When software dies

So we're kind of stuck here. Our biology department uses a nice little program called the Genetics Construction Kit what allows students to try and determine the inheritance pattern for various traits in a virtual lab full of flies. You pick two flies with specific traits out of vials, mate them and see the pattern of what comes out. Repeat with some other flies and you can build up a case for understanding the underlying genetics of the system. It's a slick little program and the bio department has built a bunch of labs around it.

It was also written for the Mac Plus. You know, the little all-in-one machine with a 9" screen and a floppy drive that was all the rage in about 1987? It's never been significantly updated, and runs on a bunch of old Mac laptops that run OSX 10.3. That's the last version of OSX that will run GCK- newer versions of MacOSX don't have the OS9 compatibility mode anymore.

So what now? We can keep trying to use the old Mac laptops, but as with any computer their lifespan is finite- they're five years old now. We could try and replace it with something else, but the closest thing I've been able to find is the Virtual Genetics Lab. This is a Java based version with some changes in the types of experiments that can be done. VGL adds the ability to do both XX/XY and ZZ/ZW sex linking as well as 3 allele problems involving circulal or heirarchical dominance. Too bad the bio department doesn't care about that but instead uses the bits they removed- multiple trait problems and codominance-based systems.

We could try to keep the old GCK running using Windows emulators but they have significant limitations- you can't print, can't cut&paste, etc. It still ties us to an aging program that frankly, really shows how far we've come in UI design since 1988, and we're left with additional support questions- does the emulator run on Vista? We could try to roll one ourselves, but this is a significant amount of work and then we have to support it. We can simply give up and redo the labs to use VGL, but then the students lose out. We can lobby the publishers, but according to folks in the department biology profs have been doing this for years with no success. There really aren't any good options- I suspect we might try for rolling one ourselves. (Hey, I like to tinker...)

Ugh.