Mac Emulation on Ubuntu

We had run Basilisk years ago on XP and found it useful. While it only emulated a motorola 040 mac and not a power pc cpu there were still lots of useful software it could run.

We found the CD we had stored the rom chips extracted from our bevy of beige machines. We have everything from a mac portable, mac plus, se, se/30, iisi, iici, 650, 680, 6100, 8550, color classic, 475, 575, 580, LC II, LC III, and so forth and some clones.

Before we got to test that we found something else we had to try. While researching programs for windows that could run off a USB stick without being installed we ran across mac-on-a-stick at

http://nothickmanuals.info/doku.php?id=minivmac

This uses the Mini vMac emulator to emulate a black and white mac plus. See: http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/

From the FAQ:

The biggest current difference is that Mini vMac emulates the earliest Macs, while Basilisk II emulates later 680x0 Macs. The fundamental technical difference is that Basilisk II doesn’t emulate hardware, but patches the drivers in ROM, while Mini vMac emulates the hardware (with the exception of the floppy drive).

This is a neat application. The mac-on-a-stick folder now contains a number of disk images and the rom file from a plus. It is easy to create disk images with macs and once i sort through the boxes of old mac cd and floppies i should be able to find some really old neat stuff like shufflepuck and mac write and mac draw.

The application we found is Mini Vmac.exe which means we can run it under Wine - so we have linux emulating windows emulating a mac. When you click on the app to run it you get a window called mini vmac and from here you can select a disk image from the file menu. We have a hard disk image formatted with the mac hfs file system that is 24mb in size. Once we open it the 'Welcome to Macintosh' splash screen appears and we are running a mac with system 7 and 4mb of ram.

This is not designed to emulate a recent mac but to enable you to run very old software of which there is a bunch stored around here. Will have to pull some out tomorrow.

We also used the package manager to install Basilisk2 which puts itself into /usr/bin so you have to root around the filesystem to find the executable file. This has a lot more settings so we need to remember what we did before. First we decide to create a basilisk folder in our home directory and copy the executable there and also the quadra and performa rom files.

Next in basilisk we need to create a mac volume. We select the Volume tab and click Create and createa 80 mb 'volume' called mac. We then set the Boot From to CD-ROM and insert a mac os 8.5 CD and click Start. This makes basilisk dissapear. We then run it again and goto the Memory/Misc tab and select 128 mb of ram, a Quadra 900 as the model with a 68040 cpu and the quadra rom file. In the Serial/Network tab we select eth0 as the network interface. Now we click start and the basilisk window appears briefly and the cd spins. The windows dissapears.

We decide to try again using the mac os 7.61 cd this time and emulating a IIci using the performa rom image. We also check to ignore illegal memory accesses.

We click START and the basilisk ii window appears and the 7.61 cd boots and recognizes the 80mb unformatted volume and offers to format it. We click the install macos icon. We the realize that while 80mb is fine for system 6.08 or 7.01 an install of 7.61 will take a whopping 70 mb - talk about bloat. So we cancel the install, rerun basilisk and delete the 80mb mac file and replace it with a huge 500mb volume and then click START. We initialize the giant hard disk and start the install, choosing to leave out the opendoc and cyberdog. maclink and those other optional stuff. The install flies through, a lot quicker than on the original mac.

Once the install is done we restart the mac but it reboots to the CD instead of the hard disk as it would normally do. No problem we use the Apple, startup disk control to choose the mac volume as the startup disk and restart. Up comes mac 7.61

Now we need to grab some of that old tyme software from the pile and do some installs.

Before that we went back to the video tab and changed the size of the window to 800x600 and then changed the boot from cd-rom to any so now it boots to a reasonably sized window from the hard disk.

Now to find the original civilization cd to see how it looks. I seem to recall the one of the problems with the original basilisk on windows was some pixellation of the graphics in that games which led me to getting an old mac just to play it...which somehow led to getting a lot of old macs.