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Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

snowemu.com

31–40 of 97 posts

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#31
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!

I have a large collection of vintage Mac's and peripherals, with the largest quantity being the Apple Keyboard II [1]. Archive forums all suggest the Belkin ADB Adapter [2] but that has long since been retired. I would like to make my own, i know instructions exist for a raw passthrough.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Keyboard_II.jpg

[2]https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/hack-your-old-macs-adb-k...

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#32

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…

That article is objectively true but .. I've never seen such a grotesque dismissal of the hard work people have done for free.

For the amount of time and effort that went into that article, the author could surely have fixed at least one of the things they complain about! And they don't seem to understand the C #include mechanism at all, so should we even pay attention to their technical criticisms in the first place?!

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is objectively true but .. I've never seen such a grotesque dismissal of the hard work people have done for free.

For the amount of time and effort that went into that article, the author could surely have fixed at least one of the things they complain about! And they don't seem to understand the C #include mechanism at all , so should we even pay attention to their technical criticisms in the first place?!

I don't know if you read the whole article. The author did make a Mini vMac fork to clean up the build system and code, she linked it at the end. https://github.com/InvisibleUp/uvmac .

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#34

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…

there's definitely room to improve user friendliness of mac emulation (minivmac's compile time config is so infuriating), but I think it's a bit unfair to compare to most of those emulators

vmware and virtualbox were backed by billion dollar corps

the 16 bit machines are much simpler than macs

game consoles had highly homogenous well documented hardware, and sold in much greater numbers (snes alone sold more than all macs from 1987 to 1995) so there's a larger community to draw devs and users from. writing a nes emulator is almost a weekend project now, it's so documented.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#35
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?

Anyone who has a working Bernoulli box probably has a matching old mac to go with it.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#36
post #33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the amount of time and effort that went into that article, the author could surely have fixed at least one of the things they complain about! And they don't seem to understand the C #include mechanism at all , so should we even pay attention to their technical criticisms in the first place?!

I don't know if you read the whole article. The author did make a Mini vMac fork to clean up the build system and code, she linked it at the end. https://github.com/InvisibleUp/uvmac .

Ha. I was starting to find the article a bit tiring and the moment my eyes landed on the Conclusion heading I stopped right there. You shouldn't trust my criticisms either.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#37
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?

maybe this would work? https://www.bigmessowires.com/usb-wombat/

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The Griffin iMate was the most popular ADB-USB adapter from the time, and probably supports non-input devices (it would’ve been the only option at the time to make those dongles work).

Ah yeah, the ones that were sold at the time would work if you passed through USB to an emulator that supported USB hardware, or reverse-engineered their proprietary protocol. I was only thinking of the modern options when I wrote my comment.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#39

Little help - how can I find ROM-s? I tried to download some using sites found in Google, but the emulator always says "Unknown or unsupported ROM file". How can I find usable roms?

Little help - how can I find ROM-s? I tried to download some using sites found in Google, but the emulator always says "Unknown or unsupported ROM file". How can I find usable roms? These seem to work: https://archive.org/details/mac_rom_archive_-_as_of_8-19-201...

Very nice, thank you.

I try to run some of them, e.g. Macintosh Plus. It does accept the ROM, but it just shows a flashing floppy disk icon and doesn't do anything else. How could this be fixed?

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#40
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?

Anyone who has a working Bernoulli box probably has a matching old mac to go with it.

Several, yes ;-)
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