Apple Macintosh

From DoomWiki.org

The Power Macintosh 8100/80AV, a period machine meeting the minimum specifications for Doom.

The Apple Macintosh is a brand of personal computers created by Apple Inc. beginning in 1984. During the 1990s, the standard was based on a proprietary operating system (Mac OS System 7) and the Motorola 68000 series of microprocessors. Later models replaced the Motorola 68k processor with the newer PowerPC architecture, introduced in 1994. Most applications were then shipped as "universal binaries," which included versions of the code compiled to run on either architecture.

Doom-engine games officially ported to this platform include:

Since then, the platform went through additional major standard changes:

  • The Mac OS operating system was replaced after version 9 by one based on NeXTSTEP (which is itself based on Mach and BSD), introduced in 2001, called Mac OS X. Some measure of backward compatibility was retained despite the OS change thanks to the Carbon API and emulation offered by the Classic Environment.
  • The PowerPC architecture was soon after replaced by the Intel x86 architecture, introduced in 2005. Again, backward compatibility was lost, necessitating the use of emulators. The Rosetta emulator was provided with the operating system for this purpose initially, but has been discontinued by Apple.

These changes make it difficult to run 68k or PowerPC applications on a modern Intel OS X computer. Emulators such as SheepShaver may be required.