My review of Basilisk II, an open source
Mac emulator for PCs (and other platforms) was posted on May 1st. I
got a lot of feedback and have learned a lot from the people who
responded to it.
Some things to note:
Christian Bauer, keeper of the Basilisk II flame, points out
"from your article one could get the impression that B2 works with
Mac Plus ROMs, but it
doesn't (it requires ROMs from a 32-bit clean '030/'040 Mac or from
a Mac Classic)." Fans of
the Mac Plus shouldn't despair, however (more on that in a
bit).
And Ian Raymond had a different clarification. He points out
that Lauri Petersen, who ported Basilisk II to the Windows platform
"is a him, not a her." You can read
his interview with Lauri. Among other things, it talks
about reasons why there are no PowerPC emulators currently
available.
Graeme Bennett, of
MacBuyersGuide/
PCBuyersGuide notes that readers may be interested in his
Basilisk II software compatibility list. Note,
however, that this is unofficial: it lists the applications that
Graeme has tried out, so if the application you're interested in
isn't listed, it's worth a try in any case; several applications
that I'm running successfully under emulation aren't on that
list.
Reader William Dawson found the performance of my emulated Mac
impressive but wondered what sort of PC I was running it on. The
results I reported were achieved on a Compaq notebook with a
Pentium III/750 processor and a relatively unimpressive Trident
video card.
Several people were interested in emulating a Mac on a
Mac. Why, you may wonder? For the people writing, it's to be
able to run software that won't work on more modern hardware and
operating systems.
Nigel
Pearson has one solution; he ported Basilisk II to run under
OS X.
That won't necessarily help the reader only known as "M." (Named
after James Bond's superior, perhaps?) M wrote, "What I'd really
like and could really use, because I have old software I wish to
run, is that Connectix would 'get with the program' and produce
Virtual Mac for the Mac. I really need something like Virtual Mac
with Mac OS 6.0.8."
It may be possible to install Mac OS 6.0.8 on Basilisk, but I
don't know if M is running OS X, letting him use Nigel
Pearson's port. Instead, he may want to check out vMac, a project to
emulate a Mac Plus. As with Basilisk II, vMac requires a Mac ROM
(either physically in a Gemulator ROM board or as a ROM image file)
- in this case, the ROMs from a 1987-era Mac Plus.
While originally designed to run on PCs (versions for Windows,
DOS, Unix/Linux, NeXT, OS/2), Richard
Bannister has gotten vMac to work on a Mac! A carbonized
application, it will run under OS X or under earlier Mac OS
versions with CarbonLib 1.2 or later.
Peter Johnson has taken it perhaps the final step. As
illustrated, he has vMac up and running inside Virtual PC 4.0 on
his FireWire PowerBook running OS 9.2.2. An emulator running within
an emulator. His comment: "Largely useless, but amusing."
