E-Maculation News: August 2007

A beta version of Gemulator 2008 including SoftMac 9 is now avaliable for downloading. Get it at here.

Also, Mac Emu has been doing a bit of testing of the new emulator and written a short review with some comparisons between Gemulator and BasiliskII. These can be seen in the forum here.

Please also note, that new users will not be able to post in the forums for the next few days. This is due to a small problem with the theme which will be fixed during the next few day. Sorry for the inconveniance.

— Stephen Coates, August 18 2007

Due to the way that news is organised on this site, long news posting can make the slightly older postings go quite far down the page, so people can miss them, so I thought I’d make a summary of the recent news here so no one misses anything.

*Clifford Mathews make Executor free to use for all - a new serial number is avaliable which will not expire.

*MacEmu has made a large ISO file containing all the versions and source codes of all the emulators that he has downloaded over many years.

*Darek Mihoca has said that he will update his Macintosh and Atari emulators, SoftMac and Gemulator to run better on more modern systems and portable to other systems.

*Apple released some new iMacs

*Some new SheepShaver builds have been released for Intel and PPC Macs.

To read these, scroll down the page, or visit the August 2007 page here.

— Stephen Coates, August 16 2007

Clifford Mathews finally updated the ARDI website to include a new serial number for Executor which will not expire. This means that Executor can now be used by anyone for free.

From ARDI’s website, News from July 23rd 2007:

This just in, ARDI is still dead.

I, Clifford Matthews, ARDI’s founder, stopped working on Executor in 2002. In 2006, three of my friends from Wall Street and I founded Stolen Bases, a company that has nothing to do with emulation or reverse-engineering.

A wife, three kids and a startup keep me crazy busy. A startup keeps my wife and three kids crazy.

There are old Executor binaries in our download section. You may use the serial number “99991004″ and the authentication key “n9rk57f369byp”. The key doesn’t expire. There is no technical support available for Executor. The source code is not yet available.

— Stephen Coates, August 16 2007

This monster is not human! It feels no pain! It can’t be reasoned with!

Over the last two months I’ve been going though all my burnt CDRs for the past 9 years dumping everything onto an external hard drive. I decided to organize all the Mac emulation stuff in one folder and thought … “Hey! I bet others might love this pile of memories past too!”.

So I’ve created a 684 MB ISO containing (among other things) every freely available # Basilisk
# Basilisk II
# EmMac
# Executor
# Fusion PC
# Mac-on-Linux (and MoM)
# Mini-vMac
# PearPC
# ShapeShifter
# SheepShaver
# SoftMac
# vMac

build (and source code) my grubby hands have downloaded over the years (no ROMs or Mac OSes!). For some of you these files will bring back fond memories. I hope you enjoy them.

You can download the ISO via torrent here: Monster Mac Emulation Pack 2007.

Update: It’s been RARed to make it 110 MB smaller and available via demonoid.com here (called the “Mac Emulation Mega Pack”).

If you have any files or suggestions to add\subtract, post it below or on the Emaculation Forum.

PS: There’s an installer called the Mac Emulation Power Pack Summer 2007 containing the latest Windows builds of our beloved Mac emulators and tools in the “Packs” directory.

— MacEmu, August 14, 2007

Darek Mihoka has decided to release new versions of Gemulator and SoftMac.

The new versions are going to be optimised for the new 64bit and dual core processors. It will be portable to other operating system, like MacOSX and Linux, and will be open source. First betas will be avaliable on 13th August 2007.

From the Emulators, Inc website:

The ninth generation of our 680×0 emulation products Gemulator and SoftMac is now under development. The first beta release of GEMULATOR 9.0 will be posted here on August 13 2007. A Gemulator 9.0 beta refresh along with a SoftMac 9.0 beta release will follow in September. For the 9.0 releases, several high priority issues were addressed relating to stability and reliability which were found after the 8.x releases:

*Fix video where on some systems the screen refresh was either very slow or infrequent. *Support for running in WOW64 mode on 64-bit XP and 64-bit Vista. *Improve support for running in virtual machines such as VMware and Virtual PC. *Remove menu options that had little effect (such as “Fast Refresh” or “Use Hardware Timer”) in order to reduce testing complexity. *Eliminate Windows calls specific to certain Windows releases and choosing more general purpose implementations instead. For example, the “write watch” API in Windows is no longer being used as it is not consistently available on different PCs. *Merge back to a common 680×0 emulation engine. Gemulator 8 and SoftMac 8 had used forked sources which had diverged significantly and had subtly different behaviour.

These changes and fixes result in a more consistent experience regardless of the version of Windows being run on or the host CPU being used. More importantly, these changes are also intended to ease the porting process. Very soon these products will be ported from being 32-bit applications to being 64-bit applications which will be targeted at 64-bit Windows, Mac OS X Leopard, and x64 distributions of Linux. It is possible that Fusion PC will also be revived in the future to target MS-DOS hosts, either from the current Fusion PC 3.0 sources or from the ported SoftMac sources. Whether this happens at all will depend on demand from users of MS-DOS.

Discuss it in the forum! (No posts flaming anyone please)

More information avaliable from http://www.emulators.com/beta.htm

— Stephen Coates, August 8 2007