Systems Corporation. This manual reflects version 3.0 of OS-9 for 68K Processors. Creating a set of ROMs for a fully ROMed system. Disk-based runtime. Oct 11, 2005 - Das anyone to know where i can get it, old os called OS-9 (created by microware). Where do I get OS-9/68000 for the Commodore Amiga?

Recently, a reader of this blog submitted a comment regarding an earlier post. Following links in the comment, I stumbled upon an article about solutions to the “Appleworks problem”. My interest was piqued. What WAS “the Appleworks problem” and how DO you solve it?

The “Appleworks problem” turned out to be fairly easily stated. If you have an older Appleworks based document that you need to regain access to, how do you do this if you don’t have an older Mac to facilitate that access? Run a Mac OS 9 emulator on your modern Mac, install Appleworks into the emulator and then use it to recover full access to the document of interest. Sounds simple, right?

Well, it turns out to be anything but simple. Installing and setting up either of the two major Mac OS emulators presently available is a bit of a chore. The curiously named Sheepshaver application is the best supported Mac emulator currently out there. Sheepshaver is followed closely by the equally oddly named Basilisk II. Sheepshaver emulates a PowerPC Macintosh; Basilisk II emulates a 68K Macintosh.

I looked into installing and setting up Sheepshaver on my Intel iMac and quickly found that the number of steps involved, and the amount of work involved in each step, was daunting to say the least. I won’t comment on the effort required to install and set up Basilisk II – I found the idea of an emulated PowerPC Mac far more attractive than the idea of an emulated 68K Mac. This is where another curiously named package came to the rescue. There are a LOT of curiously named applications in this post! 🙂 “Chubby Bunny” is a pre-configured version of Sheepshaver, with all of the setup already done.

What a great idea! Installing Chubby Bunny is as simple as dropping its executable into your Applications folder (the application is called Classic.app, and it sports the “classic” Classic.app icon – a nice touch) and placing one of the three included disk images into your /Users/Shared folder.

That’s pretty much it! Launch Classic.app and Mac OS 9 pops up in all its glory. Here is a screen shot of Chubby Bunny running Mac OS 9.0.4 (Mac OS 9.0.4 is the highest version of Mac OS 9 supported by Sheepshaver) on my Mac OS X Mavericks 3.4 GHz 27” iMac (click the image to get the full size screenshot). There are only a small number of preconfigured applications in the Mac OS 9 instance you get this way, and oddly, given how this whole thing started, Appleworks is NOT one of them(!), but you can install more, just as you can with a real Mac OS 9 installation. That SHOULD be the end of this post – mission accomplished! I now know what the “Appleworks problem” is AND how to solve it, and as an added bonus, I have discovered how to run Mac OS 9 Classic on my modern iMac – Classic on Intel. I was delighted to learn all of this, and wanted to pass it along to you, the readers of this blog.