Basilisk II & Classic Emulation

Mini vMac seems a lot less flaky and picky then BasiliskII. It won't run with a "Classic" ROM, but there's very little you can do with a Classic you can't do with a Mac Plus, which it does emulate much better.

And, no, I've never gotten BasiliskII to work with a Classic ROM either. Admittedly I was never that motivated. You could always just configure BasiliskII to run in black-and-white@512x384 and pretend it's a really fast 32bit-clean SE/30.

--Peace

Both Mini vMac and SheepShaver are far superior emulators, though Basilisk II does fill the hole between 7.5 and 8.5 which some vintage software requires (along with a 68030/40 processor). However, I am specifically interested in running the Classic emulation because I want to be able to access the embedded system in the ROM among other things. That is one thing you can't do with a MacPlus. Just wanted to know if it was possible since I have never been able to get it to work and the documentation indicates it should be possible, but is not clear on the exact specifics.

My impression is that Basilisk and Sheepshaver are very much on a par. Minivmac is better because it actually emulates the machine (so MacsBug etc runs), but the other two patch the ROM to avoid emulating various aspects of the hardware. Basilisk in particular seems to have gone downhill in its last few releases, but it still does a very nice job. I want to see minivmac develop to handle a Mac II - then hopefully a IIx or better. Then it'll have 68030, 68881/2, colour, and support for up to System 7.5 and Basilisk will be much less necessary as a gap filler.

I believe Basilisk used to handle Classic emulation, but the support for it has been broken. Try a google search - there was a reference on one of the Basilisk forums that mentioned what version could manage it. It is probably still available somewhere.

Ken

It seems to be Basilisk ii 0.6 that supports the Classic. Reading through some interweb sites, I found mention of the BeOS and Linux versions, with the 00.6 version number, that supported the Classic. No mention of later versions or other platforms.

I've had pretty good reliability with Basilisk II over the years, using the Windows version. What's kept me using it over MiniVMac was Basilisk's CD-ROM and Network capabilities.

Yes, I know what version of Basilisk II is supposed to run with Classic ROM, it is clearly stated on the developer's page and in download version notes. My point is I have never been able to get it to run, so was hoping someone was actually running it so I could compare notes. Thanks. I know Paul is working on Mini vMac for Mac II emulation, but 68030 is a long way off ... there are other things that need to happen with Mini vMac too to make it a complete resource for managing old Macs on the Intel platform. But for freeware, it's pretty nice. I myself will be putting up some tutorials for working with Mini vMac in the near future as I am a huge supporter of it.

I run Basilisk, try to set the colors to 8 bit, I got Quadra650 ROM and 68030 emulation, the screen size is 512x384, on iBook G4 10.4 ... but before delete old preferences, they are hidden in users directory (.basiliskIIpref_something like that)anyway, watch the videos of old mac runing apps on my youtube.com/slomacuser

Has anyone tried Softmac for Windows or Fusion PC for DOS?

http://emulators.com/softmac.htm

Fusion's only advantage is if you have a preference to run an emulator from DOS.

Softmac's still in development, but I didn't see anything in earlier versions to recommend it over vMac or Basilisk.

And I've got a bit of a grudge against Darek Mihocka since he went on a holier-than-though slam against another emulator author because he seemed to consider him competition. The other author's product, an Atari 8-bit emulator for the Mac, got my shareware payment.

Try softmac. www.emulators.com. I use that to emulate my classic II. The emulator supports all ROM's below PowerPC. But sadly softmac doesn't run under Mac OS X.