VOGONS


First post, by rmay635703

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Were there any highly functional emulators that ran on old 68k Macs like the Plus or LC2 under System 6/7/8
for Gameboy/Apple 2/Atari/NES/Genesis ?

I’ve seen recent developments like this

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NESMac

But they aren’t fleshed out very well

I would find it very amusing to play a B&W gameboy game on a black and white Mac but can’t recall anyone making emulators for Macintosh back in the golden age of emulation.

One would think the 68k chip in a Mac would make it much easier to virtualize then emulate given how close 68k is already to the bare metal of most arcades and consoles of the 80’s and early 90’s. Might not get sound support in some cases but who cares?

Would also be a unique use for dusty old Macs that have a less accessible ecosystem.

I’ve often wondered if a classic external Mac harddrive could be virtualized so I could more easily move files between my old Macs and PCs sans floppy (since old Mac floppies are PC incompatible)

Ah well, goes to show I’ve forgotten about my Mac Plus and Apple 2gs for over a decade. Not even sure what solutions exists for them anymore

Thanks

Reply 1 of 8, by bifo86

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There were some emulators for 68k Macs, this comes to mind https://www.bernhard-baehr.de/pdp8e/pdp8e.html

The problem would be tracking down active downloads. I remember Apple II emulators, a CPM emulator and MagiC Mac, which was an emulator/compatibility layer for Atari ST. There's a lot of them on Macintosh Garden.

Reply 3 of 8, by Jo22

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SoftWindows 1.x

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 4 of 8, by bifo86

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rmay635703 wrote on 2022-01-21, 03:53:
Interesting Looks like 1 GB GBC emulator for system 7 1 NES emulator And a historic APPLE II emulator for B&W mac […]
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Interesting Looks like
1 GB GBC emulator for system 7
1 NES emulator
And a historic APPLE II emulator for B&W mac

Slim pickings for System 6/7 ah well better than nothing

they were pretty much all for system 7 other than the CPM emulator but this is the oldest emulation aggregation website online https://www.zophar.net/macintosh.html

that section appears to still have the same links and programs that it carried and is a good start to diving into the internet archive. there were a lot of system 8/9 emulators for ppc, but there were definitely a lot of emulators that ran on the 030 and later systems under 7. but this is, like, a level beyond retrocomputing. it's retroemulation. they were often not polished products, and if they were they were they were usually at least shareware if not demos for commercial releases lost to time.

the issue with emulation under system 6 is that as i recall it when i was a kid at the time, emulation of past systems didn't really become a thing until the mid-90s, and while current systems would be possible it was extremely difficult to build a custom device to rip roms from the cartridges at that point. so emulating a gameboy while system 6 existed would have been a pointless exercise in hardware unless you were developing a game for the gameboy on a system 6 system, which nobody on earth would have done given both nintendo's lockdown on cartridge production and software licensing.

Meanwhile, emulating a Z80 CPM system was simple and could potentially be very useful if you plugged a 5.25" drive into a mac plus external floppy port. 8-bit systems were possible and were done, eg https://www.zophar.net/macintosh/apple2/][-in-a-mac.html

Reply 6 of 8, by Jo22

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bifo86 wrote on 2022-02-08, 03:56:

the issue with emulation under system 6 is that as i recall it when i was a kid at the time, emulation of past systems didn't really become a thing until the mid-90s, and while current systems would be possible it was extremely difficult to build a custom device to rip roms from the cartridges at that point.

Makes sense to me. 😀 I wished I could help, but a G3 is the oldest Macintosh I have at hand right now, which limits me to Mac OS 8.5 and beyond.
Maybe it helps to find out which systems were emulated in the 80s already.
I remember, there was a ZX81 emulator for Atari ST, DOS and CP/M emulators for multiple 16-Bit systems, several Apple II and some TRS-80 or PET emulators.
Emulators of the 8051/AH-BASIC microcontroller, the CHIP-8/COSMAC ELF..
Maybe such emulators existed for early Macintosh, platform too?

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 7 of 8, by bifo86

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If we limit it to System 6 then beyond the freeware CP/M emulator (which does emulate a basic Z80 system, fast enough to be comparable to other Z80 systems at the time as I remember from my Kaypro) and SoftPC, PET and TRS-80 would be the most likely. That being said this was also before people could really share methods for reading disks and build on the work of others, and I'm not aware of any that existed that would run on, say, a 4MB Plus, but that's likely because there was very little crossover between Commodore/Tandy owners and Mac owners.

Expand it to System 7 and there's a lot of options, including C64, Atari, that PDP-8 emulator, TRS-80, Amstrad, NES, etc, but they usually required both color and an 030 system.

This section seems to have a fair number and their labeling should be accurate for the system they will run on: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/emulators

Of course, the one system you'd expect was emulated from pretty early on: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ii-in-a-mac

Reply 8 of 8, by Jo22

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+1

System 6 wasn't very popular, anyway.

System 6 compares to System 7 like Windows Windows/386 compares to Windows 3.0a with Multimedia Extensions 1.0 or Windows 3.1.

There was some interesting software for System 6, but all the cool stuff came with System 7.
QuickTime, TrueType fonts, web browsers.. Etc.

Personally, I think it's better to try to hack old systems to run System 7,
than finding old beta software (emulators) that runs on System 6.

Because even if there are, such early versions are far from usable likely.

Edit: To give an idea in which infancy the Macintosh OS was in the late 80s,
please have a look which Macintosh hard- and software was used to create the graphics in ST TNG.
Some of the software was pre- Color QuickDraw, even!
Color was provided through the original QuickDraw, which wasn't really intended for this.

https://memory-alpha.wiki/wiki/LCARS

Please use a translation for English.
Ironically, the English article is not as detailed as the German one.

Edit: Just saw an article that recommended System 7 over 6. Maybe it helps in making a decision.
https://lowendmac.com/2014/system-7-bigger-be … -than-system-6/

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//