The first several releases up to 10.4 Tiger contained support for Classic applications, but this was later dropped. However it had severe technical limitations, so Apple developed macOS which is Unix-based. The original System/Mac OS, which is now referred to as “Classic' macOS, was closed-source and proprietary. The Mac has had two main operating systems over its history. While Rosetta performs very respectably for most software, it adds extra overhead which can reduce performance on demanding games and emulators. Rosetta 2 currently facilitates 圆4 software to run on Arm Macs. Rosetta was a software emulation layer that helped PPC applications to run on x86/圆4 Macs, but was dropped in macOS 10.6 Snow Leopard. Each time there was a hardware transition, Apple provided ways to continue to support older software on the new systems. There have also been minor architectural changes such as moving from Intel's 32-bit x86 to 64-bit 圆4. The Mac has gone through four major cpu architecture changes: Motorola 68k, IBM PowerPC (PPC), Intel x86/圆4 and most recently Apple Silicon (Arm64). It is important to understand these changes so you can choose the best emulators for your Mac.

The Mac has changed considerably over the years, both in terms of hardware and software. For software that emulates macOS (previously Mac OS X) on other hardware, see Macintosh line.

This page is about emulators that run on macOS. You can help Emulation General Wiki by improving it. This article is a work in progress (WIP).

Mac os 10.4 emulator