Installing A/UX to (real) Quadra 700 via m68k emulator?

[Xentre]

I got a Quadra 700 and I am keen on installing A/UX 3.0 into it. At the moment the problem is that the superdrive (floppy) seems to be broken (unable to read / format floppies) xx( . Booting from floppy is needed for A/UX installation, before CD-media can be used. I am wondering if it is possible to install A/UX via PC mac m68k emulator into (real) SCSI drive and then use this hard drive on the Quadra 700.

Some years ago I did similar thing with my WinAUE for Amiga 1200 (no floppy drive) and it succeeded well.

Cheers!

 

[Gorgonops]

Unfortunately, no working Mac emulator can run A/UX. It's remotely possible MESS might hit that point eventually, but they're not there yet. BasiliskII and vMac "cheat" by patching the Macintosh ROM to fake certain hardware devices, which doesn't work with software that needs to hit the bare hardware like A/UX does.

I do wonder if it might be possible to copy the contents of that boot floppy onto a hard disk partition, boot from that, and then install A/UX normally via the CD-ROM. I no longer have the means to investigate that possibility.

 

[Dog Cow]

A/UX needs a Memory Management Unit, something which only the Mac II and successive higher-end Mac models had.

 

[Xentre]

040 has mmu

 

[Gorgonops]

A/UX needs a Memory Management Unit, something which only the Mac II and successive higher-end Mac models had.

To be pedantic, the Mac II technically didn't have an MMU out of the box. (It had a socket for one, or you could get one by adding a 68030 upgrade.)

The bigger issue with running A/UX on BasiliskII or Mini vMac (with its experimental MacII support) is that even if one enabled MMU emulation for the 68040 core (Which would probably be "doable" with BasiliskII at least, as its CPU emulation is lifted from UAE and a patch *did* exist for adding MMU support good enough to run Amiga Linux, and MMU support also exists in the Atari ST emulator ARAnyM.) the Mac emulators don't actually emulate most Macintosh *hardware*. For instance, disks are emulated by patching the Mac ROM floppy driver, not by actually implementing the genuine SCSI hardware of a real Mac. The screen hardware, sound, network driver, SCSI manager (which isn't used for disk images), and most everything else is similarly "faked".

For the most part A/UX doesn't call the Apple ROM drivers, and instead hits the hardware directly. So... faceplant.

The only Mac emulator I know of that emulates the hardware more explicitly is MESS, which at least has experimental support for the NCR SCSI controller and several other literal devices. However, the support for the II-series machines is seriously bleeding edge and experimental. (And as anyone who's used it can tell you, using MESS can be a mess even for the "well supported" systems.)