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The Fourth Emulation Option
Not that long after getting an old Macintosh SE/30 working I ran the recently programmed full-screen video player “MacFlim” on it, and with that I was left with a bit of a “so now what do I do with this computer?” feeling. Table space is a limited resource for me to be managed with some care, and even if I’ve had worn-out parts on the main circuit board replaced it’s a question how many hours are left in the rest of the hardware.
In contemplating how the early wallpaper extension I’d made use of in emulation and on other hardware hadn’t worked quite right on this compact Mac, though, I did happen on another extension of comparable vintage if a bit less versatile. To test it out I turned to a fourth Macintosh emulator I’d got working just a little while ago. Many, many systems are built into the program MAME, but a certain austerity to its interface limits the number of systems I’ve tried out with it. On hearing its Macintosh emulation had been improving, though, I’d tried out some colour Macs a little newer than the SE/30, got multiple screens working on one virtual model, and even worked out how to pass files between its emulation and the more relaxed yet not quite as rigorous emulators Mini vMac and Basilisk II. Getting a first file set up for the new wallpaper extension, though, left me struck by imprecisions in the scaling and then discovering I’d kept making my black-and-white images a bit too tall for the size of a compact Mac’s screen; as I said, my previous wallpaper extension was more versatile.
Along the way it did happen that even though I’m not able to encode my own videos for “MacFlim” yet, I did sort out there is a way to boil video down to the postage stamps of motion of the early versions of QuickTime. It took using the modern command-line extension ffmpeg and then, after discovering I was getting about two frames of motion out of a five-second clip in MAME’s Macintosh emulation, turning to the emulator SheepShaver and an old license code I’d bought for QuickTime Pro to encode the video again. Although not grueling, doing it once was somehow enough to nudge my thoughts away from trying it again with longer clips.
In contemplating how the early wallpaper extension I’d made use of in emulation and on other hardware hadn’t worked quite right on this compact Mac, though, I did happen on another extension of comparable vintage if a bit less versatile. To test it out I turned to a fourth Macintosh emulator I’d got working just a little while ago. Many, many systems are built into the program MAME, but a certain austerity to its interface limits the number of systems I’ve tried out with it. On hearing its Macintosh emulation had been improving, though, I’d tried out some colour Macs a little newer than the SE/30, got multiple screens working on one virtual model, and even worked out how to pass files between its emulation and the more relaxed yet not quite as rigorous emulators Mini vMac and Basilisk II. Getting a first file set up for the new wallpaper extension, though, left me struck by imprecisions in the scaling and then discovering I’d kept making my black-and-white images a bit too tall for the size of a compact Mac’s screen; as I said, my previous wallpaper extension was more versatile.
Along the way it did happen that even though I’m not able to encode my own videos for “MacFlim” yet, I did sort out there is a way to boil video down to the postage stamps of motion of the early versions of QuickTime. It took using the modern command-line extension ffmpeg and then, after discovering I was getting about two frames of motion out of a five-second clip in MAME’s Macintosh emulation, turning to the emulator SheepShaver and an old license code I’d bought for QuickTime Pro to encode the video again. Although not grueling, doing it once was somehow enough to nudge my thoughts away from trying it again with longer clips.