Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

For some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/

For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years.

For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidelity emulators like 86Box and MartyPC.

The C64 has VICE, the Amiga has WinUAE, even the Apple II has had high-quality emulators like KEGS and AppleWin, but the Mac has mostly been limited to high-level and approximate emulators like Basilisk II.

there's definitely room to improve user friendliness of mac emulation (minivmac's compile time config is so infuriating), but I think it's a bit unfair to compare to most of those emulators

vmware and virtualbox were backed by billion dollar corps

the 16 bit machines are much simpler than macs

game consoles had highly homogenous well documented hardware, and sold in much greater numbers (snes alone sold more than all macs from 1987 to 1995) so there's a larger community to draw devs and users from. writing a nes emulator is almost a weekend project now, it's so documented.

It should be pointed out that VMware started as a tiny, scrappy company mostly focused on selling workstation seats for you to run Windows on your Linux computer (which I did back circa 1999, so I could use Linux on my desktop), and VirtualBox started out from InnoTek, a tiny company which was essentially making software to emulate Windows on OS/2, and then later did a contract with Connectix to run OS/2 on Windows (or other hosts) using Virtual PC.

Connectix got bought by Windows, and InnoTek got bought by Sun, which is now Oracle. Connectix themselves started as a scrappy outfit making it possible to run DOS/Win95 on a Mac.

The core emulation was pretty much done and stable and optimised before the billion-dollar corps bought them out.