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Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

snowemu.com

11–20 of 97 posts

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#11
post #4

Off-topic... I wish Apple would bring back the white menubar background and the coloured logo. The white menubar makes the whole computer easier to use in a small but constant way. The coloured apple icon would suggest they no longer have their heads stuck up their assess and might bring back "fun" rather than "showing off" to their design process. And then maybe, maybe... with that "suggestion" symbolised in the UI,…

What about setting a white background, which yields a white menubar? A color logo might be added with an overlay app – or you reminisce a black&white screen.

seconding the overlay app, i forgot the name but there was an app that can configure the appearance of the menubar. maybe it's my menubar icon organizer? Not dozer or bartender, but can't recall right now

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#13
post #7

Much of my early post-college work is stored across a stack of Mac formatted Bernoulli disks. The software requires an ADB dongle to run, so physical hardware is required. I wonder if any of those ADB to USB adapters could be mapped into the emulator?

If you've not backed it up already that data might be gone. If it's valuable to you then I'd recommend finding out sooner than later

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#15
post #7

Much of my early post-college work is stored across a stack of Mac formatted Bernoulli disks. The software requires an ADB dongle to run, so physical hardware is required. I wonder if any of those ADB to USB adapters could be mapped into the emulator?

All of the ADB to USB adapters I know of only support mice and keyboards and have internal firmware that maps to USB HID. You'd have to write a custom firmware to make a raw pass through to an emulator...

It would probably be easier to crack the software!

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#16

For some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/ For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years. For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidel…

In compatibility, it's MUCH worse than all the others, but there's also Executor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software) which you can use to run a Macintosh version of solitaire in your browser by having the browser emulate MS-DOS which then runs Executor/DOS: https://archive.org/details/executor

In addition to Executor/DOS, a non-released version ran on the Sun 3 workstations (they too had 680x0 processors) and Executor/NEXTSTEP ran on NeXT machines, both the 680x0 based ones and the x86 powered PCs that could run NEXTSTEP.

Executor was the least compatible because it used no intellectual property from Apple. The ROMs and system software substitutes were all written in a clean room--no disassembly of the Apple ROMs or System file.

Although Executor ostensibly has a Linux port, it's probably hard to build (I haven't tried in a couple decades) in part because to squeeze the maximum performance out of a 80386 processor, the synthetic CPU relied on gcc-specific extensions.

I know a fair amount about Executor, because I wrote the initial version of it, although all the super impressive parts (e.g., the synthetic 68k emulator and the color subsystem) were written by better programmers than I am.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#17
post #14

I'm not sure why OP links to this site, but the actual project is here https://snowemu.com/ https://github.com/twvd/snow

Personally I find an announcement like the one linked more helpful and useful to create a context, rather than linking directly to the project.

Links to the actual project are in the submitted post, so you can get an overview before then being directed to the project itself.

As always YMMV, indeed, YMWV, but I like seeing the announcement giving the context rather than a bare pointer to the project.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#18

Off-topic... I wish Apple would bring back the white menubar background and the coloured logo. The white menubar makes the whole computer easier to use in a small but constant way. The coloured apple icon would suggest they no longer have their heads stuck up their assess and might bring back "fun" rather than "showing off" to their design process. And then maybe, maybe... with that "suggestion" symbolised in the UI,…

[deleted]

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#19

For some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/ For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years. For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidel…

It might not count as "user-friendly" but MAME does hardware-level emulation of the Macintosh and Apple II (more accurate and more peripherals but less user friendly than KEGS and AppleWin).

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#20

For some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/ For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years. For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidel…

In compatibility, it's MUCH worse than all the others, but there's also Executor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software) which you can use to run a Macintosh version of solitaire in your browser by having the browser emulate MS-DOS which then runs Executor/DOS: https://archive.org/details/executor In addition to Executor/DOS, a non-released version ran on the Sun 3 workstations (they too had 680x0 processo…

https://github.com/autc04/executor is a more recent fork of executor (but based on the issues, it does build on recent OS)
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