Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004

It took me a while to figure out that the nice product shots of Mac computers were actually live, interactive copies of the relevant operating system, running under emulation. Even the laptops with the screen at a weird angle from the camera.

And the emulator tracks whether you've done the things mentioned in the article, like open a particular control panel or tried a particular menu option.

This is amazing.

It took me a minute to realize they're not just videos too. Really outstanding work.

There are even Easter Eggs and additional tasks. If you click on the system description button for each emulator it will give you a list.

I couldn't get the later emulators to work correctly though. My mouse kept flying off to the right of the screen for some reason. Also unfortunate is the scaling and tilting effect makes the screens look real bad on my machine. Just ugly aliasing artifacts everywhere.

The old 68k Macs are emulated with Basilisk II, which shims the mouse driver so it can just take mouse events from the host OS and move the cursor to the corresponding pixel on screen. The PowerPC Macs and NeXT boxes are emulated with a lower-level emulator that wants to get raw deltas from the mouse, not an absolute pixel position. If you just wave the mouse over the emulator, you'll get something approximating the expected movement (but much slower); once you click on the emulator it captures the mouse and you can use it as intended.

I agree it would be nice to have an "untransformed" view of the screen; I suspect the site might have been designed with the expectation of a high-DPI screen.

Unfortunately on the later Macs the mouse was way too slow to be useful (it kept falling well behind of where I was pointing and then my mouse would exit the area). Clicking on the emulator is when the mouse suddenly acted like I was always moving it right.