MESS

[huntgr]

So I have been successful in getting MESS running on my MBA. The IIci emulation work great! Here is the question. I went ahead to see how far I could get on an A/UX installation, and to my surprise there were no error messages! Here's the issue. When it looks for the CD, it can't find the image. I cannot get the disk image for the CD to mount (even the Mac Partition). Has anyone had any luck?

 

[huntgr]

I'll take that as a no. Is anyone at least using MESS to emulate the IIci?

 

[Gorgonops]

I lack the patience to try using MESS as a Mac emulator since for most things the "fake it" emulators like BasiliskII do a better job with less fiddling. I do use MESS sometimes for 8 bit era emulation.

That said, about a year ago or so one of the MESS developers was on this forum talking a bit about it. Just FYI, unless something's changed MESS won't run A/UX. At the time at least the 680x0 emulation lacked the ability to recover from a page fault so despite having at least partially working MMU emulation it will still fall down with anything that uses virtual memory. The A/UX installer runs under a modified System 7 so it's not really surprising that the installer disk works.

 

[tecneeq]

The experiment must continue!

Can you add harddisk images? If yes, dd the ISO into a HFS partition or harddisk.

I don't remember the details, but i did something like that when i didn't have a cdrom to install A/UX on my quadra. I used dd to dump the iso on a disk wich i then added as a second drive.

Like so:

dd bs=1M if=/aux,iso of=/dev/sdx

Either that or i used a partition, for that your linux kernel must know mac partitions:

dd bs=1M if=/aux,iso of=/dev/sdx2

dd is a dangerous command, make sure you know what the options mean.

Good luck .

 

[huntgr]

I understand the MMU issue, but if I remember right from installing A/UX on a real IIci (and error messages that Basilisk gives) the installer alerts you if it cannot find a MMU. The installer goes through all the checks, and doesn't give a single error message. The issue is that it cannot find the install media.

 

[tecneeq]

... which doesn't need to be a cdrom. Just a volume somewhere. Have you tried dumping the iso to another (virtual) harddisk?

 

[huntgr]

Yes, but for some reason MESS doesn't like it. MESS cannot even mount the Mac Partition of the ISO.

 

[Gorgonops]

the installer alerts you if it cannot find a MMU. The installer goes through all the checks, and doesn't give a single error message.

The page fault issue is unrelated to the MMU, which again, the 68k emulation in MESS does support at least a subset of. (All 68030 or higher Macs use the built-in MMU to shuffle memory spaces around at boot time, replacing some simple hard switches that were present in the 68000 models. The gray area is 68020 Macs like a stock Mac II or the original LC that lack a "full" MMU. They instead have a brain-damaged subset that supports address remapping but not demand paging; that's what BasiliskII emulates, even when you're using "68040 emulation".) If that functionality is still lacking you're not going to see a problem until you're actually running the A/UX kernel, possibly not even until it enters multi-user mode. I'd be really surprised if the installer "checked for it". (Trying to do so would probably crash the machine unless you were really clever, and there's no reason in real life you'd think that feature was missing.)

But by all means, if you can get it to read the CD image see how far you can actually get.

 

[huntgr]

That is very interesting to learn.

 

[huntgr]

Looks like someone has made some progress. Further than I ever got. http://andrewgong2013.blogspot.com/2013/05/aux-on-mess-floppy-version.html