Developer here! I'm so excited to see that people like this toy. I'm happy to answer any questions, if you have any.
But first, some important credits: Emulator: Basilisk II, a 68k Macintosh emulator, by Christian Bauer et al, modified and compiled with Emscripten by James Friend. Installed software from vintage computing archives: WinWorldPC, Macintosh Garden, and Macintosh Repository.
This running MacWord+MacExcel in 1997 would have prevented the dystopia from coming true. (Of course, the dystopia is necessary to even conceive of doing this!)
Now put down the keyboard, raise your arms slowly and back away from the NodeJS interpreter. ;)
how easy is this to get running in an actual browser, rather than Electron*? I want to host some Hypercard stacks (some of which need Quicktime support, hence colour Mac emulation).
James Friend is the one who got the C compiled with Emscripten, and as long as you're able to serve an entire disk image from a server (and don't crumble under the bandwidth), a browser is good enough.
Electron is only here to ensure that state is saved (save a game, quit the app, start the app, your save game is still there) and to make the mounting of disk images and transfer of files from your local machine super easy.
That's indeed probably a bad idea if the author wants the repository to last, embedding unlicensed content is always a risk. Morally I'd argue that it's absurd that such old software isn't in the public domain yet, but legally it's pretty clear that this can't be redistributed freely, although I doubt that Apple is likely to enforce it.
But first, some important credits: Emulator: Basilisk II, a 68k Macintosh emulator, by Christian Bauer et al, modified and compiled with Emscripten by James Friend. Installed software from vintage computing archives: WinWorldPC, Macintosh Garden, and Macintosh Repository.