I was reading the Basilisk II official support files and the codes and all, trying to understand the whole workflow of the emulator and I've been doing a few tests and I came to some crazy information I never saw written anywhere. I suppose these are old news, but I had to dig a lot the internet for some of the preferences options to understand what they were about, so I suppose more people would like to learn a few tricks!
Model mystery
One of these tests I made is related to the Macintosh model. For example, I got a Quadra 800 ROM file (F1ACAD13) and, if I define a specific set of preferences like.. modelid to 29 (same as ROM), cpu to 68040 with floating-point instructions (FPU) enabled, I can make Mac OS 8.1 run the System Profiler flawlessly! Any other combination with the same ROM will not allow the system profiler to work properly.
I had success with Quadra 605 too.
But the documentation states that "other [model] values are not officially supported and may result in crashes". This is weird, I tried to search the code for details and all I found is that here and there the "Mac IIci" and "Quadra 900" have some honourable mentions in the logs but everything else looks basically the same.
The technical manual also says that B2 emulates a "Mac II series computer", meaning "all 68020/30/40 based Macs with 32-bit clean ROMs". So why is Quadra 900 and the IIci supposed to work best? What's the difference?
Keyboard
I was also playing with the keyboard. If I set the keycodes to "true", being on a mac, my keyboard is basically the same in the virtual machine. Except that the "option" key won't work all the time. No idea why. I can't drag&drop the goddamn control strip. Any ideas?
Running from console
Try it! Try to run the unix executable from console with incomplete parameters like "./BasiliskII --" and wait for the feedback. It seems all preferences can be given using console parameters, for example:
'True' or 'yes'?./BasiliskII --disk ./mydisk.dmg --cpu 3 --rom ./myrom.rom
Doing the one above I learned that, so far, it seems that in the preferences file one can use "yes", "true", "on", "false", "off" and "no" for booleans. All means the same.
Memory limit
As far as I tested, memory seems to have a limit of 1,024 MB / 1 GB. Is it true?
Classic, anyone?
Basilisk II officially also supports Classic emulation. Actually, there are plenty of code exceptions for this specific model. For example: the computer model and processor type are forced by just having the rom file identified as a classic. I still didn't try it. Does anyone here plays with Classic? How is it?
Force quit without Cmd+Opt+Esc
You can force-quit anything on OSX by using Cmd+Opt+Esc. I actually do this a lot since I work with programming. But Basilisk II can be neatly killed by doing Ctrl + Esc on OSX. I think there used to be a similar command in Windows. Ctrl + F11 or something similar. Also there was an option to quit fullscreen.
So.. what else do you folks know? Any more hidden/forgotten/weird features anywhere?
We could make a compilation of these things!
All the best!