The Internet Archive may use a less-capable Mac emulator, but you don’t have to. Here’s how to use their HyperCard stacks on MAME:

Initial setup

Download the HyperCard startup image from this page. Click “Download ISO Image” to get HyperCardBootSystem7.img.

Run MAME maciicx with RAM size set to 8 MB, the “image” card in slot B, a System 7.1 or later boot disk as “hard1”, and IA’s HyperCard Boot disk as “disk”. From the command line that looks like this:

mame64 maciicx -ramsize 8M -nbb image -hard1 mac755.chd -disk HyperCardBootSystem7.img

When it comes up, drag the HyperCard folder from the BootSystem7 disk to your startup disk and shut down cleanly. (Before shutting down you may wish to go to the Monitors control panel and enable color if you haven’t already; 256 colors is good for HyperCard without slowing things down.

Running a Stack

See a stack you like? Click the stack page’s “Download ISO Image”; this will give you a .img file. Run as you did before, but this time select the stack you want to run as “disk”.

mame64 maciicx -ramsize 8M -nbb image -hard1 mac755.chd -disk disk.img

Double-click the stack and HyperCard should auto-launch.

No, Google Translate will not render that title as anything worthwhile. It’s a line from Firefly.

Anyway, the fine folks at the Internet Archive recently surfaced a ton of materials relating to the China Educational Computer I, or CEC-I. The CEC-I was an almost chip-for-chip clone of the Apple //e (including the MMU and IOC custom chips), but the aux side is devoted to a bunch of new ROM containing Chinese fonts, a built-in LOGO interpreter, and who knows what else (there’s 384K of extra ROM in this thing compared to a real //e).

There are two dumped versions of the firmware. Version 1.1 has $8D as the ID byte at $FBB3; this doesn’t match any real Apple, and so e.g. ProDOS refuses to work (even our modern enlightened John Brooks versions). Version 1.21 changes the ID bytes to perfectly match an Apple II Plus and so all versions of ProDOS work. Programmatically, while the extra switches of a //e exist, they’ll do things you don’t expect (RAMRD will page in ROM at $4000, which probably isn’t what you were expecting, and the lack of auxram means double-anything modes aren’t happening). So treat the machine as a 64K II Plus and everything will go well for you (it plays 64K II Plus games fine).

Even in the firmware version that IDs as a II Plus, other ROM contents can and do vary. Zellyn and qkumba’s Apple II Audit disk fails because of this.

MAME will have full support for this unique bit of history very soon.