Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!phigate!philica!lex
From: lex@philica.ica.philips.nl (Lex van Sonderen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Mac emulator
Message-ID: <689@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 15 Oct 90 16:09:21 GMT
References: <9010141624.AA06607@mcs-server.gac.edu>
Reply-To: lex@leest.ica.philips.nl (Lex van Sonderen)
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 57


1) History
The Mac emulators started off with Magic Sac and Aladdin, both
running on the Atari ST. Both systems used a copy of the 64K roms
(from the original Macintosh and the Fat Mac) read into RAM, and
a lot of patches and fixes. Magic Sac was known for it's crashes,
but Aladdin was fairly stable. However, you only had an 'old' Mac.

After that, Spectre came for the Atari and AMax for the Amiga, they
both worked with original 128K MacPlus/Mac 512KE roms. These roms
are fairly widely available because of Apple rom upgrade sets.
They are more reliable than Aladin. They are not available as sofware-
only versions (maybe because the rom code is trickier).

2) Problems
As far as I know there is no color support on either of these
emulators, so you at best have a black-and-white MacPlus.

There are no emulators for newer Macs (SE, SE/30, II and beyond).
The roms are harder to get, and probably a lot trickier to copy-and-patch.
It is going to take a smart guy to make a colour/gray mac emulator.

Another disadvantage is that the emulators take over the machine 
completely, there is no Mac Window or fast-switch option, and you
have to do a reboot to get back to native mode.

A 'Mac Window' approach would make making an emulation considerably 
more difficult.

Making a good Mac emulator inevitably will get you into deep 
trouble with the Apple Thought Police.

3) Hope
The more different Macintoshes come out, the easier it becomes to make
an emulator (it is thanks to the excellence of the Mac software that
these emulators work). Macintosh software cannot make any assumption
on what kind of machine it is running, so as soon as the roms are 
'ported' to the NeXT, all software will be running.
A lot of Mac software also runs under AUX (Apple Unix).

4) Other Hope
Abacus Research and Development (ARDI) is developing a package called
'Executor' which is a program that allows you to run Macintosh programs
on Sun-3. I do not know it's current status, I do know they took the
effort to re-engineer the Mac toolbox, so it does not need roms, and they
possibly cannot be sued by Apple.
I have never seen it, so I know barely what I am talking about :-).
This could be ported to the NeXT if we convince them.

5) Conclusion
Do not hold your breath for a nice Mac emulator on the NeXT. It is easier,
more reliable and possible the same price to buy a Plus and a NeXT.
I think I'll buy a Mac Portable or a sexy Outbound (Mac Compatible 
Portable) which will do until that portable NeXT comes.

Lex van Sonderen
lex@ica.philips.nl