Basilisk II

Basilisk II is an open source emulator for 68k Macintosh computers, originally written by Christian Bauer and released under the GNU GPL version 2. It emulates a Macintosh II series or Quadra class machine with a 68020, 68030 or 68040 processor and can run System 7 and Mac OS 8 up to version 8.1. It needs a ROM image from a real Macintosh, such as a Quadra 650 or Performa ROM.

Rather than emulating every piece of Mac hardware, Basilisk II patches the Mac ROM and replaces hardware drivers with its own, which makes it fast and easy to set up. It supports colour graphics, sound, networking, CD-ROM access and sharing folders with the host computer. A JIT compiler speeds up emulation on x86 systems.

The original project has not been updated for many years, but development continues in the fork by kanjitalk755, which adds SDL2 support, Apple Silicon builds and many fixes. Up-to-date builds for Windows, macOS and Linux are posted on the E-Maculation forum rather than as GitHub releases.

The official downloads cannot currently be tracked automatically, so this page has no download archive yet. Builds and setup guides are available from E-Maculation.