Basilisk II

(last updated December 20, 2009)

Basilisk II is an open source emulator of 68xxx-based Macintosh computers. With Basilisk II one can boot Mac OS versions 7.x through 8.1. Ports of Basilisk II are available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and a number of lesser known systems. Users require a Macintosh ROM image and a copy of Mac OS to use with the emulator.

We provide a setup guide for Basilisk II (Windows) and a busy support forum.

• Basilisk II for Windows: 23 July, 2008.
• Basilisk II for Mac OS X: 4 October, 2009.

• Archive of JIT releases for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
• Archive of test JIT releases for Windows and Mac OS X
• pre-jit Build 142 for Windows (use if you have the “black screen” problem)
• pre-jit Build 94 for Windows
• Archive of older releases for Windows, Linux, BeOS, AmigaOS, IRIX, Solaris, etc

• Basilisk II setup guide for Windows
• Basilisk II setup guide for OS X (offline)
• Appletalk for Basilisk for Mac OS X
• Getting online in Basilisk II for Windows
• Essential 68K Macintosh Software

• HFVExplorer 1.31
• System 7 boot disk
• Stuffit Expander 5.5
• Graphical Disk Image Chooser (for the Mac OS X port)

The initial alpha release of Basilisk II (for the Linux platform) was made on January 23, 1999 by Christian Bauer, who previously developed Frodo, a popular Commodore 64 emulator, Shapeshifter, a (obsolete) Macintosh emulator for the Amiga, and Basilisk, a (obsolete) Macintosh emulator for BeOS and Linux. The windows port of the emulator was developed by Lauri Pesonen. At this time it competed with two commercial emulators: Microcode Solution's Fusion and Emulators, Inc.'s SoftMac.

Later development was carried out by Gwenole Beauchesne.

Beauchesne suspended his development of Basilisk II in April of 2008. Volunteers have contributed bug-fixes since then. Builds based on these fixes are listed here and in the Basilisk II forum.