I elided much of the technical process of setting up a legacy operating system environment in an emulator, since my focus for that post was on general strategy and assessment – but there are aspects of the technical setup process that aren’t super clear from the Emaculation guides that I first started with.What is MAME OS X for Mac MAME OS X is a native OS X port of the popular MAME emulator. The Mac OS X tests were performed on a 1.25 GHz G4 PowerBook with 1 GB of RAM and 128 MB allocated to the virtual machine.Last fall I wrote about the collaborative technical/scholarly process of making some ’90s multimedia CD-ROMs available for a Cinema Studies course on Interactive Cinema. We ran this under the lightweight icewm Window manager rather than the text console, so as to stress the GUI a bit while we ran the tests. We ran make three times on each emulator, and took the average.These releases will only run on specific models of PPC Apple Macintosh computers.That’s not too surprising. X86 emulators like VirtualBox, VMWare or Virtual PC will not work. Installation notes: This version of Mac OS X is for PowerPC. Installation instructions.
Tiger Emulator Mac MAME OSAmigaOS ZX Spectrum emulators available for AmigaOS. Macintosh ZX Spectrum emulators available for the Macintosh platform, including Mac OS X. Etc.Note that some emulators listed can also be compiled for MacOS X. That’s also not something that to hold against them in the least, mind you – when you are a relatively tiny, all-volunteer group of programmers keeping the software going to maintain decades’ worth of content from a major computing company that’s notoriously litigious about intellectual property….some of the details are going to fall through the cracks, especially when you’re trying to cram them into a forum post, not specifically addressing the archival/information science community, etc. I’ll start with the essential components to get any Mac emulation program running, give some recommendations for picking an emulator, then round it out with some installation instructions and tips for each one. PearPC is a useful emulator.So what really is the boundary between Basilisk II and SheepShaver? Why is there such a difference between MacOS 9.0.4 and 9.1? And what the hell is a ROM file anyway? That’s what I want to get into today. Most of the “default” or recommended pre-compiled Mac/Windows versions of emulators offered up to casual or first-time users don’t necessarily do every single feature that the emulator’s front page brags about.Only certain versions of Mac OS 9 can run under the Classic system layer, and the layer itself was dropped after Mac OS X Tiger. That’s partly because, as open source software, each of these programs is *potentially* capable of a hell of a lot – but might require a lot of futzing in configuration files and compiling of source code to actually unlock all those potentials (which, those of us just trying to load up Nanosaur for the first time in 15 years aren’t necessarily looking to mess with). Although you can change the default shell in the Terminal preferences, this does not affect the login shell used for remote or console logins.In particular, while each Mac emulator has some pretty good information available to troubleshoot it (if you’ve got the time to find it), I’ve never found a really satisfying overview, that is, an explanation of why you might choose X program over Y. Earlier versions of Mac OS X shipped with tcsh as the default shell. Mac command for disk utility at startupFor the rest of us, there’s WinWorld , providing disk image files for all your abandonware OS needs.This is the first thing that can start to throw people off. If you still have the original installer CD lying around, great! You can still use that. These used to come on bootable CD-ROMs, or depending on the age of the OS, floppy disks. We’ll go over these in more detail in a minute.You’ll need the program that installs the desired operating system that you’re trying to recreate/emulate: let’s say, for example, Mac OS 8.5. Intro: How do I pick what emulator to use?There are several free and open-source software options for emulating legacy Mac systems on contemporary computers. The major selling point of Windows systems is that they are not locked into specific hardware: there are/have been any number of third-party manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo, HP, IBM, etc etc) and they all have to make sure their hardware, including the CPU/ROM that come with their desktops, are very broadly compatible, because they can never predict what other manufacturer’s hardware/software you may be trying to use in combination. If the whole goal of an emulator is to trick legacy software into thinking it’s on an older machine by creating a fake computer-inside-your-computer (a “virtual machine”), you need a ROM file to serve as the fake brain.This is trickier with Mac emulation than it is with Windows/PC emulation. Rather than stored on a hard drive like the operating system, which is easily writable/modifiable by the user, this crucial, small central piece of code is stored on the CPU on a chip of Read-Only Memory (the read-only part is why this sort of code is often called firmware rather than software). But the CPU itself needs a little bit of programmed code in order to work – it has to be able to both understand and give instructions. This ensures your computer has at least some basic functionality even if your operating system were to get corrupted or some piece of hardware were to truly go haywire (see this other post). It also has a CPU, central processing unit, which is commonly analogized to the “brain” of the computer: it coordinates all the different pieces of your computer, hardware and software alike: operating system, keyboard, mouse, monitor, hard drive (or solid state drive), CD-ROM drive, USB hub, etc. ![]() So how do I pick what ROM file and emulator to use?That’s largely going to depend on what OS you’re aiming for. I’ll link with impunity to options that have worked for me. Besides malware, it’s easy to come across ROM files that are just corrupted and non-functional. ![]()
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