My old 68030 based Macintosh LC III in its bodily form is gathering dust upstairs, but its spirit lives on through an extraordinary emulator called Basilisk II. I just got around to porting the LC III’s partition images from my old dell box to the new core 2 box and am pleased at how well it runs. Despite the LC III application software being totally obsolete, it is still quite functional and fast — very very very fast. When things get to be this fast they seem to magically acquire a whole new level of functionality — by not getting in your way like most graphically bloated application manage to do. I only wish my native applications ran this well.

Basilisk II hacks directly into the classic Mac OS toolbox which abstracts all the hardware specific details of the machine; the rest of the OS and all the application software thinks it is running on a 68030. The version of Basilisk II that I compiled doesn’t use a JIT emulator, just a simple 68k machine code interpreter, and yet it can still cold boot a virtual machine to a fully functional desktop in under a second.