Is there any way to force quit an application inside Mini vMac?

[bribri]

Occasionally apps crash in System 7, and I can't press command+option+escape to attempt to force quit them because that keystroke is intercepted by macOS / OS X. Is there any way I can send command+option+escape into Mini vMac to be received by the guest OS?

[dolarfred]

Try 'control Q' then holding 'control key' down taping 'Y' to exit
(if french azerty keyboard it's 'control A')

[bribri]

Try 'control Q' then holding 'control key' down taping 'Y' to exit
(if french azerty keyboard it's 'control A')

I'm already doing that, actually! But that quits the emulator completely, and doesn't give the guest OS a chance to recover. In the case of just a single application in the emulated environment freezing, I'd like to try force quitting the app first before terminating the whole emulator and causing the guest OS to shut down uncleanly. Normally in System 7 you can press command+option+escape to (at least attempt to) quit the current app. That's what I'm trying to figure out how to do.

[mabam]

According to https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/hard ... l#keyboard it might work to press F1+F2+esc.

[adespoton]

command-option-escape doesn't do anything in System 7?

What you want to do is hit the interrupt switch or the reset switch. Both have shortcuts in Mini vMac's control overlay: https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/opti ... option_eci

If you want to trigger Minibug, you do Control-I; if you want to force a reset, you do Control-R. If you want to use the Control key as a control key, you do Control-K (which means all the other MvM control shortcuts are disabled until you disable the control key again).

So if you're in Minibug, you can type

Code: Select all

SM FA700 A9F4
PC FA700
G

This sets the memory at FA700 (top of the stack) to A9F4, which is the "Exit to Finder" command. Then you set the program counter to that address (so the CPU will run that instruction next) and type G to get it to run.

For older Macs running System 6 and below, we used SM 0, but there can be important stuff at address 0 in System 7 and later, so it's better to use FA700.

Once you've done this, the memory is going to be in a messed up state, so save/quit everything else you've got going and reboot the emulator immediately so you don't lock up again. Using Minibug to exit an app is useful to avoid HFS corruption, but it doesn't clean up whatever caused issues with the running app in the first place.

[bribri]

command-option-escape doesn't do anything in System 7?

I must be getting my memory mixed up about which versions of Mac OS introduced which features. At some point they included a keyboard shortcut that could be used to force quit the frontmost app. Maybe it wasn't Command+Option+Esc? It could also be that it was Mac OS 8 or 9 that introduced that. In any case, according to my memory from 25-30 years ago it didn't even work that well, and would often just deepen the crash and force you to restart the whole system. But for apps that are locked up but not completely crashed it was a useful way of getting things back to normal.

In any case the next time things are crashed I'll give your suggestion a try. Thanks!