Something of a Snow Job
Aug. 2nd, 2025 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter setting up a series of TRS-80 emulators on my “Linux portable” and compiling an Apple II emulator there as well, my thoughts turned to Mini vMac. I’ve used that particular program for some years; perhaps the thought of trying out one more way to get it running was more enticing than a different thought that “if I wind up moving to Linux, this will maintain one connection to at least the Macintosh in days of yore...”
As vMac evolved to the point of offering more models than the Macintosh Plus, it reached a perhaps peculiar state where, to emulate those different models or even different “screen depths” on the Macintosh II, you needed separate programs. For some time I was actually generating those custom-configured programs using vMac itself. I would load a disk image into it, launch a program, enter settings, and have a file exported to the larger system to be compiled there. Taking one comment about what the OS X version was targeted for to a literal extreme, I did do my compiling on my PowerBook G4, even at that point no longer my “current portable.”
That way of doing things did pass, though. The person developing the emulator started offering a service where you could enter your settings on a web page and download programs. It was a subscription to start with, which I accepted. After a while it did become free, but this was tied up with the developer no longer being online and other people wondering about him and how long the service would still be available.
At a certain point someone “forked” the code and offered a few instructions for compiling it on different systems. My experience with compiling software remains a matter of issuing incantations and hoping, but while I had to install a prerequisite component after running into errors things worked in the end. What I came to notice was how vMac still expected the “command” key on my portable to be used for menu shortcuts, but Linux used that key to pop open a Windows-esque program launcher. I puzzled over numerous remapping options in system settings, then tried a compilation setting itself to have vMac treat the “control” key as “command” and use the right-hand command key, which had more or less worked before but which I’m not as likely to reach for, to call up vMac’s simple emulator control menu.
At that point I began trying to write a draft of a post describing all of this in vMac itself (using MacWrite), but as I noticed a cryptic but non-fatal error message starting up every time I rebooted Linux I was also thinking a bit about announcements of a new Macintosh emulator called Snow (after the “Snow White design language.”) It seemed just a bit more finicky to set up than vMac, but it had been in serious development more recently. After sorting out how to convert one hard disk image I use in vMac for Snow, it just so happened I got the emulator running on my latest portable, one not running Linux. While writing the draft using MacWrite in Snow, I got to thinking it just might split an interesting difference between the features and limitations of vMac and MAME alike. At the same time, I did get to thinking that while vMac casually runs faster than an actual antique Macintosh, Snow makes it a bit more obvious those old computers did take a little time to do particular things, including redrawing their screens...
It also so happened that I’d thought about exporting the draft using vMac. What I found, though, was that Snow saves even its floppy disk images in a format vMac can’t recognize. I wound up having to open Snow in the background and transcribe everything into BBEdit, which is somewhere in between “still a few bugs in the system” and “there’s always room for improvement.”
As vMac evolved to the point of offering more models than the Macintosh Plus, it reached a perhaps peculiar state where, to emulate those different models or even different “screen depths” on the Macintosh II, you needed separate programs. For some time I was actually generating those custom-configured programs using vMac itself. I would load a disk image into it, launch a program, enter settings, and have a file exported to the larger system to be compiled there. Taking one comment about what the OS X version was targeted for to a literal extreme, I did do my compiling on my PowerBook G4, even at that point no longer my “current portable.”
That way of doing things did pass, though. The person developing the emulator started offering a service where you could enter your settings on a web page and download programs. It was a subscription to start with, which I accepted. After a while it did become free, but this was tied up with the developer no longer being online and other people wondering about him and how long the service would still be available.
At a certain point someone “forked” the code and offered a few instructions for compiling it on different systems. My experience with compiling software remains a matter of issuing incantations and hoping, but while I had to install a prerequisite component after running into errors things worked in the end. What I came to notice was how vMac still expected the “command” key on my portable to be used for menu shortcuts, but Linux used that key to pop open a Windows-esque program launcher. I puzzled over numerous remapping options in system settings, then tried a compilation setting itself to have vMac treat the “control” key as “command” and use the right-hand command key, which had more or less worked before but which I’m not as likely to reach for, to call up vMac’s simple emulator control menu.
At that point I began trying to write a draft of a post describing all of this in vMac itself (using MacWrite), but as I noticed a cryptic but non-fatal error message starting up every time I rebooted Linux I was also thinking a bit about announcements of a new Macintosh emulator called Snow (after the “Snow White design language.”) It seemed just a bit more finicky to set up than vMac, but it had been in serious development more recently. After sorting out how to convert one hard disk image I use in vMac for Snow, it just so happened I got the emulator running on my latest portable, one not running Linux. While writing the draft using MacWrite in Snow, I got to thinking it just might split an interesting difference between the features and limitations of vMac and MAME alike. At the same time, I did get to thinking that while vMac casually runs faster than an actual antique Macintosh, Snow makes it a bit more obvious those old computers did take a little time to do particular things, including redrawing their screens...
It also so happened that I’d thought about exporting the draft using vMac. What I found, though, was that Snow saves even its floppy disk images in a format vMac can’t recognize. I wound up having to open Snow in the background and transcribe everything into BBEdit, which is somewhere in between “still a few bugs in the system” and “there’s always room for improvement.”