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Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

snowemu.com

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Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#51

Post by trollbridge »

Palomides wrote: post #34
thristian wrote: post #3

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…

It should be pointed out that VMware started as a tiny, scrappy company mostly focused on selling workstation seats for you to run Windows on your Linux computer (which I did back circa 1999, so I could use Linux on my desktop), and VirtualBox started out from InnoTek, a tiny company which was essentially making software to emulate Windows on OS/2, and then later did a contract with Connectix to run OS/2 on Windows (or other hosts) using Virtual PC.

Connectix got bought by Windows, and InnoTek got bought by Sun, which is now Oracle. Connectix themselves started as a scrappy outfit making it possible to run DOS/Win95 on a Mac.

The core emulation was pretty much done and stable and optimised before the billion-dollar corps bought them out.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#52

Post by the_other »

thm wrote: post #5
the_other wrote: post #2

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,…

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/23/macos-tahoe-beta-2-menu...

Nice, thanks. I'll use that when I upgrade.

But I'm not going to upgrade whilst the back/next buttons are floating 3m above the window as suggested in that screen shot.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#53

Post by the_other »

celsius1414 wrote: post #47
the_other wrote: post #2

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,…

Turning “Reduce Transparency” on in Accessibility > Display will solidify the menubar in both light and dark modes. I go through phases with transparency off or on.

Same.

Sometimes I enjoy the translucent menus. They make the machine look "glossy" and expensive. But they're definitely harder to read than opaque flat ones.

With "reduce transparency" on, it's better, but the menubar still isn't white. It's a textured light grey that's closer to the look of an unfocused app window than the solid, dependable, flat thing I wish it still was.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#54

Post by projektfu »

ndiddy wrote: post #33
tom_ wrote: 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 .

Oh, thank goodness. Hacking Mini vMac was a chore and I didn't have the energy to do something like this.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#55

Post by GloriousCow »

trollbridge wrote: post #49

Was this inspired by MartyPC?

Funny you mention that, I'm actually friends with twvd and we share a discord server and trade UI ideas as we both use the same GUI toolkit. Snow actually uses the disk image library I built for MartyPC.

Inspired is a strong word. I didn't invent the concept of an accurate emulator, although I'm certainly a fan of his approach.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#56

Post by joshmarinacci »

nmdeadhead wrote: post #16
thristian wrote: post #3

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…

Thank you so much for Executor. I used to run it on my 486 Linux box, over an X11 SSH tunnel to the Sun workstation I used in the computer labs for work on campus. I balanced my checkbook and wrote essays in emulated Excel and Word (with rough compatibility with the Windows versions). It was so cool to be able to mix and match systems that way.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#57

Post by Rochus »

Does the Mac - like the Lisa - also require cycle accurate emulation of the hardware? I spent some time with lisaem and made experiments with Qemu, but the Lisa OS makes assumptions about hardware timing which cannot be met by the latter.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#58

Post by hedgehog »

duskwuff wrote: post #50
hedgehog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An accurate emulator with clean codebase is a good starting point onto which to add patches/shortcuts. I've looked through the Basilisk patching code, it's not really complicated, and there are a handful of partial Toolbox reimplementations including the bits in Basilisk, Executor (author is in the comments here), MACE, etc. It would be some work to port but mostly direct translation of the code & adding test infrast…

As an aside, I really wish MACE would open-source their work. They've made some impressive progress, but I worry that work's going to go to waste if it stays closed.

Aha, I got MACE and Advanced Mac Substitute (AMS) mixed up. AMS looks less complete but has source available.

https://www.v68k.org/advanced-mac-substitute/

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#59

Post by InvisibleUp »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #6
thristian wrote: post #3

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.

I feel like that’s a bit harsh, but I’ll admit that it is needlessly inflammatory. I wasn’t in the best state mentally when I wrote that. (I do sometimes worry that I’m responsible for the disappearance of Paul C. Pratt…) At some point I need to either rewrite it to be less hostile or just yank it entirely.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#60

Post by CTOSian »

longtimelistnr wrote: post #29
mdavid626 wrote: post #12

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?

https://macintoshgarden.org/ has always been the gold standard source for me!

I usually use https://www.macintoshrepository.org , the garden lack some proper organisation
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