The Frugal Blog

Ever wanted to play around with vintage computing, but don't have the time/money/space? I get you. I love old PCs and other gadgets, but I'm really pretty limited on space and what I can bring into my house. And in some cases, I just don't have the money or time to devote to keeping them in running condition.

Fortunately a lot of really great, smart folks have taken the time to emulate a variety of different systems and you can run them right in your browser! I love playing around with these things and using them to run programs. A few of them let you upload and download files to them, so you can run your own applications and download any files you've created. I really like playing around with the paint programs in these in particular.

https://system7.app/ - Emulates MacOS 7
https://macos8.app/ - Emulates MacOS 8
https://macos9.app/ - Emulates MacOS 9

These MacOS emulators are great, and even let you add and remove files from them. They even support networking! Unfortunately I've had some issues with them crashing after a little bit of use in my case (on Windows 10). Hopefully you'll have better luck than me.

https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox - Windows 95, courtesy of archive.org
https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ - This is another MacOS 7 emulator, but also contains links to many others!
https://classicreload.com/Windows-1-01.html - Windows 1.01. It's got a lot of ads, though, and I couldn't find it hosted anywhere else yet.
https://classicreload.com/win3x-windows-31.html - From the same site. Turn your adblocker on!
http://retroweb.maclab.org/ - Little hard to use, but this one has several emulated systems
https://www.pcjs.org/ - More emulated systems. There are a TON here and they're lots of fun to play with!