Comment by nmdeadhead
1 day ago
In compatibility, it's MUCH worse than all the others, but there's also Executor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software) which you can use to run a Macintosh version of solitaire in your browser by having the browser emulate MS-DOS which then runs Executor/DOS: https://archive.org/details/executor
In addition to Executor/DOS, a non-released version ran on the Sun 3 workstations (they too had 680x0 processors) and Executor/NEXTSTEP ran on NeXT machines, both the 680x0 based ones and the x86 powered PCs that could run NEXTSTEP.
Executor was the least compatible because it used no intellectual property from Apple. The ROMs and system software substitutes were all written in a clean room--no disassembly of the Apple ROMs or System file.
Although Executor ostensibly has a Linux port, it's probably hard to build (I haven't tried in a couple decades) in part because to squeeze the maximum performance out of a 80386 processor, the synthetic CPU relied on gcc-specific extensions.
I know a fair amount about Executor, because I wrote the initial version of it, although all the super impressive parts (e.g., the synthetic 68k emulator and the color subsystem) were written by better programmers than I am.
Thank you so much for Executor. I used to run it on my 486 Linux box, over an X11 SSH tunnel to the Sun workstation I used in the computer labs for work on campus. I balanced my checkbook and wrote essays in emulated Excel and Word (with rough compatibility with the Windows versions). It was so cool to be able to mix and match systems that way.
I had a licensed copy of Executor back in the mid-90s. It was the coolest thing ever. Thanks for being one of my inspirations to go into software development.
https://github.com/autc04/executor is a more recent fork of executor (but based on the issues, it does build on recent OS)
typo: does NOT build on recent OS
When I was starting out in the 90s, Executor was one of those very cool pieces of software I would love to play around with.