I've thought about MAE many times while running ShapeShifter. According to Christian Bauer, the author of ShapeShifter, MacOS and the Mac ROMs were practically written to make abstraction as straightforward as possible.
Considering how wonderful and usable the GUI of classic MacOS is, I think it's a shame that the GUI was never properly abstracted enough to be used in a Unix environment by itself, but between work already done in MAE, ShapeShifter and A/UX, I wonder if it could still be a thing some day...
There was Ardi‘s Executor, but I don’t think there was an IRIX port. You could port Executor yourself now, it was open sourced some years ago: https://github.com/ctm/executor
In addition, there is a port of the Basilisk II emulator (this requires a copy of the original Mac ROMs, Executor reimplements the ROM parts of the Mac System, MAE includes a copy of the ROM as it was an official Apple product): https://forums.irixnet.org/printthread.php?tid=977
Considering how wonderful and usable the GUI of classic MacOS is, I think it's a shame that the GUI was never properly abstracted enough to be used in a Unix environment by itself, but between work already done in MAE, ShapeShifter and A/UX, I wonder if it could still be a thing some day...
In addition, there is a port of the Basilisk II emulator (this requires a copy of the original Mac ROMs, Executor reimplements the ROM parts of the Mac System, MAE includes a copy of the ROM as it was an official Apple product): https://forums.irixnet.org/printthread.php?tid=977
https://github.com/autc04/executor
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/apple-macintosh-application-...
https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10...