled for PowerPC will not run on a 68k Quadra at all — picking the wrong machine is the single most common reason an old program refuses to start. The page for each title says which machine it uses and why.

Disk images are split into small chunks and fetched only as the emulated Mac reads them, which is why a machine with a two-hundred-megabyte hard disk starts in seconds instead of after a long download. The long version is on the blog.

What is here, and on what footing

Every page says plainly whether a title runs here or needs a copy you supply. There are no pages promising a game the site does not have.

Free and clear. Software released by the people who made it — Marathon, which Bungie put into free redistribution in 2005; Glider PRO, whose source John Calhoun published under the GPL; Kid Pix 1.0, which Craig Hickman gave away himself.
Shareware. A model built on being copied. Most shareware licences explicitly permit non-profit redistribution of the unregistered version, provided nothing is modified and the whole package is included — which is why the registration notices these programs open with are left exactly where their authors put them.
Abandoned. Software whose publisher no longer exists or has not sold it in decades, preserved for the same reason the Internet Archive and Macintosh Garden preserve it. Not a claim that it is public domain — which is why the takedown page is a 48-hour promise.
Still sold. Never hosted. Those pages tell you where to buy it and run your own copy in the same emulator.