Whatever happened to vMac (not Mini)?

[nkeck72]

I went to look up Mini vMac to download it for the what seems like 40 billionth time the other day for a Windows 95 machine that I had just built and gotten onto the internet and came across a Wikipedia article about vMac. The original vMac, not Mini vMac. After reading up on it, I decided I might give it a try since their website is still up, and also because it has more features than Mini vMac. But alas, their download page was broken and their support email address immediately returned my email with permanent errors. So now what?

I don't want to see this project die. Not only that, it seems to have more features that Mini vMac and has a better feel (in my opinion) than Basilisk II. Does anyone else possibly have a download hosted somewhere or a copy laying on an old disk image or hard drive somewhere?

It would be great to have something that full-featured on Windows 95, especially since vMac is period accurate for that OS.

I'll stop rambling now, I promise.

[Cat_7]

Hi,

This takes you straight to the download:
http://www.vmac.org/download/Windows/

Best,
Cat_7

[24bit]

vMac was for DOS but I hardly used it, I could not see much difference to MiniVMac myself.
As you are running an old W95 PC (I presume), maybe consider Fusion_PC too.
Fusion is really fast for its time and has tons of features too.
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/fusion-pc

[nkeck72]

Thanks for the response! I will download both and give them a try. :D

[CharlesS]

Mini vMac eclipsed vMac in emulation quality a long time ago. As I remember it, vMac didn't even have sound (whereas Mini vMac goes far enough as to have complete emulation of the original Mac's square wave generator).

[adespoton]

IIRC, vMac was mostly a shell and a dream, and Paul took the useful parts from that to build a no-nonsense emulator stripped of the moving goalposts that were bogging down the vMac project, to create a functional platform for MPW. Since then it's become a lot more feature complete as Paul's had time to fill it out.

And the architectural requirements of today are significantly different than they were when vMac was designed and developed, so using one of the other frameworks makes more sense now.

[24bit]

Off topic, but time to mention again maybe?
Hampa Hug´s PCE emulator with some ready to go Mac builds included:
http://www.hampa.ch/pce/download.html

[Cat_7]

Good of you to refresh our memory.
I once started writing a guide for PCE but it somehow ground to a halt (Me, not PCE)

[nkeck72]

I actually have tried vMac over the past couple of days (both in DOS and Win95) and the Windows version does indeed support sound, and it lets me boot directly off of my Mac floppies (not 400k or 800k ones, because of the multispeed drives needed) without having to create a disk image, which is a feature I would rather keep. The DOS version also emulates the floppy drive in this way, albeit somewhat slower becuase of the use of BIOS calls. I actually wouldn't mind using vMac for something of Windows 95 vintage.

[sentient06]

Does vMac work in DOSBox implementation of DOS? I know Fusion works, never tried vMac. =D

[nkeck72]

Speaking of Fusion, I have always wondered what range of OSes it could run. I have always gotten System 7.0 to work on it, but I never knew what OS range it could truly run.

[24bit]

Fusion emulates a MC68040 without MMU, MacOS compatibility as stated in the manual is 7.1 to 8.1 - similar to BasiliskII.
See the details here, as taken from The Waybackmachine, look for the "Manual" please. http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/fusion-pc