BII and 4K retina iMac

About BasiliskII, a 68k Mac emulator for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux that can run System 7.x through MacOS 8.1.

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enryfox
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BII and 4K retina iMac

Post by enryfox »

I'm running latest Basilisk II OSX build on a 4K retina iMac with OSX 10.11 and so far so good.
Running benchmarks show that the emulated mac is much faster that any 68k mac ever by several order of magnitude but the GUI is not as snappy as expected. Running in windowed mode (1024x768) the mouse is sluggish and the folder animations are slow; switching to full screen improves responsiveness a bit, but the GUI appears to be anyway slower than SheepShaver in a similar configuration. What is odd is that if I run a quick benchmark using Doom II on the two emulated mac's (Basilisk II and SheepShaver) I get roughly the same ~35 fps, it is just the MacOS UI that is slower in BII...
Moreover in windowed mode, BII seems to have a sort an antialiasing applied while SS is very sharp. Is that expected ?

thanks
bye

Enrico
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: BII and 4K retina iMac

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

BasiliskII does indeed run visually not as smooth as SheepShaver. That is true especially for mouse movements. BasiliskII and SheepShaver display the mouse cursor differently. Also, there are several issues with different builds of BasiliskII. See the list of available builds in the second post in this topic and the discussion here. Simply try which build suits you best.

BasiliskII should appear sharp. Maybe the "antialiasing" you see is an issue with the retina screen. Is it possible to choose to run BasiliskII in Low Resolution mode or will it always run in Low Resolution mode? See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202471

If you post here the content of your .basilisk_ii_prefs file, we can judge your settings for BasiliskII. Maybe some improvement can be made by adjusting settings.

To get the content of that file, open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/) and type at the prompt

Code: Select all

open ~/.basilisk_ii_prefs
followed by a return. The file will open in your default text editor.
enryfox
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Re: BII and 4K retina iMac

Post by enryfox »

Thanks, for the info !
Actually switching to "low res mode" has fixed most of the issues: the UI is very sharp, mouse is faster and everything feels snappier. In Sheepshaver it is enabled by default and that explains the differences; I've read the thread dealing with various builds, but to me the 2014 runs super smooth (I have not tried the others though).

I think it would be nice to add the Low Resolution mode trick to BII installation how to, on retina mac it really changes the responsiveness of the emulator.

regards
Enrico
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: BII and 4K retina iMac

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

enryfox wrote:I think it would be nice to add the Low Resolution mode trick to BII installation how to, on retina mac
Good idea. Will do. Thanks.
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