Page 1 of 1

Interesting idea for a Virtual Machine....

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 7:55 pm
by adespoton
Currently QEMU won't emulate a 68k Mac because of the issues surrounding ROM handling.

This got me thinking that it would be neat to implement a clean room classic ROM. However, then you need an OS to run on it.

http://mcosre.sourceforge.net might be a bit ancient at this point and not have a ton of time put into it these days, but combined with executor code, should be enough to create a Macintosh binary-compatible OS, that should run in an emulator.

So all that's left is figuring out the ROM, really. When that's done, we should have a system that could wrap around Classic applications, or even re-create a portable environment for Classic applications that is totally portable and fully open source.

It's likely we'll never get there, but I'd love it if we could; all sorts of fixes could be added for complaints people had with the Mac back in the day, sort of like what happened with the Amiga.

I'd love to have all three of those parts (even if buggy) in place such that someone could download an emulator off the Internet that is totally free of copyright restrictions, and will run at least most of their old software.

Yes, I have a dream :)

Re: Interesting idea for a Virtual Machine....

Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2018 11:54 am
by J. Gryphon
This pretty well answers the question I was planning on asking here, whether there were any projects to make an open-source clone of the Classic Mac OS, similar in scope to the Haiku or ReactOS projects. As an unashamed fanboy of the classic Macintosh philosophy, mindset and architecture, it seemed to me that there was room for development in this area, in a sea of Unix derivatives. While I've always been a big proponent of emulation as a means for keeping Classic applications available it seems that the ideal of such an OS, with the hope of a future, would surely be as worthy an endeavor as the ones mentioned above (particularly given the not vast collection of BeOS software and the continued relative backward compatibility of Windows and the successful DOSBox and Wine projects).

Re: Interesting idea for a Virtual Machine....

Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2018 4:06 pm
by sentient06
I remember creating a similar topic here before, but focusing on that brazilian macintosh clone that had an "alternative" rom. They pretty much made the same trick Compaq (was it Compaq?) played on IBM many years ago to make PC clones.

Some 4 years ago I got curious about that and chased one of the lads involved in the development of that clone. I found him. Turns out he participated in the project but after so many years he had no idea how it worked and he had no clue where to find one of the clones. They are super rare. Also, he wrote some nonsensical stuff (I think he's a bit crazy), so I gave up digging more information on it.

My idea was to attempt copying the ROM data as we do for vMac and Basilisk and then try to use it. Of course only Mac 512 architecture would probably work, but at least it would have no ties to Apple. I reckon the people involved in the project wouldn't give a flying duck for the image being freely distributed. They had the same mentality.

In the end of the day, we don't have a clone ROM because people with the knowledge are not in the mood. But it has been done before and could be done again. =D

Update:

This one: http://lowendmac.com/2016/unitron-mac-5 ... om-brazil/

Re: Interesting idea for a Virtual Machine....

Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2018 10:49 pm
by adespoton
Of course, since they didn't care about IP, chances are that the ROM has copyrighted Apple code in it too....