January 20, 2010
I've updated the blank disk images archive. Surprisingly, this has been one of the most popular downloads. The new version provides many more sizes. It also includes a few images in Disk Copy 4.2 format, with file tags and checksums, which are useful with the compile time options “-sony-tag 1” and “-sony-sum 1”. These options are enabled in Mini vMac variation 155, and in the new variation 2010.
Selected variations (including 155 and 2010) are now available from a new Mini vMac Variations page, this time with no activation required. The evidence so far is that simply accepting donations is more effective than the shareware like scheme. Also, it seems a better match for the goals of the Mini vMac project. And also, SourceForge has recently made it much less of a pain to release files, so including more than just the default compile is less of a problem.
Thanks to a donation from Andrew Johnstone, along with income from the former variations activation scheme, I now have a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 for testing Mini vMac on. The first use of it was in updating the Screenshots page. Beside a new image for Windows, I also added new images for OS X and Linux, and put previous images on another page (which also includes new screenshots of Mini vMac running on Windows 98 and Mac OS 7.5.5).
I run Windows and Linux in VMware Fusion. Thanks to donations from Andrew Johnstone, Steve Waddell, Evan Appelman, Stephen Kluskens, Jonathan Ploudre, and Zheng Yang, I now have a 1 TB hard drive for holding all my current VMware Fusion images, with room to create more.
Thanks to John Knoll for sponsoring food for my next period of working only on Mini vMac without internet access. This starts later today, and will last about a week. And thanks to Leon Buijs for sponsoring one day of work on Mini vMac (I haven't picked which day yet).
I haven't found as much time lately to work on Mini vMac with internet access. Sorry for not keeping up with email. This may change later this year, or else I'll just try getting better at making do.
Some news from Mini vMac development is that I've tried out a new scheme for caching the translation of emulated to real addresses. Mostly it has shown just how good the current scheme is, which was one of the first things I worked on in Mini vMac almost a decade ago. But I expect the new scheme will still be useful eventually for emulating later Macintosh computers that spend most of their time using 32 bit addressing.
