Speed Advances in Mac Emulation on Microcontrollers

Innovation in Emulating Retro Computers

Emulating older computers via microcontrollers has been a popular practice in retro computing for many years, particularly with most 8-bit machines and some 16-bit ones implemented on platforms like Atmel, ARM, or ESP32. However, there has always been a power limitation, a point beyond which a microcontroller is no longer sufficient, necessitating a "real" computer. One of these barriers seems to have been surpassed as microcontroller-based emulation enters the 32-bit era.

[Amcchord] has ported the Basilisk II emulator to the ESP32-P4 platform, enabling a 68040 architecture Mac capable of running OS8.1. This machine from the 1990s may seem modest in 2026, but it represents a significant step forward. The hardware utilized is the M5Stack Tab5, which offers an emulated Mac with up to 16 MB of memory. Note that, in 1992, this would have been considered a high-performance machine. It manages to achieve a refresh rate of 15 frames per second, suitable for productivity applications.

The emulator utilizes the touchscreen of the Tab5 to emulate the Mac mouse, along with support for USB input devices. For hackers of the 1990s, it resembles the Mac tablet you didn’t know you wanted in the future. We love this project both for advancing the art of microcontroller emulation and because it provides a functional computer for some activities you could have performed on a Mac in 1992 and could still do today. Bringing something like this onto a train back then would have shocked observers. There’s even a chance that MacOS on such a device could attract curious glances in 2026.

However, it's important to note that Basilisk II is only a Mac emulator in the broadest sense. Although it emulates a '040, it primarily uses the toolbox ROM for the gestalt ID it transmits to the software, effectively obscuring almost all hardware accesses of the machine. Since most Macintosh software did not directly access the hardware, this works for the purpose of running software. But you won’t find emulation of any specific hardware from a particular model of Macintosh. For this purpose, MAME or Mini vMac are solutions for 68k-based Macs, or DingusPPC for older PowerPC Macs.