(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 OSX/macOS, 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.
