Random Flakes of Snow
Oct. 25th, 2025 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerPoking away at the Snow emulator to explore a few corners of the antique Macintosh experience has stayed interesting enough to get me wondering about making another post on the subject. The whole matter of “old computers,” though, can leave me thinking “it interests me, but anyone likely to see this here would, at best, just sort of shrug and think ‘too much detail.’” The best I can do is keep this introduction short and put everything else a click away.
The experiences of a few other people have been linked to on Snow’s own web site. When someone reported their simple image-recognition program would run in the emulator where it wouldn’t in many others, that got my attention even if some of their rhetoric about “getting hardware this limited to do even this” had me thinking the Motorola 68000 was supposed to have been a decent processor in its day. (Of course, the program had been fit into the infamous “128K” of the original Macintosh itself.) Once I’d tried it out, though, I did get to wondering about the actual Macintosh Plus down in my basement. Warnings it was tricky to load off a “Floppy Emu” deterred me from carting the hardware upstairs and setting it up for the first time in some time, but in the end I went ahead and put everything together. After a bit of trouble getting the program to recognise every number from zero to nine the way I could draw them with the mouse, I supposed I’d given it a decent workout. The problem with wanting to do something more with the hardware before I put it away again was that setting up my Floppy Emu’s memory card to load the program had managed to knock out the larger hard disk image on it.
One recent feature added to Snow did address a certain problem I’d had with it early on. The emulator could now access a “shared directory” on the computer running it, using not a program specific to it but one meant for a particular “hard drive replacement gadget” (not the one I managed to get running in my SE/30). One thing I did realise about that, though, was that I could now get files into Snow under Linux; when I’d got Mini vMac running there, the program specific to it I used most of the time wouldn’t work. A thought or two about “carrying a little bit of the past into a hypothetical future” did come back to me.
After sorting out how to produce “simulated ImageWriter” printouts using Snow, I got to thinking about the old printout from that dot-matrix printer I do have. Before my family made the lateral move from a Tandy Color Computer 3 to an LC II, I’d used some “compact Macs” in a computer lab just off my high school library to start a few stories. The story I’d printed out wasn’t a very good one, but the printout was one I didn’t have the file for any more. Somehow amused at the thought of “reconstructing the file,” I got MacWrite II, the word processor I’d been using then, running in Snow and started typing.
The first thing I was looking for was making sure the font was right to match the length of the lines. When that happened, though, the lines didn’t quite fit in the small window of a “compact Mac” in emulation. I got to wondering whether I’d have noticed the screen jumping back and forth back then. Then, in opening some old files I did have, I saw their lines did fit in the window. After I couldn’t find an obvious explanation for this in the preferences section and built-in help, I wondered if I’d been using a different version of the word processor back then than the one I’d got running now.
As I pondered this and tried to come up with experiments, I did get to the point of trying to make a “simulated LaserWriter” printout, which at this moment is a bit less work than collecting ImageWriter commands. What I discovered then was that the lines were shorter, shorter to the point of everything fitting on the screen again. All of a sudden I remembered the ImageWriter’s horizontal dot density wasn’t an exact multiple of Macintosh screen resolution, and supposed MacWrite II knew this and made an effort to indicate it where the original MacWrite hadn’t. (So far as “not being able to anticipate how your economy system’s documents would turn out printed in a more expensive if higher quality” went, though, I was able to remember how the ImageWriter could print in an adjusted role. I also remembered an old Macworld article explaining there were slight disadvantages to that.)
The experiences of a few other people have been linked to on Snow’s own web site. When someone reported their simple image-recognition program would run in the emulator where it wouldn’t in many others, that got my attention even if some of their rhetoric about “getting hardware this limited to do even this” had me thinking the Motorola 68000 was supposed to have been a decent processor in its day. (Of course, the program had been fit into the infamous “128K” of the original Macintosh itself.) Once I’d tried it out, though, I did get to wondering about the actual Macintosh Plus down in my basement. Warnings it was tricky to load off a “Floppy Emu” deterred me from carting the hardware upstairs and setting it up for the first time in some time, but in the end I went ahead and put everything together. After a bit of trouble getting the program to recognise every number from zero to nine the way I could draw them with the mouse, I supposed I’d given it a decent workout. The problem with wanting to do something more with the hardware before I put it away again was that setting up my Floppy Emu’s memory card to load the program had managed to knock out the larger hard disk image on it.
One recent feature added to Snow did address a certain problem I’d had with it early on. The emulator could now access a “shared directory” on the computer running it, using not a program specific to it but one meant for a particular “hard drive replacement gadget” (not the one I managed to get running in my SE/30). One thing I did realise about that, though, was that I could now get files into Snow under Linux; when I’d got Mini vMac running there, the program specific to it I used most of the time wouldn’t work. A thought or two about “carrying a little bit of the past into a hypothetical future” did come back to me.
After sorting out how to produce “simulated ImageWriter” printouts using Snow, I got to thinking about the old printout from that dot-matrix printer I do have. Before my family made the lateral move from a Tandy Color Computer 3 to an LC II, I’d used some “compact Macs” in a computer lab just off my high school library to start a few stories. The story I’d printed out wasn’t a very good one, but the printout was one I didn’t have the file for any more. Somehow amused at the thought of “reconstructing the file,” I got MacWrite II, the word processor I’d been using then, running in Snow and started typing.
The first thing I was looking for was making sure the font was right to match the length of the lines. When that happened, though, the lines didn’t quite fit in the small window of a “compact Mac” in emulation. I got to wondering whether I’d have noticed the screen jumping back and forth back then. Then, in opening some old files I did have, I saw their lines did fit in the window. After I couldn’t find an obvious explanation for this in the preferences section and built-in help, I wondered if I’d been using a different version of the word processor back then than the one I’d got running now.
As I pondered this and tried to come up with experiments, I did get to the point of trying to make a “simulated LaserWriter” printout, which at this moment is a bit less work than collecting ImageWriter commands. What I discovered then was that the lines were shorter, shorter to the point of everything fitting on the screen again. All of a sudden I remembered the ImageWriter’s horizontal dot density wasn’t an exact multiple of Macintosh screen resolution, and supposed MacWrite II knew this and made an effort to indicate it where the original MacWrite hadn’t. (So far as “not being able to anticipate how your economy system’s documents would turn out printed in a more expensive if higher quality” went, though, I was able to remember how the ImageWriter could print in an adjusted role. I also remembered an old Macworld article explaining there were slight disadvantages to that.)