Not OT: Classic apps and the Intel Mac

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:13:51 -0800 "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: I have some results to report to anybody interested in this emulation business. I built the PearPC binary on this NetBSD system (a Pentium III machine) but it only supports the 'new' mac stuff. It emulates a PPC but I saw nothing about support for anything but Darwin, the Free UNIXes, and OS X. So I started investigating a 68K Mac emulator. BasiliskII is what it's called. You have to own a 'real' Mac to use it, because you need to extract the ROM image. I brought up my Powerbook 165c (one of my favorite Macs, personally) and using a mix-switch setup was able to get the ROM over to the NetBSD system (a very roundabout process, bringing the ROM imaging software into the Mac on a DOS floppy and the ROM image back off the Mac on the same disk). I don't have a real working floppy drive, I have discovered (*sigh*) on the Pentium III machine running NetBSD so I dug around in my Macintosh system CDS and found ONE that would boot with the Powerbook165c ROM. It turns out to be a 'Power Macintosh 5400 series' CD that will boot up on the emulator, but then will NOT install on it. So I created an image file to be the Mac hard drive, booted the CD, formatted the drive image, then simply dragged the system folder over from the 5400 Series boot CD. The drive image now boots! So I used the dd command to make a copy of the Hard Drive image, added it to the ~/.basilisk_ii_prefs file, and initialized it a second 'drive' to install System 7.5 on. Dragged in Shrinkwrapped images of system 7.5 install floppies off a CDROM, mounted 'em and by clicking over to the Basilisk II window, I see that the 'Installation was successful' dialogue has popped up. This is a lot of fun, and I recommend it strongly to anybody interested. There are binaries for Windows NT type systems, if you don't run a Freenix. It's just emulation, but you can't run BasiliskII if you don't already have a Mac to pull the ROM image off of, so the price-of-entry for non-pirates is to own a running classic Mac to pull the ROM image from. Next, it might be time to fire up the Quadra 650. It has a newer ROM and I can maybe install System 8.0 on image drives with that ROM image. Next, it's time to make a BIG drive image so I can install ClarisWorks and MS Office and all that stuff on my new Mac.