Ideas for a Macintosh emulator that is good.

Anything about Mac emulation that does not belong in the above categories.

Moderators: Cat_7, Ronald P. Regensburg

Post Reply
User95
Space Cadet
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2021 10:03 am

Ideas for a Macintosh emulator that is good.

Post by User95 »

An idea for a Macintosh emulator that is actually good.

Disclamer: I no nothing about making emulators (or old Macintoshes) and I don't have the skills to create an emulator. These are just my ideas, if anyone wants to create an emulator from this go ahead. I also don't know where to post this I just searched up 'old Macintosh emulation forums'

I have been looking to emulate an old Macintosh but all the emulators I could find were rubbish (no offence to their creators!). Here are my ideas for a good emulator: (in no order).

The emulator should support as many models of Macintoshes as possible (both 68k and PowerPC).

The emulator should be very configurable and be able to emulate as much hardware as possible. (e.g. expansion cards, different cpu's, ect)

The emulator should be easy to set up with an interface like PCem / 86box manager.

The emulator should be updated regularly (and by that i mean maybe once every couple of months not weeks or years).

The emulator should be efficient, stable and compatible.

The emulator should be free.

The emulator should support old computers as well as new computers, (for example it should run perfectly on windows 10 back to at least xp). It should run perfectly on 32 and 64 bit computers. This means it should cover every computer made in the last 20 years. Not everyone has a brand new top of the line computer (I wish more software defelopers would realise this.)

The emulator should emulate machines authentically (e.g running at original speed, original speed floppy access, ect, and maybe an option to emulate fan, floppy, hard disk, ect sounds (that can be turned off independently)).

Thats all I can think of for now, I will post more if I think of anything.
User avatar
Ronald P. Regensburg
Expert User
Posts: 7821
Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2006 10:24 pm
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Re: Ideas for a Macintosh emulator that is good.

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

User95 wrote: Sun Aug 29, 2021 10:12 am I no nothing about making emulators (or old Macintoshes) and I don't have the skills to create an emulator.
Yes, obviously.
User95
Space Cadet
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2021 10:03 am

Re: Ideas for a Macintosh emulator that is good.

Post by User95 »

I should clarify, I know this would be a difficult, complicated project but I think it could be done. Plus this was just an idea.
User avatar
adespoton
Forum All-Star
Posts: 4226
Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2009 5:11 am
Location: Emaculation.com
Contact:

Re: Ideas for a Macintosh emulator that is good.

Post by adespoton »

Could be done, yes. If you were willing to bankroll the operation -- it would likely need full-time work from at least 3 experts in the field (let's call that $450,000/year) plus a team of dedicated knowledgeable volunteers.

Stuff like this isn't free. It takes a LOT of work and a LOT of time. So you either get projects where a group of passionate people are willing to get it to do what THEY want in their spare time, or you get some tie-in to a commercial interest where a large company has a business case for investing in the project.

Macintosh emulators that had goals similar to your checklist:
MESS (left the front end to third party developers)
PCE/Mac
SoftMac XP (commercial product originally, until the business case dried up)
QEMU (left the front end to third party developers)

Also, from your feedback I'd guess you run Windows as your host OS. What about people using macOS or Linux as their host OS? That has to be considered as well. Whoever's doing the developing needs to be trained in the software environment and have the hardware test environment required to test, build and release the product.

Most other emulator projects favour running the software over emulating the hardware. This makes a lot more sense, especially for older Macs, considering looking at Mac ROMs alone, there's over 100 variations. Each of those was used with multiple hardware configurations to run inside different Macs. A lot of those configurations have little to no documentation for the hardware outside Apple, so the actual hardware needs to be analyzed statically or dynamically to try and figure out what it's doing, before it can be duplicated in software.

With the layered approach, your best bet is something like what QEMU has done -- emulate the core processors, and then pick sets of reference hardware that cover the largest set of software that was produced. So QEMU can run the Quadra 800, the Beige G3, and a G4 with PMMU. This work has taken an army of volunteers over 15 years to implement to the point where it's at now, and due to being a dependency of a number of commercial software products, has dedicated paid employees from top technology companies working on it as well. This allows third party groups like UTM to create a visual interface and management system to do most of what VirtualBox does, but for all the architectures QEMU supports in both virtualization and emulation.

Compared to that, you have Mini vMac, which is a solo project (one developer in his spare time) that requires a specific build of the software for each set of hardware you want to emulate -- and it stops with the Mac II, because of how complicated Mac emulation gets after that point.

Personally, I hope that someday, the MESS team figures out how to emulate the Macintosh Portable and the original Powerbook series. There's still some undocumented hardware in there that's being a real pain to figure out.
Post Reply