Oddities from the Server

Anything not about Mac emulation.

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ClockWise
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Oddities from the Server

Post by ClockWise »

In this thread I hope to post some oddities from our server, which has accumulated a lot of junk over the last twelve years (I delete nothing).

First up are some fun screenshots:

http://emaculation.com/articles/aquasoft1.jpg
http://emaculation.com/articles/aquasoft2.jpg
http://emaculation.com/articles/aquasoft3.jpg

Those appear to be showing the creation of the "Aqua Apps" that were distributed on aqua-soft.org around 2001-2002ish. They seem to have been taken by Christian Clough (ChrisClough, CyCo) while he was having an MSN conversation with me. I used to talk to him a lot, but I haven't heard from him in at least seven years.

Has anyone here heard from him lately?

Aqua-Soft was a very very popular site dedicated to skinning the OS X look in Windows. It was started by some people who used to hang around here back when we talked about that sort of stuff in this forum (and in earlier versions of this forum). But it is a mostly dead page now. People just aren't interested in that sort of thing anymore.
fanman93
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Post by fanman93 »

Wow. I wish I could get a copy of those buttons/skins, actually.
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Post by ClockWise »

You're in luck, fanman, because today's oddity is just that:

http://www.emaculation.com/aapps/

Those are the famed "Aqua Apps." They are probably not the final versions... I think those were sent to me by Christian sometime before they were all released. They are from 2002, I suppose. Let me know what you think of them!

I think that Aqua Soft stopped distributing them after legal threats from Apple.

I'll try them myself later and write a few notes about how they work.
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Post by ClockWise »

And today's special treat is our old random screenshot page:

http://www.emaculation.com/screenshots/ ... nshot.html

Just refresh that page to get a new screenshot of one of our emulators in action... taken between 1999 and, I guess, 2002.

I think there are about 50 different screenshots displayed. For more, check the directory listing:

http://www.emaculation.com/screenshots/
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Post by Stephen Coates »

I had a good look round the server a couple of years ago.

I found this on my hard drive amongst 10000 files which ScanDisk kindly placed in a FOUND.000 directory. Must have come from the forum directory as it was with a load of forum stuff.

Image

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Post by fanman93 »

I tried out those VB controls, and I'm impressed with how well they work. Not used to ActivX controls, but I may just start using them.
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Post by ClockWise »

Here's another oddity:

http://emaculation.com/articles/ppcemufuture.html

It's an article from 2001 about the possibility of PPC emulation. Ah, the good old days!

To quote:

"Fusion and Basililsk II are able to emulate ‘040 Macs at superb speeds. This is because ‘040s are much slower than current x86 processors. They top out at 50 MHz. That’s no big deal for a new processor. Power PCs on the other hand, are much faster than X86s. They’re so much faster that even a top of the line x86 processor would have trouble emulating a low MHz Power PC. Why? The reason lies in the way Power PC and x86 processors handle data. Pentiums handle big chunks of data at once and then break them down; this is called a CISC (Complicated Instruction Set Computing) architecture. Power PCs handle only small chunks of data at once and quickly execute them; this is called a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architecture. So while a Pentium may be spending three or four clock cycles (ticks of the processors “clock” aka MHz) to execute one instruction, a Power PC has already executed three or more instructions. This makes emulating a Power PC processor on an x86 processor very hard. It would be like trying to get a work out on a treadmill that was slower than you were."

A nice explanation!

That was written by "Jay," who was a young guy who ran a site called "Jay's Mac." He was super-prolific and was always writing up articles for his site and for other sites.

Google tells us that Jay has a current website:

http://jasontaylor.ath.cx/
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Post by ClockWise »

Here are some benchmarks from June 2000!

http://emaculation.com/bench.html

They were from an old contributor named "rockets." I don't know what happened to him.
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Post by ClockWise »

Here's a neat old file:

http://www.emaculation.com/b2manual/

It's Marc Hoffman's monumental 150 page manual (in PDF) for Basilisk II (build 142).

Cat_7 might want to include a link to this in his setup guide for build 142!

Marc ran the "OS Emulation Homepage" for some time before disappearing from the community. I did spot him last year, though, when he added a page from our wiki to his delicious.com profile.
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Post by ClockWise »

Here's an article called "SheepShaver - the new Classic?"

http://emaculation.com/sheepshaver.html

I think that Stephen formatted and uploaded this one... it is much newer than the other "oddities" in this thread.
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Post by Stephen Coates »

Hehe.

Michael Brice wrote that and posted it on another forum and suggested it as an article for us, so I HTMLd it and uploaded.
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Post by ClockWise »

Here's a wonderful oddity that I like to link to quite often: Charred PC's Emulation Oddities:

http://www.emaculation.com/charred/

It's an old "hosted site" that was updated back in the old old days (2001ish?). I talk to CharredPC on msn messenger about once a year. He's doing well.
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Post by ClockWise »

Here's a collection of SheepShaver screenshots uploaded by Mike Kolassa (jackalo) in January of 2004:

http://emaculation.com/SheepShaver-Screenshots/

There was supposed to be a thumbnail display provided by a java script, but it was broken and I sort of stripped it out.

Mike still posts sometimes on Jim's "OS Emulation" forum on Delphi. He seems to be doing well.
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