Browse the modern web on vintage Macs.
RetroGate is a macOS proxy server that bridges the gap between classic Macintosh computers (1984–2005) and today's internet. It runs on a modern Mac (Apple Silicon) on your local network and handles all the heavy lifting — TLS, HTML5, modern image formats — so your old Mac doesn't have to.
🌐 retrogate.app
- TLS Bridge — Old Macs can't do TLS 1.2/1.3. RetroGate fetches HTTPS sites and serves them back as plain HTTP.
- HTML Transcoder — Converts modern HTML5/CSS3/JS pages into clean HTML 3.2 that Netscape 2, MacWeb, and iCab can actually render.
- Image Transcoder — Converts WebP/AVIF to JPEG/GIF, resizes images to vintage-friendly dimensions.
- Wayback Machine Mode — Set a date, and RetroGate fetches every page from the Wayback Machine. Browse the web as it was in 1997.
- FTP Gateway (planned) — Serve files over FTP for classic Mac FTP clients like Fetch.
- MacWeb 1.x–2.x (System 6/7)
- Netscape Navigator 1.x–4.x
- Internet Explorer for Mac 2.x–5.x
- iCab 2.x–3.x
- Cyberdog
- Classilla (Mac OS 9)
- macOS 14+ (Sonoma) on Apple Silicon
- Swift 5.9+
- A vintage Mac on the same network (Ethernet via bridge, or LocalTalk→Ethernet adapter)
cd retrogate
swift build
swift run RetroGateOr open in Xcode:
open Package.swift- Launch RetroGate on your modern Mac
- Note the IP address and port (default:
8080) - On your vintage Mac, set the HTTP proxy to
<modern-mac-ip>:8080 - Browse!
Sources/
├── RetroGate/ # SwiftUI app + CLI entry point
├── ProxyServer/ # SwiftNIO HTTP proxy listener
├── HTMLTranscoder/ # HTML5 → HTML 3.2 conversion
├── WaybackBridge/ # Wayback Machine integration
└── ImageTranscoder/ # Image format conversion & resizing
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
See LICENSE for the full text.
Copyright (C) 2026 Bruno van Branden (Simplinity)