Straight Back to Mariani
Feb. 1st, 2025 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn the final stages of preparing a post about some new-to-me Apple II emulators, I went back to the GitHub page for the “Mariani” emulator to retrieve its URL. While there, I happened to notice the number of “branches” to the code, and was curious enough to take a look at them. Spotting something called “delete-key-mapping” was sufficient to get me thinking I might keep delving into Mariani after my post was up.
I had mentioned how I’d tried to prepare a draft for that post about emulators in an emulator itself only to find the “delete” key didn’t erase characters when running AppleWorks in Mariani. That did make typing just a little awkward. The thought of reporting that problem through signing up for a GitHub account at last, regardless of my all but nonexistent skills to contribute computer code myself, had occurred to me. A sign the problem had been noticed, even if in a different context than mine, was encouraging.
The change in the branch was a matter of a few extra lines of code added to one file among many. While the branch didn’t appear to include the “Xcode project” mentioned in the build instructions, I thought I could add the changes to the main code. Once I had everything downloaded, I managed to alter the file with BBEdit and launched Xcode, which I don’t use very often despite having bought a “learn to program the Macintosh” ebook a little while ago. It did take a bit of poking through the menus to get the build target selected the way I was supposed to, and then I hit a fatal error while building. However, I could guess this was a matter of not finding a component missed in the instructions, and that component even turned out to be available via “Homebrew.” The application now built, and once I had AppleWorks loaded in emulation the Delete key worked the way it did in Virtual ][.
As ever, of course, “the pointlessness was the point.” Beyond typing up a draft in Mariani itself (which required a different program to extract from emulation) I don’t know how much more “1980s pre-GUI word processing” I really want to indulge in. I was also thinking of how AppleWorks doesn’t work very well in OpenEmulator for a different reason, but I do still use that program to display graphics and play games. On the other hand, after thinking Mariani’s “green screen” looked a bit dim compared to Virtual ][, I was at least able to find the option to set a custom monochrome colour and pick a brighter green.
I had mentioned how I’d tried to prepare a draft for that post about emulators in an emulator itself only to find the “delete” key didn’t erase characters when running AppleWorks in Mariani. That did make typing just a little awkward. The thought of reporting that problem through signing up for a GitHub account at last, regardless of my all but nonexistent skills to contribute computer code myself, had occurred to me. A sign the problem had been noticed, even if in a different context than mine, was encouraging.
The change in the branch was a matter of a few extra lines of code added to one file among many. While the branch didn’t appear to include the “Xcode project” mentioned in the build instructions, I thought I could add the changes to the main code. Once I had everything downloaded, I managed to alter the file with BBEdit and launched Xcode, which I don’t use very often despite having bought a “learn to program the Macintosh” ebook a little while ago. It did take a bit of poking through the menus to get the build target selected the way I was supposed to, and then I hit a fatal error while building. However, I could guess this was a matter of not finding a component missed in the instructions, and that component even turned out to be available via “Homebrew.” The application now built, and once I had AppleWorks loaded in emulation the Delete key worked the way it did in Virtual ][.
As ever, of course, “the pointlessness was the point.” Beyond typing up a draft in Mariani itself (which required a different program to extract from emulation) I don’t know how much more “1980s pre-GUI word processing” I really want to indulge in. I was also thinking of how AppleWorks doesn’t work very well in OpenEmulator for a different reason, but I do still use that program to display graphics and play games. On the other hand, after thinking Mariani’s “green screen” looked a bit dim compared to Virtual ][, I was at least able to find the option to set a custom monochrome colour and pick a brighter green.