About macemu
macemu puts classic Macintosh software one click away. Pick a title, it starts in a few seconds, and nothing is installed on your computer. That is the whole idea.
It is built and maintained by Andrew Nakas, a software developer with a long-running interest in software preservation, emulation and what the web platform can be made to do. It is the sister site to exebrowser.com, which does the same for DOS and Windows programs, and the whole thing is open source.
What it is built on
The emulation is not ours and we do not pretend otherwise. macemu uses WebAssembly builds of three long-standing open-source emulators — Mini vMac, Basilisk II and SheepShaver — packaged by Mihai Parparita's Infinite Mac project, which did the genuinely hard work of making them run well in a browser.
What this site adds is the part Infinite Mac deliberately does not do: a page per title, written for somebody who searched for that title by name, with the history, the controls, the licensing position and a button that starts it. Infinite Mac gives you a machine. This gives you a program.
If you find this site useful, donate to Infinite Mac. It is the layer everything here stands on.
How a title gets here
Every playable title is a complete emulated Macintosh with one program installed on it, built by a script in the repository. The steps are worth stating because they explain why the catalogue grows slowly and why what is here works.
- Find a preserved copy, usually a disk image from the Internet Archive or Macintosh Garden, and establish what licence it carries. This is the step that takes the longest and it is the one that decides whether a title can be hosted at all.
- Copy the application into a System 7.5.3 boot image, forks and Finder metadata intact, and add an alias in Startup Items so the machine launches it by itself.
- Split the image into 256 KB content-addressed chunks and serve them from object storage, so a machine with a twenty-megabyte hard disk starts in seconds instead of after a twenty-megabyte download.
- Boot it headlessly and photograph the screen. The screenshot on a title page is taken by the same automated test that proves the title runs, so a picture and a promise cannot drift apart.
- Write the page. What the software was, who made it, why it mattered, how to play it, and what licence it is here under.
What is hosted, and on what footing
Every title page states plainly whether the software runs here or needs a copy you supply. There are no pages promising a game this site does not have — a build check enforces it, because that is a promise easy to break by accident.
Four categories, and each title page says which applies:
- Free and clear. 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 complete package is included — which is why the registration notices these programs open with are left exactly where their authors put them, rather than patched out.
- 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. That is a practical position, not a legal claim, which is why the takedown page is a 48-hour promise.
- Still sold. Never hosted, under any circumstances. Those pages tell you where to buy it and run your own copy in the same emulator.
Each hosted title has a provenance note in the repository recording where the files came from and the reasoning for hosting them. The build fails without one.
What it will not do
No printing. No network inside the emulated machine. No Mac OS X or macOS — that is a different computer wearing the same brand, and no emulator here will run a modern .app. Files go in easily and do not yet come back out.
The what runs page covers the limits in full, including the ones that are unlikely ever to change.
Contact
Corrections, missing titles, broken things, rights questions: get in touch. Rights holders should use the takedown page, which is a 48-hour promise rather than a negotiation.