Michael Steil has built a working browser-hosted emulator that boots Apple Copland D11E4, the final Copland development build, inside an improved DingusPPC running as WebAssembly. The emulation reproduces real-hardware behavior: booting takes roughly 30 seconds on comparable hardware and modern machines can match real time in wasm. Interaction is live - click the screen to capture keyboard and mouse, press Escape to release them - and if execution hits an assertion the emulator drops into a debugger where clicking “Continue” resumes. The build includes runnable applications such as GXSlidemaster and Eric’s Solitaire so users can explore the system once it reaches the desktop.
Getting Copland to run required a series of targeted fixes: eleven patches that unlock the build are maintained on branches of the author’s GitHub fork, and a separate branch holds the wasm-specific adjustments. The emulator’s maintainers refuse patches produced with AI, so the author invites someone to reimplement the fixes from the commit explanations if they wish. Copland itself was intended as a microkernel-based successor to System 7 but was cancelled; Apple instead acquired NeXTSTEP/OpenStep and that work evolved into Mac OS X.
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