Video card emulating emulator

[Tooncinator]

You know, you guys do great work. Thank you for all you do.

I have a serious hankering to play some old Apogee games. You know, Nanosaur, Bugdom, and that old caveman racing game I forget the name of. Do you know of any emulators right now that support emulating a video card and that my computer can play, or should I wait another 10 years?

And I know a year ago I asked in the SheepShaver forum about Apeiron, and found that SheepShaver doesn't have good mouse emulation. Which emulators have good mouse emulation? Last year I just caved in and bought an old iMac that was running some outdated version of OS X, but now I want to take a look at making the old game work using an emulator. I hope someday a game developer can make a suitable replacement for Apeiron... maybe if I ever get into game development, I can make a clone with the Godot engine or something.

And this question isn't relevant to the title, but... will there ever be a QEMU guide for Linux?

Thank you for always answering every inane question I've got and every question everyone else has, too. I love seeing this old community still kicking, even 20 years after its creation. When I was a kid, my dad gave my brother and I an iMac with OS 9 on it, and he even managed to find a SNES emulator for it. Still miss having that whole library, and though I have issues with Apple's way of conducting business these days, there will always be a spot in my heart for that old computer.

[Cat_7]

Hi,

Only recently someone reported success with running Nanosaur in Qemu. Whether actually runs playable is not known: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=10135&p=62797&hili ... aur#p62797

There will be no guide (at least not by me) on running Qemu in Linux. The OSX guide should be reasonably close to how things should be done in Linux. There will certainly be no Qemu builds for Linux from me. Your Linux distribution will most likely provide recent Qemu builds through the package management.

If you want to build your own Qemu binary (f.i. to build the experimental sound-enabled version), here is some info on how to compile Qemu on Linux:
https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Linux

Best,
Cat_7

[24bit]

It would be good if you could give Nanosaur a whirl with Qemu, Tooncinator.
I don´t see myself playing the game.

You will know that both VMWare and Virtual Box have some sort of GPU emulation by now.
Maybe that would help with some PowerPC OSX coded games in a VM running Leopard or Tiger including Apple´s Rosetta.

[Tooncinator]

Many thanks, I will take a look at those emulators and that version of QEMU.

[Jorpho]

I have a serious hankering to play some old Apogee games. You know, Nanosaur, Bugdom, and that old caveman racing game I forget the name of.

None of those were Apogee games, but I suspect you're thinking of BC Racers.

There used to be a "3D Realms Anthology" available on Steam and so on which contained most of Apogee's old games, but it seems it was removed from sale.

(You may also enjoy Alien Rampage, which is technically an Apogee game, but not really.)

And I know a year ago I asked in the SheepShaver forum about Apeiron, and found that SheepShaver doesn't have good mouse emulation. Which emulators have good mouse emulation?

As suggested in that thread, did you try Fusion? It should not be too difficult to get it running in DOSBox; this alternative build supports large amounts of memory.
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=9711

This thread suggests using Mini VMac II for Apeiron.
https://emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9710

And this other thread has a patch for SheepShaver which apparently fixes mouse control in Apeiron. I don't know if it was ever properly integrated into later versions.
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7604

[adespoton]

The games listed were all products of Pangea Software. Most of them required an ATi Rage graphics card, but apparently could fall back to software rendering. QEMU will run them with the software rendering mode now; it didn't when I first tried a few years back. There are still some efforts underway to add graphics card emulation/passthrough to QEMU, but it's stalled on some error conditions that nobody working on it understands (yet).

[Jorpho]

The games listed were all products of Pangaea Software.

Oh! Of course. That would be Cro-Mag Rally, then. (Who would have thought there would be more than one caveman-themed racer out there..?)

[adespoton]

I have fond memories of Pangea Software... I started downloading software from the Info-Mac and UMich FTP repositories just before Bloodsuckers! came out; it was the first colour game I downloaded and played from there. Sure beat using Gopher to grab software off the Internet or downloading from local BBSes like I'd been doing for the previous two years (or, indeed, walking into the local Apple dealer with a box of floppies like I'd done before that).