Mini vMac: problems when trying to run System 6

DevTerm
1

I’ve made a Mini vMac build from the latest beta source code, and I keep getting weird display bugs and Sad Mac errors, with a Classic machine and System 6. The same install (obviously with some different architecture options) works flawlessly on a M1 Mac.

Anyone managed any kind of successful Mini vMac installation on their DevTerm?

2

What are the different configuration options?

3

I’ve put in some effort, and failed. It’s either broken graphics (a strange interleaved mirroring of the display) or seemingly broken emulation logic (won’t boot).

Using same rom/OS files as I’ve been successfully running on OSX, so it’s the DevTerm build that’s the problem, not the support files.

4

Build options related to host OS are listed here:

https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/develop.html

(There lots more “build time options” but those concern mostly choices regarding the emulation)

The ones I’ve played around with, unsuccessfully, to get a working build:

  • development environment
  • target
  • API
  • CPU
  • sound API
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Option -ci 0 solves the interleaved display for me, but I’m still greeted with a Sad Mac. I didn’t play with the ˋ-api` variations, but I would have hoped it would fix the display issues in a cleaner way.

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6

Great news!

I took another shot at building and running vMac, and this time it wasn’t difficult at all. This is probably thanks to the currently beta tested arm64 support.

Linked below are two build scripts that are lightly altered versions of the build_linux.sh supplied with Mini vMac’s source. They’re for a Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh II, the latter with 8 bit color support enabled. Tested with great success on DevTerm A04. Sound works too. Only issue was that full screen mode is quite slow. Will report back if I find a remedy

As usual with vMac you’re gonna need ROM dumps for these respective macs along with system software, I believe they run up to System 7.5 but in their heyday it would’ve be more like System 5 or 6.

Build & install instructions

  1. git clone https://github.com/minivmac/minivmac
  2. run one (or both) of the attached scripts, build is really fast even on DevTerm
  3. make sure vMac.ROM (for Mac Plus) or MacII.ROM (for Mac II) are present in the same directory.
  4. either launch the executable with the path to a system disk image as argument, or just launch it and then drag the image from the Ubuntu desktop browser thingamajig :slight_smile:

Scripts

Mac Plus
Mac II
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