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Atari Emulation with MacOS


twh/f2

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Hi *,

 

What's the best atari 8bit emulator for MacOS?

 

A short search on this forum did not show a clear favourite. A google search found Atari800MacX.. I am going to install this now. It seems Altirra has been not yet ported to MacOS.. a pitty.

 

Are there any alternatives next to Atari800MacX?

 

grtx

twh!

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I had a lot of nice convos with the author, he fixed some glitches as soon as he could (considering, he's got another life beside the Emulator). Actually, he fixed all the glitches I found, which were some issues with the keyboard.

 

An alternative were the Rainbow emulator, which is freeware for around ten years now. It runs on 68k Mac OS 7 and higher (incl. native Mac OS X versions).

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Atari800MacX is the only mac emulator I know of that still receives much love from the author. The emulator it's based on (cleverly named atari800) will also run under OSX using X11 I believe. Other than that, the other emulators I've seen are pretty dated and had some issues, being designed around the classic MacOS and relying on Carbon for an OSX port being one of them.

 

SIO2OSX is pretty cool as well if you have real hardware around, it does a lot of the same things APE does on the PC. Basically a drive and peripheral emulator. Same developer.

 

Personally I think Atari800MacX is pretty awesome. Does just about everything. Integrates with Eclipse/WUDSN pretty nice too if you want to play in assembler.

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I almost didn't click here but it looks like your questions have been answered anyway... "MacOS" = pre OS X. The current Mac operating system is "OS X". Not trying to be a-retentive, but just so people know what is really being talked about and answer questions correctly.

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I almost didn't click here but it looks like your questions have been answered anyway... "MacOS" = pre OS X. The current Mac operating system is "OS X". Not trying to be a-retentive, but just so people know what is really being talked about and answer questions correctly.

 

All the Mac people around me call pre OS-X "Classic", since the the current OS is "Mac OS X". =D

 

Anyway, Atari800MacX is my emulator of choice, though it looks like porting Altirra wouldn't be too evil.

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All the Mac people around me call pre OS-X "Classic", since the the current OS is "Mac OS X". =D

 

 

You can call it Classic, but that's not the name for it. The old OS name actually was MacOS, the new one isn't, because technically OS X runs on more platforms than just the Mac. Only reason I bring it up is the thread title made me think it was about the old MacOS, not OS X. The only tipoff to what the OP was really looking for was the mention of Atari800MacX.

Edited by Mirage
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All the Mac people around me call pre OS-X "Classic", since the the current OS is "Mac OS X". =D

 

 

You can call it Classic, but that's not the name for it. The old OS name actually was MacOS, the new one isn't, because technically OS X runs on more platforms than just the Mac. Only reason I bring it up is the thread title made me think it was about the old MacOS, not OS X. The only tipoff to what the OP was really looking for was the mention of Atari800MacX.

 

Both are called MacOS.... the newer NeXTstep/OpenStep-derived OS is referred to as "MacOS X", the older OS was simply called "System" until the name was changed to MacOS around the time MacOS 7.6 or 8 was released (made it easy to screw the clone manufacturers based on a naming technicality). MacOS 9 and older versions are typically referred to as "classic" MacOS by most mac users and running "classic" apps on PowerPC macs was supported in MacOS X through MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger). The "Classic Environment" was removed in 10.5 (Leopard), PPC support was removed in 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and PPC emulation support (aka Rosetta) was removed in 10.7 (Lion).

 

"Classic MacOS" is the correct terminology and the terminology Apple themselves use. MacOS X has NOTHING in common with classic MacOS other than some UI bastardization to make it more comfortable for mac users.

 

MacOS X = Influential high-end UNIX workstation OS dating back to 1988 (NeXTstep 0.8)

 

"classic" MacOS = early flaky GUI-based OS lacking many modern features which caused NT to eat its lunch for a while until it was finally replaced. Was good for its day in the 80's and early 90's but when other OS's started gaining features like memory protection, etc it really started showing its age.

 

A/UX = Apple's first attempt at a MacOS/UNIX hybrid which was quite awesome but VERY expensive due to the licensing required for AT&T SysVR2 UNIX code. 68k only.

 

Anyway.... figured I'd clarify some. Switched to macs after the downfall of the ST in the US.

 

As far as running on other platforms, as of 10.7 (Lion) only one architecture is supported.... x86. Now iOS is a MacOS X derivative and targets the ARM architecture. The only difference between an Intel Mac and a PC is the firmware, Apple switched to EFI before the Windows crowd. EFI is easily emulated on stock PC's by the way.

Edited by kogden
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All the Mac people around me call pre OS-X "Classic", since the the current OS is "Mac OS X". =D

 

 

You can call it Classic, but that's not the name for it. The old OS name actually was MacOS, the new one isn't, because technically OS X runs on more platforms than just the Mac. Only reason I bring it up is the thread title made me think it was about the old MacOS, not OS X. The only tipoff to what the OP was really looking for was the mention of Atari800MacX.

 

... the older OS was simply called "System" until the name was changed to MacOS around the time MacOS 7.6 or 8 was released (made it easy to screw the clone manufacturers based on a naming technicality).

 

 

The name change came with 7.5 (Wikipedia is incorrect, stating 7.6), which was the second major version of the OS available for PPC machines (first version for PPC was System 7.1).

 

"classic" MacOS = early flaky GUI-based OS lacking many modern features which caused NT to eat its lunch for a while until it was finally replaced. Was good for its day in the 80's and early 90's but when other OS's started gaining features like memory protection, etc it really started showing its age.

 

Considering that 7.1/7.5 were running on new hardware (PPC), which didn't have the advantage of a long pre-development stage that the Intel based Macs had, was running along side of emulated code (68k) and the fact that Apple was still occupied developing the OS for much of the old 68k based hardware (not to mention that Apple was floundering as a company) -- having some flakiness in the software was somewhat understandable during this transitional phase.

 

The only reason I'm familiar with this is because I managed a lab in college when all the new PPC machines and their flaky OS's arrived. Caused me several years of headaches, but nothing a local networked death-match in Marathon (now freely downloadable from Bungie) couldn't cure... BTW, Anvil and Forge are a blast to play around with. They're the physics model/resources and map editors that were used by Bungie for developing the games (internally only, until they were released as a going-away present with the Infinity package).

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Hm. It's good to know that there people have a different understanding of MacOS and MacOS X. Especially in an retro forum like AtariAge it is likely that people also ask for old platform like MacOS.

 

Back to the topic: Atari800MacOSX works ok. But for some reasons I have sometimes glitches in the debugger-screen. This is, when I resize the debugger window, then the bottom area is not visible any longer in the view. Can this be connected with MacOSX 10,7 Lion?

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Both are called MacOS.... the newer NeXTstep/OpenStep-derived OS is referred to as "MacOS X",

 

Yes, when it's on a Mac, they call it Mac OS X. Generally, it's just OS X for the reason I already said. The difference is the space. The old one was MacOS. Now, it's Mac OS X. In other words, OS X running on a Mac. We're splitting hairs here at this point, obviously, but that's what Apple calls it.

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I thought the Mac OS X which runs on Intel processors was - strictly and legally speaking - only ever supposed to run on Macs??? It's got Mac OS X on the box. Apple calls it Mac OS X, so it's called Mac OS X. I don't understand the issue. Unless I'm totally wrong. :D

Edited by flashjazzcat
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Mac OS X is Pronounced Mac OS Ten, follows Mac OS 8 & 9 (and may be some versions of system 7). Apple ran with the name "System" before "Mac OS _". Mac OS X originally ran on only PPC Hardware till that ran out of steam then migrated over to "Intel" processors (i really hate to say x86 unless this starts another off topic conversation on what is an x86)

 

Mac OS X / TEN is a totally different OS to what when before it.

 

But can we please get back on topic? I am interested in the OPs 2nd question :)

Edited by Sub(Function(:))
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The name change came with 7.5 (Wikipedia is incorrect, stating 7.6), which was the second major version of the OS available for PPC machines (first version for PPC was System 7.1).

 

You are absolutely correct. My fault. I seem to remember seeing the MacOS logo on my IIfx running 7.5.3. That was the last version I ran on my IIfx before I sold it and became a UNIX zealot. I didn't get a PPC mac until I bought a used blue&white G3 tower running OSX 10.3 years later.

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Yes, sorry for going off topic, guys. I was just trying to make sure everyone knew what he was talking about, and it really should have ended at that, not gone into a whole dissection of the history of the name. I think we all know what it's really called now, or at least I hope so.

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The name change came with 7.5 (Wikipedia is incorrect, stating 7.6), which was the second major version of the OS available for PPC machines (first version for PPC was System 7.1).

 

You are absolutely correct. My fault. I seem to remember seeing the MacOS logo on my IIfx running 7.5.3. That was the last version I ran on my IIfx before I sold it and became a UNIX zealot. I didn't get a PPC mac until I bought a used blue&white G3 tower running OSX 10.3 years later.

 

I left using Macs probably before 7.6 was released, or shortly thereafter. Although I didn't leave out of zealousness for any other platform. I moved over to PC's during my post-college work days. I've used Windows PCs ever since, aside from owning a Classic II (for nostalgia) and more recently Quadra 605 (for studying the GUI). However, in the last few months I was able to snag a Mac mini (Core Duo) from work and started playing around with OS X more. I actually got it almost exclusively for running Atari800MacX on it, since it's a regularly updated emulator. I had heard a lot of good things about it here on the forum, and I was impressed using it some a few years back, but I still find it to be lacking in some areas, as with all emulators. One thing I find somewhat odd is that it still doesn't support bilinear video filtering. This is pretty much standard on every other emulator in existence...

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<snip uninformed image>

 

Nice. Plenty of games available on Macs natively now. And for the ones that aren't, you can run Windows (or Linux) natively on it. Macs are the most compatible machines in the world (speaking running everything legally of course), running all the main OSs. So, there's no truth whatsoever to this "cartoon". Not that this in any way shape or form on topic.

Edited by Mirage
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<snip uninformed image>

 

Macs are the most compatible machines in the world (speaking running everything legally of course), running all the main OSs. So, there's no truth whatsoever to this "cartoon". Not that this in any way shape or form on topic.

 

Rotflmaopms ....

 

What is it? Making people buying less for more money and putting biased truths on hardware with just a bitten Apple on it ?

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since my Amiga and Atari ST days I never had less hassle and a lot of fun with computers again since I switched 2 years ago from Windows to Mac... ;)

 

I still wonder how anyone could have any real hassle with Windows PCs.....

 

The only point here is that you simply do less with an apple, so the chance of doing something wrong is less in following ...

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