Play Classic Mac Games on Your Raspberry Pi with Advanced Mac Substitute

The original Apple Macintosh, released in 1984, was a very popular computer. As you’d expect, quite a lot of software and games were developed for its operating system, the “classic” Mac OS. But, because Mac OS had an architecture that was fundamentally different than its competitors, that software wasn’t easily ported to other systems. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to use any of that software without an actual Macintosh or emulating the entire OS. Advanced Mac Substitute fixes that by allowing you run applications directly — and you can run them on a Raspberry Pi.

The current version of Advanced Mac Substitute can run on modern Apple Mac OS X machines, Linux, Android, and the Raspberry Pi line of SBCs (single-board computers). Traditional emulators for classic Mac OS software need to replicate the hardware it ran on, and then run the entire operating system on that before they can launch an application. Advanced Mac Substitute completely replaces the OS, and launches directly into the application or game.

The software has a backend that includes a 68K emulator that works with an POSIX-like system, which includes most modern branches of UNIX. That works with a generic bitmapped terminal abstraction frontend that can be ported to specific platforms. It doesn’t currently work with every application available for the original Mac OS, but support is being added. Right now, it can run four different games, and potentially a lot of software depending on the graphics requirements.