Older cd-roms on Lion

Hi All:

I am running a MacBook with Lion 10.7.5 I have quite a few older cd roms with games that I'd like to play, but they won't run in Lion.

Any suggestions on how I can get these games to work?

Thanks.

No they will not run. Lion did away with Rosetta which enabled PowerPC applications to run on Snow Leopard OS X.6. Maybe partition the drive and install Snow Leopard.

Caveat to what harryb said: if your MacBook came with Lion, then you cannot put Snow Leopard on it.

Hmm... if you're going to partition to run older programs and Snow Leopard will not work as chas_m said... I'd check to see if the disc also includes a windows version. That way boot camp may be able to let you run your older software using windows as Windows 7 will run a lot of older programs.

Your other alternative is to look into buying a cheap older mac for your software on ebay or something. It probably won't run as well as the newer macs, but you'd have a system you could use to run older software while still having your mac with Lion for the mac app store and the newer apps and games available.

Here are two more options:

1. Find a cheap old Mac that is in good shape and can run a version of OS X that supports PowerPC programs, then keep the machine around for exactly that purpose. I have a Black MacBook I keep handy for this running Snow Leopard.

2. If the CD-ROMs are 90s vintage (I have a few of these, mostly musical interactive CD-ROMs from Bowie, Laurie Anderson etc), you'll need to find a good used machine that can run OS 9 or Classic in OS X. I have a 14" iBook for this purpose.

Oh wait, just remembered a third option:

3. If you've got the time and skill and resources, you could try making Sheepshaver work on your current machine. Sheepshaver can emulate OS 9 or OS 8 (or earlier if needed) and still works in Mountain Lion but man oh man is it a ... um, witch ... to set up!!