Introduction

 

I'll never forget being intrigued by the first Mac I ever saw.

 

I spent my childhood tinkering with Commodore 64's, Amstrad CPC 464's and the occasional Amiga. I was first introduced to IBM compatibles in 1986 and they consumed my life for the next two years. Then in 1988 my family moved to a small town in country New South Wales, Australia, where I was upset to find there were no IBM clones at my new school! Instead there were these tiny computers labelled "Macintosh Plus". I was surprised to see that every one of these computers had a mouse—previously the presence of a mouse had been a novelty for me. I curiously switched it on and played with the mouse while the screen displayed a flashing question mark on top of a disk. An older kid gave me a disk, it was a little 3.5" disk not like the larger 5.25" 'floppy' disks I was used to (I think it was System 3). It booted and within the next two minutes I was convinced that this was the coolest thing I had ever seen. After that moment, if anybody ever asked me about Macs, I'd say,

 

 

Nowadays there's not a great deal of difference between the various platforms, not enough at least to make a noise about like the Mac in the eighties. I now like to think of myself as "platform independent" as I quite enjoy using Windows, Gnome and Mac OS 10. But I do miss System 6!

 

 

July 2003

 

I downloaded Basilisk II from Nigel Pearson's Home Page to discover that it doesn't support sound under Mac Plus emulation. Although it was fairly cool, using a Quadra ROM, to see Mac OS 8 running under Windows!

 

 

November 2004

 

Click here to see a screen shot of vMac running on my G4 PowerBook. (104kB)

 

I downloaded vMac, copied the ROM from my Mac Plus and imaged the old external hard drive. The version of vMac I found was carbonised for OS 10. The only disk images I could get to work were those made by DiskDup Plus (these will mount normally under OS 9 and 10). This is a classic application, so you'll need either classic installed or an older Mac handy. I created a nice big image and then copied my files across to it. The emulator then booted and I was greeted with my old desktop!
 
There are 2 things to be careful of:

1. Don't remount an image containing Mac OS 6 under a newer OS. During my experimentation I remounted a disk containing OS 6 under OS 9. OS 9 "re-built" the desktop file, after which the emulator refused to boot with the disk image. To copy stuff to your primary disk image, create a new intermediary disk image, mount it under your newer OS and copy the files across, then start-up the emulator and mount both disks under the older OS.
    
2. Back-up all disk images. If the emulator crashes it takes the disk image with it.

Some things I noticed:

• Resetting the emulator is not the same as quitting it and starting it up again.
   
• It ran much better under OS 10.3 on my 867MHz G4 than under OS 9.2 on my 233MHz G3.
   
• I had to double click slower than what I was used to, even though the double click speed was set to max.
   
• The emulator is very good, except in games. A number of people have reported success with a number of games but I so far have been unable to reproduce this. For example "Crystal Quest" was quite playable but the velocity from the previous level or life was carried over into the next restart, which is a problem if you start right next to a mine. In "Beyond Dark Castle" the keys would seem to 'stick' and then I would loose keyboard input altogether, the whole time the mouse worked fine.

 

 

 

December 2004

 

Linux

 

 

Now that I'm reasonably happy with the emulator I want to spend some time in the Macintosh Garden and put together a disk image containing a minimal system and a great number of games!

 

 

Questions?

 

My name is David Johnston. If you've any questions don't hesitate to contact me.