(last updated October 9, 2020)
Basilisk II is an open source emulator of 68xxx-based Macintosh computers for Windows, OS X and Linux. 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 setup guides for Basilisk II for Windows, Basilisk II for OS X, and Basilisk II for Linux.
We also manage a busy support forum.
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 that time it competed with two commercial emulators: Microcode Solutions' Fusion and Emulators, Inc.'s SoftMac.
Later development was lead by Gwenole Beauchesne (site offline).
Beauchesne suspended his development of Basilisk II in April, 2008. Volunteers have contributed bug-fixes since then. Builds based on these fixes are listed here and in the Basilisk II forum.
