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Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

snowemu.com

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Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#71

Post by tomhow »

joshAg wrote: post #67
tomhow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

The question we always ask is whether a source contains “significant new information”.

In the case you cited, the Quanta Magazine article is a report about the study’s findings that is readable and understandable to lay people, and includes backstory and quotes from interviews with the researchers and also images.

I.e., there’s plenty of information in the article that isn’t in the paper. So we’ll always go with that kind of article, over the paper itself, particularly in the case of Quanta Magazine which is a high-quality publication.

In other cases an article is “blog spam” - I.e., it just rewords a study without adding any new information, and in those cases we’ll link directly to the study, or to a better article if someone suggests it.

Anyone is always welcome to suggest a source that is the most informative about a topic and we’ll happily update the link to that.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#72

Post by tomhow »

ColinWright wrote: post #28
tomhow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We won't agree on this. I understand the rationale, and as someone who moderates other communities I can totally understand why this is administered as a blanket policy. Having said that, it does sometimes result in what I think of as sub-optimal situations where information is unnecessarily lost or obscured. In particular, adding a link to the original post, as you have done here, is likely to be of minimal value. P…

I think you're implying that we're more rigid and/or self-defeating about this than we are.

We always want the source that contains the greatest amount of information about the topic. As I wrote in the other reply in this subthread, the heuristic is whether a source contains "significant new information" vs an alternative.

That means, as explained in that reply, an article about the findings of an academic study is better than the academic paper, if it contains significant new information that isn't easily found from the paper itself (particularly if the article contains quotes from interviews with the researchers). A project creator’s blog post about a new project or release is better than a link to the project's GitHub page.

We generally prefer not to link to a third-party's social media post about a project, on the basis that it's light on significant new information and takes traffic/attention away from the primary source or another in-depth article about it. (It's different if it's a 3rd-party's detailed blog post about a project, which includes their own experiences using the project and comparing it with other projects in the same category. But then it's more of a review, than a report about the project itself.) Another problem with submitting a 3rd-party post about a project is that it then becomes a topic of debate in the comments, why one source was chosen over another, which happened here.

In a case like this, the information that was in that social media post could easily have been quoted in a comment in the thread, that we could have pinned.

Given that the author of the project posted an announcement in a discussion forum, there could be a case for making that the HN source, given that it contains the other relevant links and some additional commentary, though in this case it's a bit light on detail. But it makes all the difference that the source we link to is by the author of the project.

In the case of this submission, the story has been on the front page for 12 hours already, including some time at #1, and is still going strong, so I don't think anything has been lost.

You're always welcome to make a case for why a particular source is the one that contains the most "significant new information" and is thus the one that should be the HN source.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#73

Post by snvzz »

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…

Note that while this was true about software, there is also hardware (FPGA HDL), such as the MacPlus-miSTer core[0].

0. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/MacPlus_MiSTer

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#74

Post by msephton »

car wrote: post #63

Feels so real, great work. Any chance this could be made to emulate an Atari ST?

Hatari is already excellent? https://github.com/hatari/hatari

And there's also Clock Signal (CLK) "A latency-hating emulator of: the Acorn Electron and Archimedes, Amstrad CPC, Apple II/II+/IIe and early Macintosh, Atari 2600 and ST, ColecoVision, Enterprise 64/128, Commodore Vic-20 and Amiga, MSX 1/2, Oric 1/Atmos, early PC compatibles, Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum." https://github.com/TomHarte/CLK

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#75

Post by troad »

InvisibleUp wrote: post #59
xdfgh1112 wrote: post #6

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.

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.

I stopped reading when we got to sarcastic hate-compiling. That whole part could be a thoughtful and compassionate discussion of the state of Mac emulators, and would be much more persuasive if it were, and instead it reads like a blog-length dunk tweet.

> I feel like that’s a bit harsh, but I’ll admit that it is needlessly inflammatory.

You're asking for a courtesy here that you failed to extend to others.

When you write a hit piece on someone's hobby volunteer code, and then you get called out for being unduly mean, I don't think you get to complain people are being harsh to you. You chose to devote hours of your time to dismantling something someone put years of effort in, entirely as a fun hobby. (Antique Mac emulation is certainly not the highway to riches.) You say 'inflammatory', like the issue here is that you're slightly heated and passionate. No, the issue here is that the piece boils down to bullying other people because their fun hobby projects don't meet your esoteric standards ('no Github releases!').

> 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…)

Nothing about your mental state gives you licence to bully others. Their emotional states are no less important than yours.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#76

Post by nxobject »

I'm surprised HD20 support is listed as "not applicable" for SE, II, etc: I think all models listed except for II have HD20 boot support in ROM. I use an HD20 emulator with my physical Mac SE.

It's one of the most convenient ways to get arbitrary-sized disk images both into emulators -- both Mac emulators and physical floppy emulators.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#77

Post by retrac »

Rochus wrote: post #57

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.

The early Macs used the IWM, which is basically Wozniak's 1977 Disk II controller reduced to one chip. The same trick with cycle-exact code, that was used in the Apple II, is also used in the Mac.

It's why the cursor stops moving sporadically when writing to a disk. The Mac has a 60 Hz interrupt timer that also tracks the cursor. It needs to be switched off when writing.

There's a story on Folklore.org by Andy Hertzfeld that mentions it in passing:

> Woz's disk technology required that the software feed it new data every 32 microseconds exactly. If we were even a single microsecond early or late, it would cause a glitch in the data and ruin it. In order to write the routines, I needed to know how fast the Macintosh executed each instruction. The manual gave the number of clocks for each instruction, but I wasn't sure how long it took to fetch from memory. So of course, I asked Burrell what the timings were, but I was surprised at his response.

> "I don't know. The Mac is synchronous, just like the Apple II, so each instruction has the same timing, every time you execute it, so you will be able to write disk routines that have exact timing. I don't know what it is, so we'll just measure it. Why don't you write your routine and we'll measure it with the logic analyzer."

-- https://www.folklore.org/Nybbles.html

This reminds me that all of the unusual Apple II disk stuff like spiral tracks and different-sized sectors and different nibbilization schemes were also, at least theoretically, possible on the Mac. I wonder if they were ever used for copy protection?

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#78

Post by flomo »

retrac wrote: post #77
Rochus wrote: post #57

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.

The early Macs used the IWM, which is basically Wozniak's 1977 Disk II controller reduced to one chip. The same trick with cycle-exact code, that was used in the Apple II, is also used in the Mac. It's why the cursor stops moving sporadically when writing to a disk. The Mac has a 60 Hz interrupt timer that also tracks the cursor. It needs to be switched off when writing. There's a story on Folklore.org by Andy Hertzf…

Early Mac games did have disk-based copy protection, and yes there was a cracking scene. A lot of these games did not run on later Macs, so this was largely forgotten.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#79

Post by dlevine »

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…

I had a licensed copy of Executor back in the mid-90s. It was the coolest thing ever. Thanks for being one of my inspirations to go into software development.

Re: Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

#80

Post by InvisibleUp »

InvisibleUp wrote: post #59
xdfgh1112 wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Update: Now that I'm off work, I’ve removed the big rant about mini vMac’s code and sanded off the snark from the rest. I should have done this years ago, and I never should have added that in the first place.
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