![]() It’s been a long time coming, but having your Mac brings some immediacy to the issue: If there’s a 32-bit Mac app you rely on to get work done, and it’s no longer being updated, on forthcoming versions of macOS it will only work with compromises, and ultimately it won’t work at all. Don’t fear the death of your old software, my friends. Your current long-in-the-tooth favorites, and old friends you said goodbye to years ago, can live on and still be useful, thanks to the miraculous digital afterlife known as virtualization. A legal hedge against obsolescence When you think about emulation (if you think about it at all), it’s probably in the context of downloading software that lets you play old games or even revisit ancient computing platforms, all thanks to software that’s probably still under copyright but has often been utterly abandoned. But emulation (and its cousin, virtualization) can also be used legally to do all sorts of useful things. The Linux server I run my entire business on is, in fact, one of many virtualized servers running on a much larger piece of hardware. It’s virtual reality for computers: There’s an entire pretend computer that’s actually a program on a different computer. If you’re a Mac user, you may know virtualization from apps like and, both of which let you run Windows apps while you’re also running macOS. Since both macOS and Windows use Intel processors, this isn’t emulation (where the software is pretending to be computer’s processor itself), but it’s still virtualization, since Windows and its apps think they’re inside a Windows PC when they’re really inside an app running on a Mac. Emulator for kerbal space program mac. Running Windows apps can be really convenient if you rely on them. But what about those old Mac apps that are going to be obsolete soon? And what about those apps you abandoned when you upgraded to Mountain Lion or Mavericks or Yosemite or El Capitan? Audition CC is a comprehensive toolset that includes multitrack, waveform, and spectral display for creating, mixing, editing, and restoring audio content. This powerful audio workstation is designed to accelerate video production workflows and audio finishing — and deliver a polished mix with pristine sound. On older Macs, the headphone jack and the internal speakers are essentially separate ports on a single output device and only one of these ports is allowed to be active at a time. Because of this, audio can be sent to either the built-in speakers or the headphone jack, but not to both. ![]() It’s not widely known, but VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop can run virtual versions of macOS, too. There are a few limitations. First off, you can only emulate macOS on hardware running macOS. Second, there are some specific versions of macOS that are allowed for virtualization: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard can only have their server versions virtualized, so if you need to dip back that far you’ll need to dig up a Mac OS X Server disc or buy an old one on the internet. OS X 10.10 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 virtualized in VMWare Fusion 10. But you’re free to virtualize Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, macOS 10.12 Sierra, and macOS 10.13 High Sierra. (Presumably Apple will continue allowing future versions of macOS to run in virtualization on Mac hardware.) So if you have old software that you’re afraid isn’t going to work in a future macOS version, fear not: You should be able to install macOS in VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop and keep using that app. Older Programs DownloadYou can even set the virtualization software to open in a full-screen space on your Mac, so you can swipe on a trackpad from High Sierra to Mavericks and back. It’s not necessarily going to be the fastest or smoothest ride—unless you’ve got a Mac with a powerful processor and a lot of RAM—but it’ll probably get the job done. What about older software? I have some serious doubts that anyone is performing major productivity tasks on the classic Mac OS, but there are several options for emulating those old versions. MinixMac is a basic emulator of very old macs, and I was able to get lots of my Mac OS 9 software up and running in the SheepShaver emulator. (A more likely use case than writing your next novel in WriteNow on System 6.0.8 is that you may want to get data that’s locked in a proprietary app out into a format you can manage with modern software. I have a bunch of stuff trapped in old database files that I was able to access last week for the first time in 15 years.) There is a big hole, though, if you’re someone like me who wants to chronicle the history of Mac OS from the beginning up to now: the early days of OS X.
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