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In some moments of diversion from real work lately I decided to have another look (haven’t played with this stuff for years) at various emulations available for a PC (ok, ok… my current nerd score is 82, up from the the last time I did it… 8-) ).

The target this time was for a free Macintosh. As it turns out with some hours to spare and plenty of Internet trawling this is not too hard for older Macs. If you really want to play with OSX emulation it looks like you should be prepared to put in a day or two.. or cut to the chase and go and buy a Mac…

The really simple – Mini vMac

Get Mini VMac, currently 2.8.2 for Windows from Sourceforge a Mac Plus 128K ROM and Mac system disk image (i.e V6.0.8), unzip the lot into a directory and run ‘Mini vMac.exe’. You should now have little Mac window with a blinking question mark on a disk. Choose the File – Open Disk image.. menu option, navigate to where the Mac system disk image is (Disk608.dsk) and presto you have Mac running on your PC.. Granted this is pretty basic – you are running a Mac Plus with 4M of RAM.

Tips:

• Mini vMac will run from Mac OS 6.x to 7.5.5 (I tried 6.08 & 7.5.5 without problems)
• hold down the [CTRL] key in Mini vMac to get to the applications options

Somewhat More Sophisticated – SoftMac

Get SoftMac XP Suite, currently 8.2, from Emulators, Inc, a Mac Quadra 1M ROM (say a Quadra 650) and a basic Mac harddrive system image (i.e 7.5.5), unzip the lot into a directory and run SOFTMAC2.EXE (on a XP pro machine).

From here all you need do is configure SoftMac to find the appropriate ROM image and point the system image (starterdisk.hfv) at the first floppy drive through ‘Disk Properties’, ‘Disk image file’ option…

This is a little more interesting – you are running a colour MAC Quadra with 8M of RAM, System 7.5.5, and quite a few options (screen size, RAM etc) available to you through setup option within SoftMac.

Even more sophisticated – Basilisk II

The most sophisticated and configurable is probably Basilisk II (Freshmeat.net) but I’ll let you play with that by yourself and I may blog about it another day….

References

• Mini VMac at sourceforge
• SoftMac at Emulators Inc
• Basilisk 1.0 (pre 20060501) at Freashmeat.net
• System 7.5.3 from Apple (FTP)