81–90 of 97 posts
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?
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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…
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https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/23/macos-tahoe-beta-2-menu...
Are they really changing the UI up again? I am actually so done at this point. The endless UI churn drives me absolutely mad, but I suppose when there's nothing left to do, making it look different is easy. I suppose a built in volume mixer is still too much to ask for though.
It’s not churn its change, and it’s inevitable. No sense getting worked up over it.
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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.
http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/devel/plushw.php:
“The Macintosh disk interface uses a design similar to that used on the Apple II and Apple III computers, employing the Apple custom IWM chip. Another custom chip called the Analog Signal Generator (ASG) reads the disk speed buffer in RAM and generates voltages that control the disk speed. Together with the VIA, the IWM and the ASG generate all the signals necessary to read, write, format, and eject the 3 1/2-inch disks used by the Macintosh.”
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…
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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...
https://github.com/gblargg/adb-usb
Unfortunately it's US-ANSI only so my pile of 4 french canadian AEK2s don't work very well with it.
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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?
Apps on Macintosh were supplied as disk images often compressed in hqx formats. You'll need PC Exchange and StuffIt Expander - think of those as equivalents of a file extension renaming tool, and 7-zip.
Installation of apps was often accomplished by dragging and dropping the application icon from installer image to Applications folder, although some did came with Windows-like installer apps.
Unmounting disks and installer images was done by moving disk icons to Trash(recycle bin). It's the most intuitive and straightforward feature of classic MacOS, followed by "Shut down" menu being under "Special".
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Are they really changing the UI up again? I am actually so done at this point. The endless UI churn drives me absolutely mad, but I suppose when there's nothing left to do, making it look different is easy. I suppose a built in volume mixer is still too much to ask for though.
Do you harbour an honest expectation that computer UIs will look the same in 2035 as they do in 2025? That would prove to be a silly thing to hope for if you were to backtest it. It’s not churn its change, and it’s inevitable. No sense getting worked up over it.
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…