- #Mini vmac internet mac os#
- #Mini vmac internet software#
- #Mini vmac internet code#
- #Mini vmac internet Pc#
In addition to acquiring a ROM image (which can only be done legally by someone who actually owns an early Mac), Mini vMac of course requires system software to run.
#Mini vmac internet Pc#
On a PC keyboard the Mac's Option key maps to the Windows-logo key and the Apple-logo key maps to the Alt key. The commands include both emulation-specific commands such as speed control and full-screen/window mode toggles, and commands that correspond to the switches on a real compact Mac: the power switch and the 'reset' and 'interrupt' buttons on the programmer's switch. A number of emulator options can be changed on the fly, and Mini vMac provides a self-documenting on-screen display that shows these options when the Control key is depressed. Since the Mac Plus has no Control key, Mini vMac can co-opt it for its own purposes. Pleasantly, the emulator patches the ROM to allow up to 6 disk images to be mounted, with sizes up to 2GB. Once supplied with a bootable disk image the machine will boot and put you in an emulated Finder. Disk images can be 'inserted' into Mini vMac through simple drag-and-drop, or through a file selection dialog on non-Linux systems. If provided with a Mac ROM image with the name vMac.ROM, it will simply start and behave exactly like a Mac Plus with no disk in the drive. Mini vMac is surprisingly easy to use, even on the Linux platform where emulation programs tend to only have cryptic command line interfaces (witness the Linux versions of FCE Ultra and Snes9X). In addition to the Mac Plus, it can be configured to emulate the original 128K Macintosh, the 512K Mac, and the Mac SE. Originally, Mini vMac was a branch of the vMac emulator designed to be simpler to understand, but as the original vMac software hasn't seen any updates in over four years (the last post to its website is a "we'll be getting going again soon" message from 2002), Mini vMac has become the de facto current version of vMac.
#Mini vmac internet mac os#
Mini vMac is a program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, or Linux that emulates an early Macintosh computer, by default a Mac Plus.
#Mini vmac internet code#
Much of the code and data from the earlier era is still tied to the original hardware and software from that time a problem given the age of the hardware and its corresponding failure rate, which brings us to the subject of this writeup. Virtually everyone who has used these machines has moved on (hi there, Amiga die-hards!) even the Macintosh faithful have moved away to a new operating system and a new hardware architecture. The same double-sided 3.5" floppy disk, for instance, would hold 720K in an ST (or a PC), 800K in a Mac, and 880K in an Amiga.Īll three architectures were swamped by the PC and its open ubiquity, aided by the fumblings of Commodore, Apple, and Atari management. (There are more, of course, but these three are the ones that were successful through a wide range of markets, which the Lisa and NeXT cube, for example, were not.) Despite all using the Motorola 68000 at their cores, there were few compatibilities between the systems. In particular, the advent of the graphical user interface and 16-bit microprocessors birthed three separate systems purpose-built with graphical capabilities in mind: the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, and the Atari ST. This state of affairs was established at the beginning of the mass personal computer market with the Commodore PET, TRS-80, and Apple II, and was accepted as something of a fact of life. Before about 1993, when the PC hardware standard finally took a commanding lead over its competitors, it was standard for different computer manufacturers to have completely different operating systems, software bases, and communication methods. In the early days of computers, compatibility between systems was not as big an issue as it is today.
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