Interesting observation about real vs. emulated hardware

[QuicksilverMac2001]

Alright. After testing the Mini vMac compiled for use with the same applications I run often on my 128k (thanks to it almost perfectly emulating a 128k), I sit here and try something that doesn't produce any problems on the emulated machine on my real hardware, and I get the following completely incongruous result:

I have MacWrite or MacPaint open, go to save my document with the application still open, put my disk in the external drive, and then the computer says there's no room to save it, even though there should be slightly over 20 files remaining until the MFS file storage limit. But then the weirdest part yet occurs...

My real 128k thinks there should be an operating system on the documents disk, when it doesn't do this when you put the disk in before you launch MacWrite or MacPaint but after you get to the desktop, and so it switches the Clipboard File and Scrapbook File to the documents disk. And this was found out by the disk no longer having any room to store my documents, even though there's over 80KB of space and 21-22 separate files left on the file number count, as well as the Scrapbook suddenly being empty and the Finder reporting that there is indeed a phantom Clipboard File and Scrapbook File that weren't there all the times I put the documents disk in before I launched MacWrite.

Eject the documents disk, shut down and restart the computer, and then you can delete both the Clipboard and Scrapbook Files thus created and it goes back to normal.

(The only reason I use an emulated 128k is to make sure my real hardware stays alive so that I can continue to have a legal right to a virtual machine.)

Was this discrepancy intentional, or was it one of those things called an "undocumented feature" ?

I am just amazed by this difference.

Sincerely,

Alex Harris

 

[uniserver]

so that I can continue to have a legal right to a virtual machine

legal rights to a rom that is from 1984,

i'd like proof its illegal to use a rom from a 1984 macintosh in a emulator with out owning the appropriate mac,

if you look farther you might find out that its flat out illegal to use any apple rom in "any" fassion other the what apple inc. has intended.

Kind of like psystar making hackintoshes, giving you the legit dvd with it, still didn't fly in court.

"so that I can continue to have a legal right to a virtual machine"

i can't fathom this being a legitimate concern...

 

[Mac128]

I'm not sure I follow the discrepancy ... Aren't you saying it does the same thing in mini vMac as well as real Mac?

Either way what you are describing is a bug of the early software. I recall this happening a lot back in the day, I would stick in a disk to save which reported plenty of space to save only to find out there was not enough. Ocassionaly, the opposite would happen, the application would save the file with apparently just enough room, then when you tried to access the disk again, you could not as the disk did not have enough space to save the Finder data, because the file size was not correctly determined, the Finder essentially oversaved, and so the disk could not be read by the Finder. If hou were lucky you would figure is out when you went to shut down as the Finder would alert you to this and sometimes you could put in another disk if you had an external drive and copy your files. But before shut down command, you were usually screwed. Also, there were plenty of applications which assumed things that simply were not true, like having the system on the application disk (Apple's were some of the worst offenders, possibly because that's how Jobs wanted it, or more likely because Jobs was forced to ship software before it was ready thanks to his mercurial tampering).

 

[Charlieman]

Mac128: Either way what you are describing is a bug of the early software. I recall this happening a lot back in the day, I would stick in a disk to save which reported plenty of space to save only to find out there was not enough. Ocassionaly, the opposite would happen, the application would save the file with apparently just enough room, then when you tried to access the disk again, you could not as the disk did not have enough space to save the Finder data, because the file size was not correctly determined, the Finder essentially oversaved, and so the disk could not be read by the Finder.

The horrible disk problems that you describe are consistent with how that generation of Mac OS works. Let's say that there is 20KB free on the system disk and you wish to save something on a separate data disk. That cannot be achieved if the save operation (by the OS) needs to write 21KB or more to the system disk.

Windows does a similar thing today. When Internet Exploder downloads a file, say 1GB in size, it requires multiples of 1GB to download and save the file at its target destination.