Getting Sad Mac Emulation

[WindozeNT]

Is it possible to get a Mac emulator to support emulation of Sad Mac crash sounds? I have a corrupt disk image that causes a Sad Mac on boot and every time the Sad Mac appears, the emulators say "An Abnormal Situation Occured" and just suddenly shuts down the emulation until I do a hard reset on it. How do I get it to allow the crash sounds to play and work with the emulators, especially Mini vMac 3.1.3 or BasiliskII 0.90 (with JIT)?
Thanks,
WindozeNT

[kikkoman]

That's an interesting question. But then again, I'd imagine that the emulator authors wouldn't have designed their emulators with failure (causing a Mac to crash) in mind.............. it's kind of like they just want to spare you the horror of ever seeing a sad Mac. Lol.

But seriously, I have no idea on how to get Sheepshaver nor Basilisk to play the crash sounds.

[Galane]

Is it the image you're trying to boot from that's corrupt or is it one you're not booting from but are trying to mount?
If you can setup another image to boot from and mount the corrupt one as a second image, you might be able to run an old version of Norton Disk Dr on it.

I've done that with Basilisk II. I don't recall which version of NUM it was, but it'd defrag and repair the boot volume, a trick no other Mac disk utility I know of could do. I never had it do any damage on emulated or real Macs.

Unlike NU 1.0 for Windows 95 that nuked my partition table while "repairing" it after I finally gave in and let it "repair" to get rid of its complaint every boot that it had something "wrong". Fortunately NU for DOS from the same version recovered my partitions *and* set things to satisfy the Windows utility that it was AOK.

I quickly upgraded to NU 2.0 for Windows 95, never had another problem with Disk Dr. or Speed Disk through NU 2000 when Symantec abandoned their *good* Norton Utilities.

[WindozeNT]

Is it the image you're trying to boot from that's corrupt or is it one you're not booting from but are trying to mount?
If you can setup another image to boot from and mount the corrupt one as a second image, you might be able to run an old version of Norton Disk Dr on it.

I've done that with Basilisk II. I don't recall which version of NUM it was, but it'd defrag and repair the boot volume, a trick no other Mac disk utility I know of could do. I never had it do any damage on emulated or real Macs.

Unlike NU 1.0 for Windows 95 that nuked my partition table while "repairing" it after I finally gave in and let it "repair" to get rid of its complaint every boot that it had something "wrong". Fortunately NU for DOS from the same version recovered my partitions *and* set things to satisfy the Windows utility that it was AOK.

I quickly upgraded to NU 2.0 for Windows 95, never had another problem with Disk Dr. or Speed Disk through NU 2000 when Symantec abandoned their *good* Norton Utilities.

I deliberatly corrupted the image to get the emulated Mac to crash. On Mini vMac, it shows the crash and gives an "Abnormal Situation" error. BasiliskII will not show the Sad Mac and just gives out an error message saying some random "unhandled exception" occured and forces the emulation to commit suicide. SoftMac goes smoothly with it because it supports no sound. SheepShaver, however, won't even run on my computer, so I can't try to get up the Sad Mac. Yes, I have tried E-Maculaion's instructions but it still doesn't work. If anyone here works on Mac emulators, perhaps they could make Sad Mac emulators that go right to the crash code in the ROM, or possibly add support to existing emulators? I use the image to get Sad Mac #0F00C on Mac Plus or 0000000F:00000003 on Mac II. It means "Unimplemented trap" according to the Sad Mac error code map. The deal is, no emulator will accept the crash like I want it to. Any ideas?

[Galane]

Never thought I'd see someone wanting to correctly emulate a computer malfunction. People usually only care about making the emulator properly emulate correct functioning. It it works 100% at working right, why bother with having it work correctly incorrectly? Or is it incorrectly correctly?

What's SheepShaver not doing? What error messages if any? What's in the stdout.txt file it creates?

[WindozeNT]

Never thought I'd see someone wanting to correctly emulate a computer malfunction. People usually only care about making the emulator properly emulate correct functioning. It it works 100% at working right, why bother with having it work correctly incorrectly? Or is it incorrectly correctly?

It's something about seeing computers fail miserably at stuff that fascinates me. Sometimes, I'll mess around with whatever's open for corrupting/deleting to make the systems cry Uncle.
I tried crashing a homebrew Windows 2000 by deleting the registry, expecting a BSOD. Instead, what I got was much worse: a DOS-style crash message saying it can't find a Reg key. This was all in a VM, so I could easily restore the VHD with a backup.
After that, I performed 2 system failures on a GS/OS installation. The first one occured during boot when I deleted the GS.OS file from the system folder. It displayed a ProDOS message with an animated image of an Apple logo sliding around back and forth while leaving a line behind it and clearing the line in front of it.

The 2nd one occurred by deleting the FSTs folder. It was a "dialog box" in the same ProDOS 8 graphics environment.


Now, I try to bring down the Macs. The only thing is, out of all other systems emulatable, there is no way to get the full, complete "real deal" of a Sad Mac crash. The typical Mac Bomb crash always works, unless the Mac really starts to panic (like when you overwrite the 0 Page in the memory, which also works on everything else too). The Sad Mac sounds are in da ROM. If there's an Interrupt Key in BasiliskII, I'll emulate Mac Plus and hit the key while the startup sound is playing, which is modifiable if you change the WAV file it uses (startup_*.wav). However, that doesn't get me an authentic Sad Mac, but just a(n obviously) synthetic version of it.

In a nutshell, I like to see things crash as much as I like using them and making software for them. I don't know why either.
Windoze NT

[ClockWise]

off-topic: if you start up a thread in the SheepShaver folder, WindozeNT, we might be able to trouble-shoot your troubles with that emulator.

[WindozeNT]

off-topic: if you start up a thread in the SheepShaver folder, WindozeNT, we might be able to trouble-shoot your troubles with that emulator.

If SheepShaver emulates a Mac II or Mac SE/30 and if I upload the image, will you test it out to see if 'Shaver supports the crash sounds?

[ClockWise]

SheepShaver doesn't emulate those Machines, I'm afraid.

If you want to emulate a Mac II, you could always check out our new setup guide to FUSION:

http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/fusion_setup_guide

[Ronald P. Regensburg]

The Mac startup crash sounds are, as you noted, in the ROM. The different crash sounds indicate specific hardware problems and are, as far as I know, produced before system software is loaded. I am not aware of a Mac emulator that produces those sounds.

[WindozeNT]

The Mac startup crash sounds are, as you noted, in the ROM. The different crash sounds indicate specific hardware problems and are, as far as I know, produced before system software is loaded. I am not aware of a Mac emulator that produces those sounds.

Actually, the code states the problem, not the sounds. I just got SheepShaver working and it works around the crash because the system is supported (8.1DT is what it identifies the Sad Mac disk as). The system software is limited and meant to repair installations. I don't know yet if it has Sad Mac support or not, meaning it's time to dig around the System File. For the record, the Sad Macs do appear when the sys file is loading because the other emus show a Happy Mac then immediately show a Sad Mac, then when receiving the Play Sound command from the ROM to load the crash sound, where there the emus dig their own grave. Also, there are Sad Macs with a Bad Finder hex code too.

[Jorpho]

I would think that MESS would be the best way to go.

But if you just want to hear the sounds, they're included with MacTracker. (It requires Quicktime, but if you don't want to install Quicktime all the audio files are just sitting there in the program's folder.)

And what lovely sounds they are! Crashin' with style, that's what it is!

[WindozeNT]

I would think that MESS would be the best way to go.

But if you just want to hear the sounds, they're included with MacTracker. (It requires Quicktime, but if you don't want to install Quicktime all the audio files are just sitting there in the program's folder.)

And what lovely sounds they are! Crashin' with style, that's what it is!

I'll try MESS and see if it allows the crash. Anyway, I'm trying to get the crash straight from the horse's mouth, meaning I want it directly from the source: none other than the Macintosh ROM itself. However, SheepShaver proves my disk image is runnable. What's a surefire way to get a Sad Mac thru just a boot disk?

And what lovely sounds they are! Crashin' with style, that's what it is!

Agreed! Apple wanted to be certain that the Mac was 100% and completely user-friendly, all the way down to the boot crashes! Whereas IBM PCs would beep tones like mad on an error.[/url]

[Arbee]

MESS will indeed play the death chime if you can provoke the ROM into playing it. On current SVN, just run the Mac LC III driver - it'll play the startup chime, wait a second or two, and then death chime. At least until I fix that

Incidentally, the latest update of the MacTracker iOS app removed the death chimes, which is disappointing.

[Jorpho]

What's a surefire way to get a Sad Mac thru just a boot disk?

The only time I saw an actual Sad Mac myself was back in high school, when I inserted a boot disk normally used for an ancient, yellowing Fat Mac (perhaps even a Macintosh 128K) into an LC 475. (I had a minor panic before someone reminded me about the manual eject mechanism.) I guess it must have been some kind of MFS-formatted pre-System 6 disk of some sort or another.

[WindozeNT]

What's a surefire way to get a Sad Mac thru just a boot disk?

The only time I saw an actual Sad Mac myself was back in high school, when I inserted a boot disk normally used for an ancient, yellowing Fat Mac (perhaps even a Macintosh 128K) into an LC 475. (I had a minor panic before someone reminded me about the manual eject mechanism.) I guess it must have been some kind of MFS-formatted pre-System 6 disk of some sort or another.

I need a MESS-compatible Mac LC III driver because my normal LCIII.rom file will not function in MESS. MESS wants a truckload of ROMs for the LC in order to boot and re-adding the same LCIII ROM file and renaming them doesn't work unfortunatly. Also by SVN, you meaning the current version? When I got MESS, I just downloaded the mess0140b.zip file. Is that it? How do I get a working version of the ROM for it, contaning 341s0851.bin and ecbbc41c.rom (or similar .rom file)? Also, is there an emulatable interrupt button in MESS?

[Arbee]

I need a MESS-compatible Mac LC III driver because my normal LCIII.rom file will not function in MESS. MESS wants a truckload of ROMs for the LC in order to boot and re-adding the same LCIII ROM file and renaming them doesn't work unfortunatly.

LC III currently needs 2 ROMs: the main system ROM (usually called "LCIII.rom", but we use the more precise "ecbbc41c.rom"), and the Egret ROM (341s0851.bin). I can't directly tell you where to get compatible ROMs, but if you can't find them quickly using Google you aren't trying.

Also by SVN, you meaning the current version? When I got MESS, I just downloaded the mess0140b.zip file. Is that it? How do I get a working version of the ROM for it, contaning 341s0851.bin and ecbbc41c.rom (or similar .rom file)? Also, is there an emulatable interrupt button in MESS?

No, 0.140 is too old to have the behavior I described. You need to get a current build - either pull SVN latest to your PC and compile, or get Bobz' daily build at http://bobz38.free.fr/mess_autobuild/index.php

MESS does not currently support a programmer's switch on any model, but you can use MESS's built-in GUI debugger to cause various calamities to the emulated systems if you so desire (run with -debug).

[WindozeNT]

LC III currently needs 2 ROMs: the main system ROM (usually called "LCIII.rom", but we use the more precise "ecbbc41c.rom"), and the Egret ROM (341s0851.bin). I can't directly tell you where to get compatible ROMs, but if you can't find them quickly using Google you aren't trying.

I have the LCIII driver, but it seems the Egret ROM does not even exist. What is this "Egret" you speak of? Why does MESS even need it in the first place if other emus run perfectly on just the main ROM? I've tried a number of things to find a downloadable Egret ROM, but there are no hits. Is it possible to use brute-force on MESS to use the Main ROM by itself without the (so far) nonexistant Egret ROM? Can you at least point me in the right direction with a search term that might give some sign of the ROM's downloadable existance?
If not, what are some programming languages for Mac OS 7.5.5 that lets me make apps that run in fullscreen (without the Finder Bar) and read the crash sounds staright from ROM and play them? A hex-generating feature with preinstalled Sad Mac Codes database would also be nice to generate different Sad Mac types. A system identifier will be good for detecting what Mac you have to detect: if it has crash sounds or not, the image for the Sad Mac (there are 2), the type of hexadecimal format (Example; 0F000D (Mac Plus) or 0000000F:00000013 (Mac II)) the ROM uses and overall what system you are running. The Sad Mac simulator would be a revolutionary program to emulate these on other emulators without it costing arm 'n' leg! To generate different "crashes" while the program is running, the user presses Command+N (this regenerates a different code and (settable by option) replays the Crash Sound. Command+O, of course, shows the option box (which only has crash-sound-on-regeneration) option. Command+Q quits the cool app and Command+S sets it to start when Mac OS is finished loading and your desktop appears. Pressing the Startup combo again disables it. Is there such a language?
Thanks,
WindozeNT

[Jorpho]

What is this "Egret" you speak of? Why does MESS even need it in the first place if other emus run perfectly on just the main ROM?

Obviously because MESS strives for considerably greater precision in its hardware emulation.

If not, what are some programming languages for Mac OS 7.5.5 that lets me make apps that run in fullscreen (without the Finder Bar) and read the crash sounds staright from ROM and play them?

Come now, what would be the point of that? You'd be just as well off playing the sounds in MacTracker at that point.

I believe Basilisk II comes with a program for dumping a Mac's BIOS ROM; it might even include the source code. You could probably modify that to do what you want.

Is there such a language?

No, no one has ever actually programmed for Mac OS 7.5.5 before; the software that exists spontaneously sprang into existence via divine intervention.

[WindozeNT]

What is this "Egret" you speak of? Why does MESS even need it in the first place if other emus run perfectly on just the main ROM?

Obviously because MESS strives for considerably greater precision in its hardware emulation.

If not, what are some programming languages for Mac OS 7.5.5 that lets me make apps that run in fullscreen (without the Finder Bar) and read the crash sounds staright from ROM and play them?

Come now, what would be the point of that? You'd be just as well off playing the sounds in MacTracker at that point.

I believe Basilisk II comes with a program for dumping a Mac's BIOS ROM; it might even include the source code. You could probably modify that to do what you want.

Is there such a language?

No, no one has ever actually programmed for Mac OS 7.5.5 before; the software that exists spontaneously sprang into existence via divine intervention.

I don't understand C++. I only know Visual Basic. Will the Sad Mac work under MacWorks in Lisa? I know a site somewhere with MacWorks XL, but I don't know how to get my collection of Mac ROMs and the corrupt disk image in the Lisa for use with MacWorks XL. I'm using LisaEm 1.2.6 (ROMless version). Also, I'm having issues getting the emulator out of the HQX. All I get is an unreadable 001.txt file from WinZip.

[Arbee]

FWIW, the death chime on some systems is actually realtime synthesized by ROM code riding the parameters of the ASC's wavetable mode (as is the boot chime). So there is no sample to pull out of ROM in those cases. Wavetable mode did get dropped from most of the all-in-one system ASICs that clone the ASC (V8, Eagle, Sonora, VASP, etc) so in those cases the sounds are samples.

As far as the roms, Google terms including "mess 140 bios" and "mess 140 roms" deliver multiple pages of correct results. (Admins: if that's too specific, feel free to censor as necessary).