alt Hacker NewsFor some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/
For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years.
For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidelity emulators like 86Box and MartyPC.
The C64 has VICE, the Amiga has WinUAE, even the Apple II has had high-quality emulators like KEGS and AppleWin, but the Mac has mostly been limited to high-level and approximate emulators like Basilisk II.
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In compatibility, it's MUCH worse than all the others, but there's also Executor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software) which you can use to run a Macintosh version of solitaire in your browser by having the browser emulate MS-DOS which then runs Executor/DOS: https://archive.org/details/executor
In addition to Executor/DOS, a non-released version ran on the Sun 3 workstations (they too had 680x0 processors) and Executor/NEXTSTEP ran on NeXT machines, both the 680x0 based ones and the x86 powered PCs that could run NEXTSTEP.
Executor was the least compatible because it used no intellectual property from Apple. The ROMs and system software substitutes were all written in a clean room--no disassembly of the Apple ROMs or System file.
Although Executor ostensibly has a Linux port, it's probably hard to build (I haven't tried in a couple decades) in part because to squeeze the maximum performance out of a 80386 processor, the synthetic CPU relied on gcc-specific extensions.
I know a fair amount about Executor, because I wrote the initial version of it, although all the super impressive parts (e.g., the synthetic 68k emulator and the color subsystem) were written by better programmers than I am.
That article is objectively true but .. I've never seen such a grotesque dismissal of the hard work people have done for free.
It might not count as "user-friendly" but MAME does hardware-level emulation of the Macintosh and Apple II (more accurate and more peripherals but less user friendly than KEGS and AppleWin).
Not to be forgotten: MAME supports the 68k macintoshes to some extent
Note that while this was true about software, there is also hardware (FPGA HDL), such as the MacPlus-miSTer core[0].
there's definitely room to improve user friendliness of mac emulation (minivmac's compile time config is so infuriating), but I think it's a bit unfair to compare to most of those emulators
vmware and virtualbox were backed by billion dollar corps
the 16 bit machines are much simpler than macs
game consoles had highly homogenous well documented hardware, and sold in much greater numbers (snes alone sold more than all macs from 1987 to 1995) so there's a larger community to draw devs and users from. writing a nes emulator is almost a weekend project now, it's so documented.
You forgot miniVMAC, 68k. Qemu does MacPPC fine.
I managed to get the Macintosh II FDHD emulator to boot, but the emulator menu only invites me to load 400K/800K floppies despite the Snow manual claiming that the Mac II FDHD emulator provides two SuperDrives https://docs.snowemu.com/manual/media/floppies . Maybe that has something to do with why the system has immediately ejected every floppy image I've given it so far, including 800K System 7.1.1 disks which are supposedly Mac II compatible. I'm sure that Snow has a great deal of promise and I salute the hard work, but to be honest, so far the overall landscape of Mac emulation seems much the same as before, with n emulators offering a jagged product matrix of emulated hardware and supported features; lots of hoop-jumping and necessary, assumed prior knowledge of old Mac plumbing; and promises for the future.