Clipout for mini-vMac

[Mu0n]

I've started to doodle around with the excellent side tools that are meant to be used in conjunction with mini-vMac, which I've criminally neglected for all of these years.

https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/extras/clipout/

Anyone familiar with using this particular Clipout program? I've successfully installed it as a Desk Accessory inside my System 6.0.8 virtual drive with Font/DA mover and it shows fine under the Apple menu. I'm only able to copy out text to my host OS (Windows 10) from a Word Processor inside mini-vMac. All attempts at copying graphics have met with failure. Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

 

[Crutch]

I just got into Mini vMac fairly recently, I used to dislike emulators generally but with more experience am really impressed with it. It’s especially great for software development, got to love the instant restart and right back into the compiler after all the inevitable crashes ...

Is clipout actually supposed to support exporting images?

 

[mactjaap]

I would love to use it together with network. Anyone knows more about this?

 

[Dog Cow]

All attempts at copying graphics have met with failure. Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

Might be nothing you're doing wrong, but check the source code for Clipout. It's not requesting a PICT type from the Scrap Manager, so you won't get graphics out of it. It is coded to only request TEXT type.

See this line:

long L = GetScrap(h, 'TEXT', &offset);

 

[Dog Cow]

I just got into Mini vMac fairly recently, I used to dislike emulators generally but with more experience am really impressed with it.

Compared to the world of Apple II emulators, with their sophisticated debuggers and wide variety of emulated peripherals, the world of classic Macintosh emulators is appalling! It's like the author puts in just enough effort to get the basic machine emulated, then stops all feature development that would make his emulator truly amazing.

Yes, making a Macintosh emulator is a lot of work! But how long has Mini vMac been around? Over a decade? Close to two decades? A developer could add one significant feature a year, every other year, and have a really featureful emulator.

 

[Crutch]

I'm sure that's true.  I've just found my speed at cranking out working 68k code is about 10x faster on Mini vMac emulating a Mac II than it is on my SE/30, since writing system extensions and patching traps means a lot of crashes a long the way.  So I'm quite happy with it!

 

[rplacd]

I'm sure that's true.  I've just found my speed at cranking out working 68k code is about 10x faster on Mini vMac emulating a Mac II than it is on my SE/30, since writing system extensions and patching traps means a lot of crashes a long the way.  So I'm quite happy with it!

How do you debug crashes when working at such a low level? I'm thinking of writing my own booter á la the booters that NetBSD has, that adds a shutdown hook that copies the kernel into memory, disables interrupts as late as possible, and JMPs there. However, I'm worried that I won't be able to use the debugger in the hook, let alone figuring out what happens after I've cleared interrupts.

 

[Dog Cow]

I'm sure that's true.  I've just found my speed at cranking out working 68k code is about 10x faster on Mini vMac emulating a Mac II than it is on my SE/30, since writing system extensions and patching traps means a lot of crashes a long the way.  So I'm quite happy with it!

Sure, but you, I, and others would be a lot happier if it had a debugger that could show you every object in every heap, the state of all low-mem globals, and any data structure like a Window record, parameter block record for I/O, etc...

Have you ever seen the debugger that's in the Virtual II emulator for Apple II? Every emulator author, no matter the system, should see this. There are even sub-debuggers that target particular aspects of the machine. Check out the screenshots. You can scroll the disassembly and ASCII/hex memory dump independently.

I paid $50 to get the full version of Virtual II, and it's worth it. I would pay the same amount for a classic Macintosh emulator with equivalent features.

We need this level of quality with Macintosh emulators, and I'm not the only person who would be willing to pay for it.

 

[Crutch]

I confess that looks pretty awesome. I haven’t used the Apple II emulation tools at all so guess I don’t know what I’m missing!

 

[Mu0n]

Wow, that is a few orders of magnitude above having to use Macsbug or TMON from inside.

 

[LaPorta]

I wouldn't have a clue what any of that means, but I can see how it would be a big benefit to all of you!

 

[NJRoadfan]

Compared to the world of Apple II emulators, with their sophisticated debuggers and wide variety of emulated peripherals, the world of classic Macintosh emulators is appalling! It's like the author puts in just enough effort to get the basic machine emulated, then stops all feature development that would make his emulator truly amazing.

The reason is because a basic 68k Macintosh is relatively easy to emulate at a high level. Very little software does direct hardware access and the OS itself can be easily be patched to run. No need to emulate things like SCSI or SWIM when you can patch the disk drivers to access a minimally coded block device that uses a disk image for storage. Basilisk II, SoftMac, and Fusion all do this high level emulation.

This is the main reason why A/UX has gone un-emulated for a long time. Nobody bothered to code a faithful low-level emulation of a supported Mac and its support chips! Mini vMac (and the long unsupported original vMac) was one of the first to actually emulate a good chunk of a Macintosh and its hardware because all the above only really focused on running System 7+ (which was current when these emulators were initially written). Really early Mac software actually did low level hardware access and most of the stuff won't run on later color machines. Even then, vMac was late to the scene having come out in 1998, years after decent high level Mac emulation was available.