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Infinite Mac OS X


# tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X, with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware.

More generally, while PearPC may be more stable than DingusPPC at running 10.2-10.4, it’s a much less principled codebase (I came across many mystery commits) and it “cheats” in many ways (it has a custom firmware and video driver, and only the subset of PowerPC instructions that are needed for Mac OS X are implemented). I ended up using a combination of both emulators to run a broader subset of early Mac OS X (unfortunately 10.0 is still unstable, and the Public Beta kernel panics immediately, but I’m holding out hope for the future). The only limitation that I ran into is that my disk build process is centered around HFS, but HFS+ was the default of that time period, and it introduced more advanced capabilities like longer file names containing arbitrary Unicode characters.

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