..In many FaceBook posts in the Apple and Mac groups and even in the 68KMLA forum and Mac Emulation groups, there has been a resurgence of people wanting to use the older systems for the apps that ran on them and are no longer supported on new systems. Though a lot of them are games, there are also various programs like Print Shop that many find useful but cannot be used on today’s systems.
 
Since OSX 10.5, Apple eliminated the Classic Environment that allowed running OS9 and all of their programs on the G4 and G5 systems of the time. Switching to the Intel CPU at the time was the final nail of the OS9 coffin. Thus many believe that to have OS9 running on your machine, it needs to a G4, G3 or PowerPC machine. Though it is preferred to have an older Mac that can run OS9, it is just an option to consider.
 
There are 3 options to consider when wanting/needing to run OS9 and the various programs it has access too.
 
1. The most obvious is having a Macintosh system that can run it. That means any PowerPC with 32mb of RAM and a 100mb hard drive. That is any desktop Mac from the 6100 PowerPC to the Mac Mini G4, and any Mac PowerBook from the 5300 to the iBook and MacBook G4.
 
The issue is this – on G4 Series other than the Mac Desktop Towers, you have to run OS9 on top of OSX through the Classic Environment. On most Mac Tower systems you can run OS9 natively without OSX and its Classic Environment.
 
2. Emulation on a Macintosh System. One can make the claim that running OS9 under OSX with the Classic Environment system is a form of emulating an older Mac on a newer G4 system with OSX 10.4 that will not boot to OS9. But if you have an Intel system or is you want to run an older system like OS8, System 7 or even System 6, the only option is software emulation of the Macintosh system. The issue with this is you will need a copy of the Mac ROMs of the system you want to emulate, which Apple, under Steve Jobs, has basically made it illegal to do by declaring the obtaining of Mac ROMs as software piracy. But when you get the ROMs, you have several options of software. The two biggest are VMac (Virtual Mac) and SheepSaver. With these two programs, you can emulate 68K or PowerPC Mac depending on how you set up it up. It gives you the ability to run from System 6 to OS9 depending on the CPU/ROM/RAM setup you put in.
 
3. Is exactly like #2 except instead of using a Mac, you are going to use a different system like a Windows based PC or a Linux based PC. You can even emulate a Mac on a Raspberry Pi or other similar ARM system including Android tablets and smartphones. The issues one might have a problem with are unsupported devices these units might have. Sure, Wifi has been around since the mid 1990 but it was 802.11 and 802.11b with minimal wifi security like WPA-Personal and not WPA-2 security implementation.
 
Once you have your system set up, you can then transfer your OS9 apps and programs to the “Applications” folder, and then copy any and all program and applications’ preferences from the System Folder. This is to ensure that you can run your software on the new system. But do note that some software packages out there do give problems and often will crash with various Mac System set ups. For example:
 
Comic Works v1.0 and v2.0 – only runs on System 6, preferably on B/W or 256 color. On Thousands or Millions of colors, the program slows down for some reason. Running it on any other system other system 6, it will crash. Over the years Comic Works becomes Manga Works for OSX 10.6 or better but there is a 10 -15 year absence where there was no such program, one used Photoshop, Page Maker, FreeHand/Illustrator or some other desktop publishing software instead. Manga Works requires a minimum of 2GB or it will complain about the lack of RAM and run slow.
 
PhotoShop 4.2LTE – despite being a free version of Photoshop Adobe distributed on computer magazine CDs and Apple Software trail packages, it required a minimum of System 7.2 and 4mb of RAM with a 68020 CPU. Anything less than a Mac II or Mac LC with 4MB of RAM and it would crash very hard.
 
System 7 ran slow on the classic 9in B/W Macs with the 68K CPU and required 4MB of RAM. Anything less and it would crash with an “Insufficient memory Error” window.
 
There were many public domain software that only ran on System 6 or 7 but not both.
 
Both the Classic II and Mac SE\30 have 68030 CPUs and were capable to displaying grayscale on their B/W Screens, and run System 7. The other 9in B/W Macs only did pixel bit mapping Black/White graphics. The SE\30 also had a Math Co-Processor and can be expanded to 128mb of RAM like its Mac II cousins. The Classic II was based on the Mac LC II and could only be expanded to 10MB of RAM and did not have a Math Co-Processor, though it could be added by its “Math Co-Processor slot. Adding a Math Co-Processor to the Classic II made it as powerful as its older sibling, the SE\30.
 
OS8 and OS9 systems and software requires a PowerPC system though OS8 can be run in a high end 68040 system by use of Fat Binary code that will run on either CPU.  Fat Binary code has been around since System 7.2.3 when the PowerPC Mac came out – the Power Macintosh 6100. To run anything emulated as an OS9 machine, this is the minimum machine set one should aim for .