MACE: an New Classic Mac emulator project

[adespoton]

Hey, thanks for your message! During the autumn the progress has been a bit slow, but moving forward. Most of the recent changes have been figuring out bugs and fixing them both in the software emulation and the processor emulation.
During the recent month I have been getting familiar with the 68881 FPU emulation mostly out of curiosity, even if there are many more urgent things.
In my understanding in the software emulation side the next thing is to continue with the Sound Manager emulation and 32 bit memory addressing mode.
Additionally we have started planning forward development of the debugger and disassembler tools to be more useful.

Hey Pukka, I've got an interesting request that goes the other direction from your arduous work with setDepth this summer and your previous work with 32-bit memory addressing:

https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/encha ... ossibility

Enchanted Scepters is a 24-bit World Builder game; something from the earliest days of the Mac. Any chance you guys can get this to work in MACE? If you can, that should result in a configuration that will work for running most World Builder games in MACE on modern OSes. I'm assuming it doesn't already work with one of your existing configurations; it's possible that it would (but I figure some tweaks are likely required).

[adespoton]

Here's a blast from the past; I knew I saw this around somewhere:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050515075 ... jb.net:80/

See especially https://web.archive.org/web/20050305132 ... about.html

Original site from 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20000816205 ... about.html

[ClockWise]

Here is an update (found in my email inbox) from Weston dated April 2001:

Mace hasn't made any progress for the past year now, due to lack of
coding help. It's got a lot of potential, but I get the feeling that
most other developers don't want to touch it until we get it to the
point where a Mac application running under Mace will put something
graphical on the screen and at least partially work. I've tried getting
development help several times since Mace went Open Source, but haven't
really gotten much of a response. Where would Linux be if other
developers, such as Alan Cox, didn't jump in and start coding? Linus is
an extremely talented person, but he's still only one person.

As for me and Mace, I'm no where near as talented as Linus is, and I
don't have much time for Mace anyways. On top of that, I'm under a
completely ridiculess Intellectual Property agreement with my current
employer, which basically says that they own anything I think up or
first practice during my employment. Although Mace has been around since
long before I got this job, any improvements that I would make to it may
be considered new and could be owned by my employer, which is simply
unacceptable and would mean problems for me. At least, that's how I
understand it; they made me sign three such agreements, all of which
pretty much said the same thing, in their own confusing way. I see none
of their source codes (unless you count small JCL scripts, lol), and
don't really see any confidential information other than customer
shipping information. I do no development whatsoever for them either,
but they still pretty much own my thoughts and anything that I create,
even when I'm not at work. I came very close to not signing those
agreements in the first place, but I needed a job at the time and I knew
that I could just quit when it became a problem. I know that I could be
making a lot more money doing something more technical, so I'm kind of
casually looking right now. I'd probably just end up under a similar IP
agreement, but I would expect something not so ridiculess as this one.
I've heard that some states like California have laws against employers
owning things that their employees do on their own time, but I'm in
Colorado and as far as I know it's legal here.

But, back to the topic... Mace. As I've explained above, I'm unable to
really do any coding right now, which means that Mace won't progress any
further until I either get a new job (that doesn't come with an IP
agreement that exploits the hell out of me), or we get some development
help. I think I'm going to go look at some tech job classifieds right
now...

-Weston

[xuser]

Look like a good project

[Madd the Sane]

There has been a recent update: https://mace.home.blog/2024/08/29/summe ... ager-news/

Main points of interest:

• Enchanted Scepters
• Larger than 1mb slot space in 32-bit mode
• 16-bit QuickDraw direct mode improvements
• PICT 2 recording improvements
• MAJOR FEATURE: Component Manager first steps
• Resource Manager fixes & ResEdit CODE editor
• AppleDoubler UTF-8 denormalization
• Font/DA Mover
• MIDI Manager implementation
• Bonus: Some Havoc screenshots

Included is a movie showing off the MIDI subsystem mapping to an external device: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z7ZzhBpKyc

I was under the impression that Havoc (or at least QuickDraw 3D) required PowerPC processors.

[adespoton]

There has been a recent update: https://mace.home.blog/2024/08/29/summe ... ager-news/

Main points of interest:

• Enchanted Scepters
• Larger than 1mb slot space in 32-bit mode
• 16-bit QuickDraw direct mode improvements
• PICT 2 recording improvements
• MAJOR FEATURE: Component Manager first steps
• Resource Manager fixes & ResEdit CODE editor
• AppleDoubler UTF-8 denormalization
• Font/DA Mover
• MIDI Manager implementation
• Bonus: Some Havoc screenshots

Included is a movie showing off the MIDI subsystem mapping to an external device: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z7ZzhBpKyc

I was under the impression that Havoc (or at least QuickDraw 3D) required PowerPC processors.

Woohoo! This is now one of the only solutions that actually supports the MIDI subsystem!

We still need to work on the Time port timers, as randomly they don’t start up properly, instead stalling up the whole port. But once you get the timer running, it seems to work stable for a long time!

...and as far as I know, no other Mac emulator (other than possibly MAME) has got the Time port timers functioning at all. So this now provides a way to use 68k Mac MIDI apps that depend on the Time port.

[marciot42]

@pukka this is very impressive! The only project I've heard of that tries to do anything similar is Advanced Macintosh Substitute, but this project seems to be so much further along!

One very cool niche for this would be to make Macintosh apps available on the web, by compiling the underlying code to WebAssembly. I've ported several emulators to the web as part of my Retroweb Vintage Computer Museum, but the use of ROMs is of questionable legality. A ROM-free way to run Mac applications on the web would be an incredible boon for software archivists!

[marciot42]

Any relationship between this MACE and this one?

https://github.com/MaddTheSane/Mace
https://web.archive.org/web/20010117233 ... about.html

[adespoton]

Any relationship between this MACE and this one?

https://github.com/MaddTheSane/Mace
https://web.archive.org/web/20010117233 ... about.html

Nope; totally different. We had that discussion right at the top of this thread, I believe

[marciot42]

Nope; totally different. We had that discussion right at the top of this thread, I believe

Yeah, I looked a bit deeper at the source for that other M.A.C.E and it doesn't seem to have much, most toolbox traps are stubbed out, at least on the code snapshots I was able to find.

Anyhow, I spent the last few hours reading through the blog posts on this new M.A.C.E and my mind is blown. I really love how the work is being well documented, as that is one area a lot of projects skimp on! This has been fascinating reading through and through!

I have no idea how to contact Toni or Pukka, but I will leave it here that they are welcome to use and/or redistribute any of my own Macintosh software as a test code. I don't know whether I have much of value, but they mentioned in the August 2023 that they got Paul Mercer's ColorDesk to work. If they were unable to get redistribution rights to that, I would offer up my own ScreenChooser V3.1 (https://archive.org/details/screen-chooser) as a similar alternative. It probably operates similarly to ColorDesk, so I'm guessing it would also work? Mine also has a Control Strip module, should they ever decide to implement that functionality

[adespoton]

Nope; totally different. We had that discussion right at the top of this thread, I believe

Yeah, I looked a bit deeper at the source for that other M.A.C.E and it doesn't seem to have much, most toolbox traps are stubbed out, at least on the code snapshots I was able to find.

Anyhow, I spent the last few hours reading through the blog posts on this new M.A.C.E and my mind is blown. I really love how the work is being well documented, as that is one area a lot of projects skimp on! This has been fascinating reading through and through!

I have no idea how to contact Toni or Pukka, but I will leave it here that they are welcome to use and/or redistribute any of my own Macintosh software as a test code. I don't know whether I have much of value, but they mentioned in the August 2023 that they got Paul Mercer's ColorDesk to work. If they were unable to get redistribution rights to that, I would offer up my own ScreenChooser V3.1 (https://archive.org/details/screen-chooser) as a similar alternative. It probably operates similarly to ColorDesk, so I'm guessing it would also work? Mine also has a Control Strip module, should they ever decide to implement that functionality

You can contact Toni and Pukka via private message on here... I was going to PM you the instructions, but it appears you don't have a contact email enabled on your account? So I'll leave this info here instead