Fresh Emulation Options
Jan. 30th, 2025 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOne recent upgrade to the long-established emulator Virtual ][ promised improvements to its rendering of Apple II graphics. That got my attention. While Virtual ][ includes many useful features and I bought a license for it some time ago (long enough ago that I have to admit I’ve used the license code to get the program running on more than one computer), in an age where some emulators make efforts to simulate the blurred-together look of cathode-ray tube monitors it had got to looking a bit old-fashioned. However, those modest improvements didn’t seem enough to make a post about.
A while after that, though, I was looking through the resources of a “vintage Macintosh” site (which does require registering an account) that include access to some computer-focused Usenet newsgroups still getting occasional posts. An Apple II newgroup offered a link to a review of emulators. Poking through the review (and its praise of Virtual ][), I noticed another long-established emulator, WinApple, was now said to have a macOS port. While I’d got WinApple running via Wine and CrossOver for the sake of seeing what things were like “over there,” this new option did intrigue me. It might have helped, too, that I “got the reference” in its name “Mariani”; from old magazines and manuals I knew the main Apple Computer building had been on Mariani Avenue in Cupertino for most of the 1980s. As for Apple’s locations before that, I could suppose “Mariani” sounded a bit more interesting by itself than “Bandley” or “Stevens Creek.”
WinApple, and Mariani by extension, offers its own share of graphics modes blurring colours together (or just paring back to a shaper monochrome monitor display). To start with, I tried out an old standby, Lode Runner. Remembering what I had to do with other emulators, I tapped Caps Lock to start with, but found myself having to hold down Shift for the controls to register. Shrugging that off, I moved on to a curious netherworld in between “old games are fun, aren’t they?” and “programming an 8-bit computer is impressive!” My intention was to write a draft of this very post using Mariani and AppleWorks, which I’ve developed some familiarity with. Again, things seemed peculiar in having to engage Caps Lock to type lowercase letters, and then I found the Delete key acted more like “left arrow,” moving the insertion point back but not erasing anything. That would have been useful in Applesoft BASIC or other programs introduced back when the Apple II didn’t have a dedicated backspace key, but I wound up heading back to Virtual ][ where the Delete key does work the way I expect it to (although there just happens to be an option to turn it into “left arrow” when you’re emulating those earlier models).
Along with all of that I had happened to notice one more new-to-me Apple II emulator designed for Linux. That “MII” offered a few interesting features (a visual display of just where on the spinning floppy disks the computer was reading from and a custom-designed interface wrapped around the Apple II emulation that avoided the “Windows-esque” blandness I’m stuck associating with Linux for something more like a fusion of System 7 and Mac OS 8) was enough to get me thinking about my own efforts to get Linux itself running. I wound up setting up the older iMac an attempt to set up as “dual-booting” had turned into a Linux-only setup. In the process, though, I was stuck thinking of how my best efforts at “building from source” remain typing the recommended commands and hoping. I’ve managed to compile a command-line program or two on Linux while still trying to deal with the error messages that had tripped me up on macOS, but attempts to compile other emulators for Linux haven’t worked out too well. MII, though, did compile and run. I poked away at it a bit, took in its unique features, and wondered how much that really amounted to as I came to the end of my first draft still using Virtual ][.
A few thoughts had come to me in any case how, for all that I might have delved into Apple II emulation fairly early on because of some quite decent emulators available for the modern Macintosh, I am conscious of the tangled fates of the Apple II and Macintosh in the latter half of the 1980s and how, after they’d diverged in tragic fashion for the older computer, I’m sure some people decided hands-on, hacker-friendly access wound up only available through the PC architecture and Linux itself. I did keep using MII long enough to notice it had the same issue with the Delete key in AppleWorks as Mariani. Because I had a larger keyboard plugged into that computer, I tapped the “forward delete” key to discover it worked as the backspace. That got me thinking of “function-Delete” on my smaller keyboard, but found it worked in WinApple via CrossOver but not in Mariani. (WinApple’s help section explained just how to use the Caps Lock with it, but I then discovered Mariani had its own quite decent help section as well.) In any case I’d intended to get my draft out into the wider world using the “print to PDF” feature of Virtual ][. When there were some problems with oddly wrapped lines using an “Apple IIe connected to an Epson FX-80,” though, I resorted to an “Apple IIc connected to an ImageWriter.”
A while after that, though, I was looking through the resources of a “vintage Macintosh” site (which does require registering an account) that include access to some computer-focused Usenet newsgroups still getting occasional posts. An Apple II newgroup offered a link to a review of emulators. Poking through the review (and its praise of Virtual ][), I noticed another long-established emulator, WinApple, was now said to have a macOS port. While I’d got WinApple running via Wine and CrossOver for the sake of seeing what things were like “over there,” this new option did intrigue me. It might have helped, too, that I “got the reference” in its name “Mariani”; from old magazines and manuals I knew the main Apple Computer building had been on Mariani Avenue in Cupertino for most of the 1980s. As for Apple’s locations before that, I could suppose “Mariani” sounded a bit more interesting by itself than “Bandley” or “Stevens Creek.”
WinApple, and Mariani by extension, offers its own share of graphics modes blurring colours together (or just paring back to a shaper monochrome monitor display). To start with, I tried out an old standby, Lode Runner. Remembering what I had to do with other emulators, I tapped Caps Lock to start with, but found myself having to hold down Shift for the controls to register. Shrugging that off, I moved on to a curious netherworld in between “old games are fun, aren’t they?” and “programming an 8-bit computer is impressive!” My intention was to write a draft of this very post using Mariani and AppleWorks, which I’ve developed some familiarity with. Again, things seemed peculiar in having to engage Caps Lock to type lowercase letters, and then I found the Delete key acted more like “left arrow,” moving the insertion point back but not erasing anything. That would have been useful in Applesoft BASIC or other programs introduced back when the Apple II didn’t have a dedicated backspace key, but I wound up heading back to Virtual ][ where the Delete key does work the way I expect it to (although there just happens to be an option to turn it into “left arrow” when you’re emulating those earlier models).
Along with all of that I had happened to notice one more new-to-me Apple II emulator designed for Linux. That “MII” offered a few interesting features (a visual display of just where on the spinning floppy disks the computer was reading from and a custom-designed interface wrapped around the Apple II emulation that avoided the “Windows-esque” blandness I’m stuck associating with Linux for something more like a fusion of System 7 and Mac OS 8) was enough to get me thinking about my own efforts to get Linux itself running. I wound up setting up the older iMac an attempt to set up as “dual-booting” had turned into a Linux-only setup. In the process, though, I was stuck thinking of how my best efforts at “building from source” remain typing the recommended commands and hoping. I’ve managed to compile a command-line program or two on Linux while still trying to deal with the error messages that had tripped me up on macOS, but attempts to compile other emulators for Linux haven’t worked out too well. MII, though, did compile and run. I poked away at it a bit, took in its unique features, and wondered how much that really amounted to as I came to the end of my first draft still using Virtual ][.
A few thoughts had come to me in any case how, for all that I might have delved into Apple II emulation fairly early on because of some quite decent emulators available for the modern Macintosh, I am conscious of the tangled fates of the Apple II and Macintosh in the latter half of the 1980s and how, after they’d diverged in tragic fashion for the older computer, I’m sure some people decided hands-on, hacker-friendly access wound up only available through the PC architecture and Linux itself. I did keep using MII long enough to notice it had the same issue with the Delete key in AppleWorks as Mariani. Because I had a larger keyboard plugged into that computer, I tapped the “forward delete” key to discover it worked as the backspace. That got me thinking of “function-Delete” on my smaller keyboard, but found it worked in WinApple via CrossOver but not in Mariani. (WinApple’s help section explained just how to use the Caps Lock with it, but I then discovered Mariani had its own quite decent help section as well.) In any case I’d intended to get my draft out into the wider world using the “print to PDF” feature of Virtual ][. When there were some problems with oddly wrapped lines using an “Apple IIe connected to an Epson FX-80,” though, I resorted to an “Apple IIc connected to an ImageWriter.”
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Date: 2025-02-02 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-02 02:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-13 02:09 pm (UTC)And I also have AtGames' Atari Flashback Classics collections for the XBox, which have a few parameters you can tweak, but the results are not that convincing.