Appler - The Apple II Emulator for MS-DOS
If you're going to run Apple II software, why not do it like we did back in the 90s and use a pure assembly emulator that runs in MS-DOS? Appler is one of the first Apple II emulators made, and likely still the fastest. To do this we'll need DOSBox, Appler, and some software - let's see how it all works together!
What's in the Box86? More gaming possibilities on Pi!
The Raspberry Pi is an excellent platform for gaming, with support for tons of retro system emulators and tools like DOSBox. What about more modern games? Some are on Linux but only made for x86 CPUs. Box86 is here to solve that, providing fast, dynamic recompilation of x86 binaries into ARM. Run Steam, Wine, and more!
SerenityOS - The dream of the '90s is alive!
SerenityOS is an operating system built from scratch by a group of developers (and many open-source contributors) that evokes the look and feel of '90s software with a unix-like core. It has many modern features and sports a very themeable retro style.
Apple Newton - A Personal Digital Assistant from 25 years ago
The original idea for the Newton was more like an iPad - a portable computer with a big screen, lots of memory, and capable of advanced graphics. What they ended up building wasn't very close to that but it was a pretty cool Personal Digital Assistant, a term coined by Apple CEO John Sculley.
Let's check out NewtonOS and see if it resembles anything today.
Commodore 64 - The Most Popular Retro Computer of All Time
Commodore sold more than 10 million C64s but were eventually left behind by the PC. Take a look at what it could do and what made it so good by installing an emulator or finding a real one. We'll check out some demos plus write our own programs in BASIC!
Explore Magic Cap, a smartphone OS from a decade before the iPhone
Magic Cap was an operating system for PDAs (smartphone ancestors) with a lot of features that look very familiar today. We'll check it out, but the emulator runs on old Mac OS, so we need to install another emulator just to get to that one.
Build your own BeBox and run BeOS using Virtualbox
Could your 90s OS boot in 10 seconds, use dual processors, and play multiple video files at once (without stuttering)? BeOS could! First released in 1995, BeOS was way ahead of its time and was almost purchased by Apple to be the basis for OS X. Like most products ahead of their time, it failed, but we can still check it out in a virtual machine.
Program in Logo on an Apple II
Long before Python made it easy to start programming, Logo was the language of choice to teach programming concepts to kids. Most kids in the 80s encountered it on their school's Apple II and spent countless hours using Logo drawing functions to move a cursor (which Logo calls a Turtle) around the screen. Let's take a look at the history behind Logo and see what it looked like by setting up an Apple II emulator.
Build your own SPARC workstation with QEMU and Solaris
Sun produced high-performance Unix workstations in the late 80s through the 2000s. They were powerful and expensive, out of reach for most mere mortals. Let's build our own and see what it was like to use! We're going to use QEMU to emulate a SPARC machine, the architecture that most Sun systems used from the late 80s through the mid 2000s.
Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine
Install OPENSTEP, the successor of NeXTSTEP and the basis for Mac OS X, on a Virtualbox VM to see what it was like to use in the 90s. It's not particularly useful these days, but it is fun to see what it was like and how it influenced later software. Score points for authenticity by using it with an original NeXT keyboard and mouse!