If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of how the Mac works, or if you're a programmer who has an interest in the old days of Mac software development, Troughton-Smith's blog entry is worth a read.
Ports of Basilisk II are available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and a number of lesser known systems. With Basilisk II, one can boot Mac OS versions 7.x through 8.1. In the course of his discovery and experimentation, Troughton-Smith learned a lot of valuable lessons about Classic Mac OS, Apple's Carbon API, and about mpw itself, which he's now a big fan of. Basilisk II is an open source emulator of 68xxx-based Macintosh computers for Windows, OS X and Linux. If you dont have an emulator yet, visit our Xbox One emulators section where youll find emulators for PC, Android, iOS and Mac that will let you enjoy all. CodeWarrior, of course, is not free, and MPW only runs on Classic Mac OS, which is unstable at the best of times and downright nightmarish when trying to use it for development in an emulator like SheepShaver.Įnter 'mpw' (which I will refer to in lowercase throughout as something distinct from Apple's MPW toolset). There has never been a good way to compile Classic Mac OS apps on modern OS X - for the most part, you were stuck using ancient tools, either Apple's MPW or CodeWarrior, running in a VM of some sort.
Recently Steven Troughton-Smith - who's best known for his iOS development work - decided to delve into the process of making 'classic' Mac OS apps in a modern programming environment.