Mouse tracking and hanging on restart

[wwinfrey]

Hello - First off, great forum! I'm new to emulating OS9 on PPC, but have been a Mac user since System 6 on my Macintosh SE.

I checked out the screamer fork of qemu from Github, built it and have been using that. I launch qemu to an OS9.2 instance like so:

Code: Select all

~/Source/qemu-screamer/ppc-softmmu/qemu-system-ppc -L ~/Source/qemu-screamer/pc-bios -cpu "g4" -M mac99,via=pmu -m 768 -hda macos92.img -boot c -g 1024x768x32 -drive file=exchange.img,format=raw,media=disk

I struggle with mouse tracking at any resolution, full-screen or not. Is there any fix for this? It seems to lose focus at the edges, often it is quite difficult to click on the apple menu or control strip. It is on the cusp of being unusable.

Also, qemu-screamer seems to hang on restarts. If I don't shut it down, I have to kill it from the shell. On next reboot, OS9 will start up normally, but right at the end of the startup sequence, it will begin to rapidly flash the wristwatch, and has to be manually killed. Next bootup requires a disk repair. So, bottom-line, restarts rather than quits will require 2 forced quits of qemu.

Any suggestions?

[Cat_7]

Hi,

Does that problem occur under load? Playing sound already puts a heavy strain on the emulation.
On which host is this? macOS or Linux?

Our guide says to always shut down Mac OS 9.x guests. Restart will not work for those, only for OSX guests.
https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/pp ... own_issues

Best,
Cat_7

[wwinfrey]

Does that problem occur under load? Playing sound already puts a heavy strain on the emulation.
On which host is this? macOS or Linux?

I'm on Catalina, my apologies. It looks like the issue may have been the distribution (I had started with stock OS 9 ISO installers). Once I moved to an installation based on Mac_OS_9.2.2_Unsupported_G4s.iso, the tracking issue went away.

Our guide says to always shut down Mac OS 9.x guests. Restart will not work for those, only for OSX guests.
https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/pp ... own_issues

A lot of reading the last week, and I missed that. Is there any way to emulate the Mac power button in qemu so a command-control-option-power button combo can be sent to force a shutdown? Sometimes the installers I am using only give me the option of restarting, and I can't seem to click away to the task switcher in the upper-right hand corner.

[Ronald P. Regensburg]

Sometimes the installers I am using only give me the option of restarting, and I can't seem to click away to the task switcher in the upper-right hand corner.

Can't you quit the installer and then shut down normally?

[wwinfrey]

Can't you quit the installer and then shut down normally?

Some installers insist on restart and will not allow quit, won't respond to command-q, etc.

[adespoton]

Can't you quit the installer and then shut down normally?

Some installers insist on restart and will not allow quit, won't respond to command-q, etc.

For these I just click "restart" and then wait until it seems like most things are torn down and it's waiting for the PMU. Then I kill the process and start back up. Almost always does the trick.

[edit] Regarding the jerky mouse thing, I've been following a thread on MacOS9Lives and they figured out where the problem was; it's an issue in the Mac OS ROM IO handler with newer hardware. So the Unsupported G4s image has a patch in the ROM that fixes this, as does the G4 Mini image (which needed even more patching). So the beigeg3 hardware option shouldn't have the mouse issues, and it should be patchable on the G4 either in OpenBIOS or by using the correct Mac OS ROM (just swapping out the ROM in the system folder from the one on the Unsupported G4s image should do the trick).

[wwinfrey]

How long would you estimate the wait is? To this newb, it just seems like it's hung.

[darthnvader]

Once you get the black screen OS 9 is down and it's safe to reset.