The Macintosh was unveiled on January 24, 1984, two days after the "1984" commercial directed by Ridley Scott aired during the Super Bowl. It is the first mainstream computer to impose a graphical interface and a mouse in place of the command line: windows, icons, pull-down menus, trash can — the vocabulary everyone still uses today comes from this machine, itself an heir of the Lisa and of the Xerox PARC research.
The first model, with its 128 KB of memory and its single floppy drive, was too tight for its ambitions. Apple corrected course with the 512K, then above all with the Macintosh Plus in 1986 (1 MB of RAM and a SCSI port), and finally the Macintosh II in 1987, the first color machine of the range, with a 68020 CPU and expansion slots.
The real revolution came from desktop publishing: paired with the LaserWriter printer and PageMaker, the Macintosh created an entire market from 1985 onwards. Its game library, more confidential, keeps a few black and white classics — Dark Castle, Shufflepuck Café, Lode Runner, Crystal Quest — designed for the mouse and a monochrome screen.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro minivmac | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
In the
RPI3/RPI02Wcolumn, the core is built for the Raspberry Pi 3 but not for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2: the Macintosh system cannot be used on that last board.
Libretro MiniVMac is the only emulator for this system. It is the libretro port of Mini vMac, in its Macintosh II variant — which is why the expected ROM is the one of that machine. Netplay is not available and RetroAchievements are not supported.
A mouse is mandatory on this system: the Macintosh is entirely driven with the pointer, and there is no keyboard shortcut for most actions. A pad is required as well to navigate Recalbox and quit the game, and the keyboard, optional, remains very useful as soon as a program asks you to type text.
The Macintosh does not hold its operating system in ROM: it boots from a system floppy. Two files are therefore needed, both mandatory: the machine ROM and a boot floppy.
| File name | Description | MD5 | Emulators |
|---|---|---|---|
macintosh/MacII.ROM |
Macintosh II ROM (mandatory) | 66223be1497460f1e60885eeb35e03cc | Libretro MiniVMac |
macintosh/MinivMacBootv2.dsk |
Boot floppy holding the system (mandatory) | 16ddb8838d48be26e471a2f2bb85a961 or e66dc7952c8b9673868ad2faba3c0d20 | Libretro MiniVMac |
Place your BIOS files like this:
/recalbox/share/bios/macintosh/
├── MacII.ROM
└── MinivMacBootv2.dsk
Two versions of the boot floppy are accepted, hence the two possible MD5 values. Mind the case of the file names:
MacII.ROMandMinivMacBootv2.dsk.
Without these two files, the emulator stops on the floppy icon with a question mark, which is the classic screen of a Macintosh that cannot find a system to boot. This is not a crash: a BIOS is missing.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/macintosh/
Supported extensions: .cmd .dsk .hvf .img .zip .7z
A few pointers about these formats:
.dsk and .img are floppy disk images: this is the shape nearly all Macintosh software of that era comes in;.hvf is a hard disk volume image, handy to gather several programs together;.zip and .7z archives run without being extracted.Launching a game first mounts the boot floppy, then the image you picked: you therefore land on the Finder desktop, where you have to open the game floppy and double-click its icon, exactly as on the original machine.
Also have a look at the Apple Macintosh guide for game preparation, configuration and system-specific tips.