Sheepshaver does a decent job of emulating Mac OS9, but it lacks support for the Laser Printer driver, which means you can't generate a proper PS file: a crucial omission.
There is another emulator that works for Motorola macs running, e.g., System 7. As a joke, Makemusic released a self-contained file of this emulator running the first version of Finale, but it could run up to 2.6.3 as well. I never checked to see if I could generate a PS file from it. The good news about both emulators is they are open source, so someone could come along and add the missing pieces. On the Windows side the emulators are better. DOS and Win32 have had a much better track record of backwards compatibility in contemporary hardware. This is largely due to their one-time overwhelming market dominance and also the unflagging efforts of one particular compatibility-zealot at Microsoft (who is no longer there). None of the later Microsoft technologies have enjoyed anything like the same level of backwards compatibility, and I expect at some point Microsoft will make the same calculation as Apple has and drop support for DOS and Win32. The reality is, no major developer uses them any more. All the major players that use MS technology are using some flavor of ASPX, a technology with a far sketchier history of backwards compatibility. Perhaps the main thing keeping Win32 alive is Microsoft Office! On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 5:51 AM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz < bath...@maltedmedia.com> wrote: > On Sun, February 27, 2011 11:37 pm, Robert Patterson wrote: > > The computer industry is fickle towards users and extremely > > short-lived compared to humans, without even thinking about the kind of > > archival persistence we are accustomed to in the music world. > > Yes. > > I remember how, about ten years ago when the archiving issue got serious, > the > industry leaders told us not to worry -- emulation would make old hardware > and > software issues insignificant. Whether it was old data formats, old > websites, > or even old software and operating systems, there would be emulators > broadly > available to do whatever was needed. > > I started working with computers 34 years ago, and I've watched major > projects > of mine slowly vanish because the old hardware finally failed (right down > to > old EPROMs self-erasing and old floppies losing coercivity with time). No > emulators had appeared in time. > > Archiving may still happen, but I wouldn't count on it. Volunteers have > written 8-bit emulators (though they are unable to handle even the common > hardware interfaces, such as 5-inch floppies or parallel printers much less > 'niche' devices most at risk). But I'm not so sure that, with the extended > copyright issues, we'll see emulations of obsoleted PC and Mac operating > systems (nor hardware to work with them) in time to recover what we're > beginning to lose. > > Dennis > > > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > Finale@shsu.edu > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
