One of the critical items that are required to run an Apple Macintosh emulator is the Macintosh operating system itself (the Mac OS). This is true whether you're running SoftMac, or Fusion, or vMac, or Basilisk, or any other Macintosh computer emulator out there. There is of course Executor, but is not a Macintosh emulator, it is a Mac OS runtime for the PC, NOT the same thing.
Anyway, most Macintosh users who go to run Mac OS on their PC already have a Mac OS on their Mac, duh. However, perhaps you've lost the Mac OS startup disks that came with your Macintosh, perhaps you've got an old old versions of the System, or you've got too new a version (such as Mac OS 9) which is currently not supported by any of the above emulators. So you need to create a new startup disk.
You're in luck! A few years ago, as Apple decided to kill off 68000 based machines, they also went ahead and simply make the older 68000 compatible versions of Mac OS free. That's right, they just posted them to their FTP site. Right now, all Mac OS releases up to and included 7.5.5 can be freely downloaded from their FTP site, as well as the latest versions of various control panels, system extensions, and utilities such as the Drive Setup hard disk formatter.
Although the keep shuffling the files around on their FTP site, and recently dropped the links from their FTP site, the files are still there. You will simply need 3 tools on your Windows computer - an FTP client (or FTP enabled web browser such as Internet Explorer), a Mac archive unstuffer (such as Aladdin's Stuffit Expander), and a disk imaging utility to copy the expanded disk image to a real physical floppy disk.
The first part is easy. If you can read this, chances are your browser will work. Just to go Apple's mirror site: http://mirror.apple.com. Go ahead, try it. Did that work? Now click on either "FTP Access" or "HTTP Access". Click on Apple_Software_Updates. Then click on US since I'm using the U.S. English language releases of Mac OS as the example here, click on Macintosh, then click on System, then finally Older_System. I walked you through it instead of giving a direct link because you'll other interesting folders there along the way to play with later.
Now, if you absolutely have no Mac OS boot disk of any kind, I recommend the System 6.0.8 boot disks for three reasons. First, it's a 1.44M floppy disk image compatible with your PC's floppy disk drive. Second, it contains the Apple hard disk formatting utility which you need to "format" any hard disk image files you create for use with SoftMac. Once you get this done, and have a booting System 6 hard disk image, you can always upgrade it to System 7 later. Third, the system requires only two floppy disks in order to boot and install on a hard disk, less floppies that required by System 7.
So to go ahead and get your System 6.0.8 disk images, click on the System 6.0.x folder and download both the SSW_6.0.8-1.4MB_Disk1of2.sea.bin and SSW_6.0.8-1.4MB_Disk2of2.sea.bin files. These are binary images of self extracting files which uncompress to give you the actual disk images. Apple used to post the raw disk images directly for some stupid reason pulled them off just to make this process all that much more complicated. Argh!
Once you have the two disk images, you'll need Stuffit Expander to uncompress them. Fortunately the makers of Stuffit Expander for the Macintosh also make a Windows version. Simply go to http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander and download it, install it, and run it. Drag the two .bin files to the Stuffit Expander window. You'll end up with two new files, SYSTEM_S and SYSTEM_A which are the two disk images of the System 6.0.8 setup disks.
The final step is to copy these disk images to real floppy disks. If you're not running SoftMac 8.0 or Gemulator 8.0 or later (which contain built-in disk imaging functions), download our own Gemulator Explorer utility. Run it, click on "Non-DOS floppy in A:", then select the Write Image File To Physical Disk menu command. When the file selector comes up, select the SYSTEM_S file. That is your startup disk, which will boot System 6.0.8 and also includes the disk formatter utility, Apple HD SC Setup, as well as TeachText and the disk repair utility. Repeat the same process on a second floppy disk, using the SYSTEM_A disk image. There, you now have a complete set of System 6.0.8 installation disks!
If your particular Mac ROMs don't support System 6.0.8 or you want to upgrade to System 7, click on the System 7.0.x folder instead, and download the file System_7.0.1.smi.bin. As this file format is not expandable by the Windows version of Stuffit Expander, and since Apple decided to be dicks and remove the raw System 7 disk images, you'll need to expand this either on a real Macintosh computer or one the freshly installed System 6.0.8 installation.
You can of course always simply order a Mac OS 8 CD-ROM with your SoftMac purchase and save yourself a lot of hassle!
Other useful things to download from Apple's site:
from the Other_System folder, download MODE32_7.5.sea.bin. The MODE32 utility allows 24-bit dirty 68030 ROMs (Macintosh IIx, IIcx, and SE/30) to work with more than 8 megabytes of memory.
from the Utilities folder, you can download various versions of Drive Setup (the new name for the hard disk formatting utility), Disk Copy (the disk imaging tool for Mac OS), and Disk First Aid (the disk repair utility for Mac OS). These versions will be newer than what you get with System 6, although if you have a Mac OS 8.0, 8.1, or 8.5 CD-ROM, you should simply use the version on the CD-ROM.
You can also poke around the other directories and download things like updated Apple CD-ROM drivers, patches for ClarisWorks, and other useful things.
Update: SoftMac XP has disk imaging commands built right in. You can take a boot floppy disk image, transfer it to a real floppy, and have it booted up in a matter of minutes, all without leaving the emulator.
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