SnowTime Experiments
Dec. 6th, 2025 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen my RSS reader pointed me to a retrospective on QuickTime as “an Apple innovation of the 1990s that managed to have made it out of that decade,” it just so happened I’d managed in recent days to have simulated an early stage of that step towards “multimedia” myself. While working with the Snow emulator to try out “dot matrix printing” and “old word processors,” I’d kept an eye on its development. A “branch” promising steps towards offering the Motorola 68030 microprocessor had got my attention, but I’ll admit to wondering how many steps would be needed until it became available. When the first “030 Macs” showed up in the general “cutting-edge build,” it was something of a pleasant surprise.
I put some effort into getting SE/30 emulation running. After noting the extension I’d used on the “68000 machines” to step up from the familiar small desktop patterns to “MacPaint wallpaper” didn’t quite work in emulation just as it hadn’t on my actual hardware, I started up that half-joking, “1-bit black-and-white,” recent video player MacFlim. As soon as I’d seen it working I did wonder about the two “colour Macs” also available in Snow now, the IIx and IIcx, and about a disk image I’d saved some time ago made up by someone else and meant to demonstrate how QuickTime hadn’t quite worked in that previous emulator Mini vMac.
While Snow makes promises of greater compatibility through deeper emulation, one new question I was wondering about was how those first “030 Macs” it now offered all ran at sixteen megahertz. That added pep to something like a word processor, but I was uncertain about video (even if I could imagine Amiga users making a big deal of that computer’s custom silicon working wonders with a “mere 68000” running around half that clock speed...) One sample video built into the disk image (which just happened to be the “anime-adjacent,” black-and-white-silhouette music video “Bad Apple,” which I’ve seen people put effort into playing back on even older hardware), didn’t play back all that well. It offered a larger image than the absolute minimum postage stamp QuickTime had started with, though, and I did remember how I’d once managed to make a tiny video at that size back when I’d been working with the somewhat fussier MAME. Once I’d tracked the file down and transferred it into the remaining free space of the Snow-accessible disk image it did play back all right. Then, after noting how “presenting full screen” still didn’t work for it, I realised there was also an option to play back at half size. When shrunk down on a temporary basis, the larger video did play back without becoming a slide show.
All of this did have me trying to think back to my own early experiences with QuickTime. I recall there’d been a Macintosh in my high school library running a version of the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (and impressions its interface didn’t have quite as much “glitz” as the version my family had after adding a CD-ROM drive to our own computer). The multimedia component had included some NASA footage I believe got played every so often. Beyond that, though, I’ve been trying to recall just what steps I’d used to make my postage-stamp video. There is the thought of trying to get Myst running, but I am wondering if its video content would be too much for the emulated IIx and IIcx and if I’d have to wait and hope Snow gets to the point of offering the somewhat faster machines that succeeded them.
I put some effort into getting SE/30 emulation running. After noting the extension I’d used on the “68000 machines” to step up from the familiar small desktop patterns to “MacPaint wallpaper” didn’t quite work in emulation just as it hadn’t on my actual hardware, I started up that half-joking, “1-bit black-and-white,” recent video player MacFlim. As soon as I’d seen it working I did wonder about the two “colour Macs” also available in Snow now, the IIx and IIcx, and about a disk image I’d saved some time ago made up by someone else and meant to demonstrate how QuickTime hadn’t quite worked in that previous emulator Mini vMac.
While Snow makes promises of greater compatibility through deeper emulation, one new question I was wondering about was how those first “030 Macs” it now offered all ran at sixteen megahertz. That added pep to something like a word processor, but I was uncertain about video (even if I could imagine Amiga users making a big deal of that computer’s custom silicon working wonders with a “mere 68000” running around half that clock speed...) One sample video built into the disk image (which just happened to be the “anime-adjacent,” black-and-white-silhouette music video “Bad Apple,” which I’ve seen people put effort into playing back on even older hardware), didn’t play back all that well. It offered a larger image than the absolute minimum postage stamp QuickTime had started with, though, and I did remember how I’d once managed to make a tiny video at that size back when I’d been working with the somewhat fussier MAME. Once I’d tracked the file down and transferred it into the remaining free space of the Snow-accessible disk image it did play back all right. Then, after noting how “presenting full screen” still didn’t work for it, I realised there was also an option to play back at half size. When shrunk down on a temporary basis, the larger video did play back without becoming a slide show.
All of this did have me trying to think back to my own early experiences with QuickTime. I recall there’d been a Macintosh in my high school library running a version of the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (and impressions its interface didn’t have quite as much “glitz” as the version my family had after adding a CD-ROM drive to our own computer). The multimedia component had included some NASA footage I believe got played every so often. Beyond that, though, I’ve been trying to recall just what steps I’d used to make my postage-stamp video. There is the thought of trying to get Myst running, but I am wondering if its video content would be too much for the emulated IIx and IIcx and if I’d have to wait and hope Snow gets to the point of offering the somewhat faster machines that succeeded them.