Turning Up the Clock
Jun. 6th, 2026 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerDelving into Macintosh software from “MacWrite/MacPaint” to “QuickTime/CD-ROM” in recent months has depended on the Snow emulator. (I can think of previous moments where other emulators got me looking further into programs for other old computers.) When working with the latter part of that range, though, I have wondered at times if Snow will get to offering more models. Trying to run “1993 programs” with “computers from early 1989” does have me remembering certain complaints over the years about software expanding to soak up hardware advances.
Not that long ago, though, I did manage to notice someone had created a “fork” offering an “overclocking” option. Now pretty familiar with compiling Snow from source, I set about trying the new version out. For whatever reason I first resorted to the lowest-end machine I run Snow on, a decade-old MacBook Air now running Linux; it might have had to do with having to compile Snow on it with a now-deprecated option enabled to keep sound working there. That computer’s fan runs fast enough to hear while the program is building, and it kept running that fast as I ran the overclocked emulator. I moved on to my newer “M2” MacBook Air (trying to make up for that on the older computer by building a different fork offering a “floppy disk image visualizer”), and found Activity Monitor reporting about fifty percent CPU usage with the emulator running. I was even able to extract the executable file from the rather large folder it winds up in and copy it alone to my most formidable computer, where it also ran.
One of the first things I tried at the higher emulated clock speed was the recent port of Doom. It went from “it’s nice that it works” to “it seems pretty fluid now”; I even tried switching the floor and ceiling textures on to tell when I was approaching dangerous green goo and still found it in “nice that it works” territory. After that I moved on to a less violent game, regardless of certain recent judgements about which one of them has mattered more in the long run, and thought Myst’s QuickTime movies ran pretty well too.
A small follow-up revision suggested the increased clock speed defaulted to “forty”; that brought the Macintosh IIfx to mind, even if I’ve gathered the impression the faster (and more expensive) machine had additional hardware built into it, hardware the operating system it shipped with might not have been able to command at least at first. While not altogether sure if I should “spoil myself for running the included systems the way they’re supposed to be run,” I do appreciate the option being offered.
Not that long ago, though, I did manage to notice someone had created a “fork” offering an “overclocking” option. Now pretty familiar with compiling Snow from source, I set about trying the new version out. For whatever reason I first resorted to the lowest-end machine I run Snow on, a decade-old MacBook Air now running Linux; it might have had to do with having to compile Snow on it with a now-deprecated option enabled to keep sound working there. That computer’s fan runs fast enough to hear while the program is building, and it kept running that fast as I ran the overclocked emulator. I moved on to my newer “M2” MacBook Air (trying to make up for that on the older computer by building a different fork offering a “floppy disk image visualizer”), and found Activity Monitor reporting about fifty percent CPU usage with the emulator running. I was even able to extract the executable file from the rather large folder it winds up in and copy it alone to my most formidable computer, where it also ran.
One of the first things I tried at the higher emulated clock speed was the recent port of Doom. It went from “it’s nice that it works” to “it seems pretty fluid now”; I even tried switching the floor and ceiling textures on to tell when I was approaching dangerous green goo and still found it in “nice that it works” territory. After that I moved on to a less violent game, regardless of certain recent judgements about which one of them has mattered more in the long run, and thought Myst’s QuickTime movies ran pretty well too.
A small follow-up revision suggested the increased clock speed defaulted to “forty”; that brought the Macintosh IIfx to mind, even if I’ve gathered the impression the faster (and more expensive) machine had additional hardware built into it, hardware the operating system it shipped with might not have been able to command at least at first. While not altogether sure if I should “spoil myself for running the included systems the way they’re supposed to be run,” I do appreciate the option being offered.
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Date: 2026-06-06 11:08 pm (UTC)