Mac 68k emulation

 


 

Got the very last one at .63 per ounce. Now .88 per ounce. Allah 4ever.
 
 
 

 Funny how the blue ones contain the knowledge based stuff which became automated since 2023 while the red ones contain the manual labor which is in demand.  Where have you gone, dot com boom?  Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
 
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Restoring ancient audio software 
 
Again set to the task of reconstituting the lion kingdom's mac 68k environment of 30 years ago.    When this journey began, the only emulator was super expensive ARDI.  After years of unsucessful basilisk installations, new to the chat was Mini vmac.  https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/
 
 The problem seems to be the large number of bits they require assembling from scratch & the strict enforcement of the copyrights by the type of group which develops mac emulators.  For 25 years, you really had to own a mac to get any of the bits. 
 
 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/7038-all-macintosh-roms-68k-ppc-
 
Macintoshrepository has offered some hope, but even today you have to transfer URL's from a video.  
 
youtube.com/watch?v=FhdGxH8lzGA 
 
A video showed 1 of the .ROM files being renamed to vMac.ROM & automatically picked up by Mini vMac.  He had to download a specific version of mini vmac 
 
https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/dnld_std.html 

 Helas, he had to use a 128kb Macplus ROM.  The Mac II ROMs all had invalid chksums, some kind of early code signing.  Highly recommended to try getting a Macintosh II version working, since the Macintosh Plus version couldn't run anything.

Next came the operating system.  Helas, Macintoshrepository requires waiting 10 minutes between downloads or limiting downloads to 100MB per day.  He got Apple Mac OS 7.1 (3.5-1.44mb).7z from a warez server with a daily download limit.

winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-7/71

 It needs to be extracted with the ancient 7zz program.

 Then he needed a blank hard drive image from

https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/extras/blanks/

The largest one was blanks-1.1/M/224M.zip.  That decompressed into the right image.

 Helas, it's not possible to dynamically mount any disks without drag & drop support in the window manager.  There are programs which can emulate drag & drop but they all require the latest GTK libraries.

 Lions had to surrender their entire desktop, fire up Nautilus & drag all the disk images from there, 1st the Install.img image, then the  224M.dsk hard drive image, then the rest of the install images when prompted.

Helas, mini vmac freezes unless its window is in the foreground.   ctrl-s gets it into a speed adjustment mode to make installation more bearable.  ctrl-m doubles the screen size.  The scroll bars & a lot of widgets do not work at maximum speed.  

Once installed, the hard drive can be specified on the command line.  It has to run in the foreground to start.  It seems to use some timers to abort.

 ./Mini\ vMac 224M.dsk 

 To communicate with the host filesystem, he used a tool

https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/extras/importfl/index.html

 Then you're back in stuffit/resedit/macbinary hell. He used stuffitexpander402.zip

 You have to dig up a resedit.img using a linux version of unstuffit.  There was but 1 copy on archive.org.

 https://web.archive.org/web/20060205025441/http://www.stuffit.com/downloads/files/stuffit520.611linux-i386.tar.gz

 Use resedit to change the type & creator of all the .sit files to SIT!

Sadly, it reported a damaged header for most very .sit file on macintoshrepository.  The same .sit files managed to decode properly on Linux.  Providing -m=on to stuffit created macbinary output & this could be extracted successfully on the mac.

 bin/unstuff -m=on Sound_Sculptor_1.1.1.sit

 

 Some of the .img files in /root/mac are disk images & tar files.  There's a copy of suntar, stuffit, macgzip, macbinary in file_utilities.img but everything crashes now.  They might require 68020 support in the emulator.  The macplus emulator only has a 68000.

The surviving disk images still have the original window positions, 30 years later.  The sound programs, microsoft word, microsoft works, think C were not preserved.  Young lion must have scrapped all those sound programs as soon as his UNIX tools became minimally functional.

 

 

Confirmed the version of sound sculptor lions had had multiple subsample zooms.  Managed to register it again with "sound sculptor" as the password.  Lions knew he only released version 2 because of the crummy password. It did not have the synthesizer lions remembered.  That might have been in cooledit 96.


 Just a basic waveform generator.

 

https://github.com/nyteshade/mini-vmac-setup/blob/master/

This guy seems to have an unauthorized Mac II distribution with all the required file utilities.  The MacII.ROM & the disk image macOS755.dsk are required.  Running ./Mini\ vMac\ 26 macOS755.dsk brought it up.  He has a pain the ass dragstrip program which kicks out importfl.  Drag strip is some kind of improvement on importfl.  He also has a lot of memory devoted to extensions.

The serial number for soundedit 16 was SSM101-4604-1072-4078.  

 


 Confirmed soundedit 16 only had a single subsample zoom level & it wasn't wide enough for any of Cinelerra's functions.  It only read AIFF files.  The type had to be changed to AIFF.  The emulator only had single channel 8 bit playback.  You had to select a region to play from anywhere besides the start.

 

  

 

That's pretty much what lions were using in summer of 1996.  In winter of 1996, they briefly used an SGI Indy just to capture from tape, but the editing & playback was painstakingly slow soundedit 16 in 8 bit stereo.

Kind of a gloomy reminder of the primitive, early programs Cinelerra is still heavily modeled after, hardly absorbing any of the last 30 years of evolution, even if it was all bloat.  Thus ended a 30 year desire to see at least some of the original Mac environment resurrected in emulation.

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Restoring ancient documents

 

A lot more files were preserved in /dvd/mac/, /dvd/mac.tar, not all of them savory.  The .tar file has Word, Works, Think C, & photoshop 3.0.  The tar was created by suntar, transferred to PC over a floppy disk brigade since that was faster than a serial port.  /dvd/mac lacks the resource forks.

 Suntar managed to recover most of the final HD image from 2000.  The cringy stuff survived.  Some word documents were lost.  Very little is worth viewing.

The emulator can't swap disks when suntar is extracting.  They need to be catted into a single .tar file. 

The only surviving exercises file was in /root/mac/msword.img There weren't any fingerings for chromatic scales.   Lots of cringy stuff would have to be deleted to reupload that one.  It had some forgotten exercises.  Pondered whether to transfer that one to openoffice.


 The vintage photoshop interface looked really good.  It was the 1st time lions saw MSWorks in color.  It's a bit clunkier than 1 bit.  The 1 bit user interfaces always seemed pixel perfect & lined up.  Macs were late to the color game.

 


 That copy of MSWorks was the only thing the old man bought for it.  He considered it a tragic waste, but lions would be remiss not to be grateful for doing better than almost everyone who ever lived on this shithole planet, as he would call it.

Everything lions made before 1993 is gone & so will everything from the mac, after lions die.   Nobody cares about your data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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