If you're curious about emulating even older apple devices (Clickwheel iPod), I worked on an emulator for a few months called `clicky`. Very nifty project, given the weird and undocumented architecture of those early iPods
Any chance I could borrow this code for my (very WIP) classic clickwheel iPod emulator? I've actually got an experimental WASM build of it up and running, so this would be super appropriate!
One of the coolest technical aspects of early Infocom text adventure games is that most games weren't actually written using native assembly code for the platforms they ran on, and were instead compiled down to "z-code", a bytecode which ran on the "z-machine" virtual machine architecture. Z-machines are pretty niftly little bits of tech, as while they have a lot in common with regular 'ol machine code, the z-machine spec also includes dedicated instructions for fetching text input from the user, outputting text to the console, saving/loading data to disk, etc...
Having games target the abstract z-machine platform made it incredibly easy for Infocom to port games across platforms, as instead of re-writing every game from scratch, they could simply write a z-machine interpreter for said platform, and immediately gain access to their entire adventure game catalog!
A happy side-effect of all this is that it's super easy to run these classic adventure games on modern platforms, as instead of emulating the UI/UX of a 80s microcomputer, it's possible to write a z-machine interpreter that takes full advantage of modern GUIs.
One of my personal favorite modern z-machine interpreters is `encrusted` [1], which is written in Rust that runs on the Web thanks to WebAssembly. As a fun side-project, I ended up forking the project and making `embcrusted` [2], a z-machine interpreter that can run on embedded platforms without a full C-library. In a weekend or two of hacking, I was able to port a z-machine interpreter to my mechanical keyboard, in order to get the "authentic" experience of playing a text-adventure game through a teletype :)
[clicky](https://github.com/daniel5151/clicky) is an emulator for Clickwheel iPods I worked on in the many boring months between University graduation and starting full time work.
Unlike retro consoles/handhelds, there doesn't seem to be much nostalgia in the public consciousness for OG iPods - which is fair, given that most people just see them as antiquated MP3 players. That said, some of the later models did have some pretty neat little games which have yet to be preserved, and can only be played by owning the original hardware.
It was a lot of fun hacking away at the project, and I'd made a surprising amount of progress given that I'd opted to roll my own full-system emulator (in Rust!) as opposed to using something like QEMU.
Who knows, maybe when I have more free time I'll revisit the project and keep pushing it closer to completion. Not sure when though - emulation is a real time hog when you're also juggling a full time job!
https://github.com/daniel5151/clicky