System 6 in Technicolour: The Fast Track to Colour System 6

[IPalindromeI]

This is a tutorial with everything you want to get System 6 running!

1. Create an image

We'll use HFV Explorer (download it) to create an image:



2. Start Mini vMac II and get rolling

Use this build of MVMii; it comes with all the dressings.

3. Open up the disks

In Mini vMac, hit File->Open and select System Startup, and then once it boots, do it again for System Additions.



4. Install the system and the goodies

Double-click System Startup and open Installer. Change the drive to the target, and hit Customize. In particular, select 32-bit Colour QuickDraw; and then use shift-click to highlight Macintosh II System. (I select Plus and IIx; Plus can be still be used in regular Mini vMac and IIx can be substituted in Mini vMac custom builds.)





5. Reboot into your installed OS

Hey, it's black and white! We can fix this by opening the control panel (Apple->Control Panel) and select Monitors. Your settings should look like mine:



Congrats, you have System 6 in more than 2 colours!

[ClockWise]

Thanks for sharing this guide!

Do you think that the December 6 snapshot ("support color for Mac II emulation") might be an improvement?

[yksoft1]

Thanks for sharing this guide!

Do you think that the December 6 snapshot ("support color for Mac II emulation") might be an improvement?

I don't think so.
What the Mini vMac II still lacking is the Sound Manager-related features (PMMU might be another one, however even Sheepshaver don't have that implemented. And there are other requirements such as emulation of SCSI controller and SCSI disk drives for OSes that require PMMU).

[elodman]

Greets

would this OS colour change affect originally Black and White game colours?
(as this is an eye killer combo)

E.g. I tried a BW game first on Mini vMac, then on a colour Basilisk II emu, but nothing changed in game colours. Just replacing the 2 colours with more eye friendly ones would be great.

(couldn't search much, as being on mobile net )
thanx.

[MacintoshGuy]

Download link does not work atm.

[adespoton]

You don't really need it to; just create a custom build from here: http://www.gryphel.com/c/var/index.html that includes the features you want. You can also search for a specific build on http://www.gryphel.com/c/var/latest/index.html#latest which contains builds requested by others. The one that looks similar to what's being discussed here is http://www.gryphel.com/d/var/latest/c/m ... 64.bin.zip which emulates a Mac II with 2 floppy drives and audio on 64-bit Windows.

[madcrow]

Now that Mac II support is in the "stable" branch and seems to be working well, I wonder why a "normal" build of Mac II MiniVmac hasn't been posted yet. When looking at the list of rescent custom build requests, the VAST majority seem to have been for relatively vanilla Mac II builds. Having a Mac II default build would probably be a lot less work.

[adespoton]

Having sent in a number of those Mac II requests, I have to say that it's due to there not being a real "normal" Mac II build.

I've been testing Mac II builds and have found that I can build a variant that supports everything back to System Software 0.1 (System 2.0, Finder 1.1g) -- and I have a feeling you can even do System 0.95 if you build with memory set to 128k.

The changes needed for various systems seem to be limited to memory and screen depth -- if you set those to values that the guest OS supports, it will boot and run your software.

But it might be nice to have a default Mac II 640x480 with 8 drives, 8 bit colour, 8 MB RAM. It might also be nice to have a default build at 1024x768 with 16 bit colour.

But then, I build all mine at 1280x720 so I can screen capture right to youtube video with no awful compression artifacts I'm not really interested in what would likely be a default.

I've also been considering creating an entire virtual LAN of Mini vMacs with localtalk enabled -- just run 15 or so variants on my host and have them all talking to each other happily. If I give each one its own screen, I could even support a remote VNC session for each screen, so people could remote in tot a low latency Mac network.