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Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

snowemu.com

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Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#61

Post by nxobject »

hedgehog wrote: post #43
wk_end wrote: post #21

I suppose - owing to its accuracy - that this doesn't have some of BasiliskII's killer features: it patches the OS/ROMs to add support for super-high resolutions and (mostly) seamless integration with the host's file system and network. It's a shame that Basilisk - possibly owing to its inaccurate but killer features - is as janky as it is, because it's really remarkably pleasant to use when it works.

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…

One way to add devices that doesn't require ROM or software modification, but _does_ require modifying the emulator: create a virtual memory-mapped device off 68K bus, and write a driver/CDEV to drive it. The SE and Macintosh II had blessed but different expansion options, after all.

For earlier models, there are unused apertures in model memory maps that are at least 2KB large, but they do differ between models.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#64

Post by nxobject »

projektfu wrote: post #54
ndiddy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My 2c: having played around with the codebase recently (to add C++ to the codebase), I did find Cursor helpful in figuring out how to work with the bespoke build system.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#65

Post by egypturnash »

raihansaputra wrote: post #11
xenonite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ice organizes menubar icons and can alter the bar's appearance.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#66

Post by anthk »

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…

You forgot miniVMAC, 68k. Qemu does MacPPC fine.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#67

Post by joshAg »

tomhow wrote: post #24
ColinWright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and while I appreciate the rationale behind it, I'm always saddened when a carefully chosen link that suits the way I think, giving and overview and a context with links to the projects, is then over-written by the direct link to the project that doesn't give a sense of why it's interesting or relevant. But as the Man in Black says in The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment".

We can have our cake and eat it. The guidelines are clear that the original/canonical source is what we want on HN: Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. But you're welcome to post a comment with links to other sources that give the extra information and context, and we can pin it to the top of the thread, or do what I've done here and put them in…

so just to confirm, this HN submission [ 1] should have linked to this pdf of the paper [2] and put the article [3] that is the current link for the post as a comment?

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381297
  [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19244
  [3]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-pyramid-like-shape-always-lands-the-same-side-up-20250625/

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#68

Post by Palomides »

trollbridge wrote: post #51
Palomides wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

vmware apparently had 20 employees in year one, I don't think a single person has ever worked full time on a mac emulator (other than Apple's internal ones, of course)

even a "tiny, scrappy company" has massive manpower compared to 99.999% of open source projects

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#69

Post by homarp »

homarp wrote: post #20
nmdeadhead wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

typo: does NOT build on recent OS
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