Macintosh Classic Emulation

[Dennis Nedry]

Is there an emulator that exists that supports the Mac Classic? It seems like one of those Macs that's in between vMac and Basilisk II. It would be awesome to run that in an emulator because it has a bootable copy of Mac OS hidden in its ROM, triggered by Apple + option + O + X at startup. Supposedly there are countless easter eggs hidden in this bootable ROM disk.

 

[protocol7]

The original Basilisk emu (not Basilisk II) supported just the Classic. I managed to boot into the desktop on the built-in ROM but it would crash if I tried doing anything in it.

According to the Basilisk II site it supports Classic emulation. But I never tried going that low.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

COOOOOL! :b&w:

I tried the Classic ROM in Basilisk II and it complains about an unsupported ROM. I also have a Classic ROM file that has the ROM disk chopped off of it (it's just the last half of the ROM). I have not tried that one.

 

[techknight]

mini vMac wont work?

 

[FlyingToaster]

I tried in Windows XP/Mini vMac/Macintosh Classic rom named vmac.rom. Got a sad mac. I read it can be compiled to take different roms

 

[Mac128]

Yes mini vMac will work. I was never able to get it to work properly in Basilisk II myself.

I have successfully booted from the built-in ROM disk image in mini vMac with the classic build emulator.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

That's cool - I didn't notice there was a Mac Classic build.

It works fine for me but I can't get it to boot form the ROM disk. Is there a special trick you used? I hit apple+option+x+o as fast as I could and I just got the flashing question mark.

I downloaded from here:

http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/doc-3.2/var/mnvm0025.html

 

[Dennis Nedry]

I just kept trying and suddenly it worked. :?:

 

[Mac128]

Slow the emulator down as slow as it will go ... That helps too ...

 

[Dennis Nedry]

I tried that, I think that might have been what got it to work. Now if I hold down the combo right during the startup chime it always works.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

It's weird because the ROM disk is actually writable. It must copy itself into a RAM disk.

 

[Mac128]

Yes exactly, but obviously, you can't save changes, since you can't write to the ROM. I suppose you could copy it to a disk. Great feature in the Mac OS -- a foolproof way to boot the system if anything becomes corrupted, and always have a clean copy of OS 6.0.3.

 

[protocol7]

Great feature in the Mac OS -- a foolproof way to boot the system if anything becomes corrupted, and always have a clean copy of OS 6.0.3.

Which begs the obvious question: why did they only do it this one time?

 

[Scott Baret]

That ROM disk is the reason I prefer Classics when going for extra compacts. If I get a Classic without a hard drive or have one develop a dead hard drive, I can always run it off floppies without having to use a RAM disk program (typical for me when dealing with floppy-driven Macs) or disk swaps (which is why I avoid them with the RAM disk; using one isn't always practical if the system has less than 4MB).

I believe the reason the ROM disk didn't exist on newer Macs is because of the size of subsequent systems. The Classic came out in the System 6 era. It's possible to fit a decent installation of 6.0.x on an 800K floppy. For System 7, a 1.4MB floppy can't fit much more than the System and Finder. Apple would have had to put huge ROMs in newer machines if they wanted ROM disk startup disks.

 

[protocol7]

Yeah, it wouldn't have been practical with System 7, but of all the System 6-capable Macs, only the Classic got the built-in System. It strikes me as odd that they didn't extend this to any of the other 6-era Macs like the IIfx.