Macintosh Emulation
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What exactly is it?
It is emulating a Macintosh computer system on your Windows based computer. This includes the operating system and any Macintosh software.
What can I use it for?
Absolutely anything you could do on a real Mac. The main reason for running a Mac emulator is to run software only available for the Mac. You can connect to the internet with it, connect to a network, play games and all software, and open and view Macintosh files. And, it's just fun knowing you have the ability to do the same thing on your pc in one program that it takes an entire Mac to do. Unfortunately at this time emulators can only emulate 68k Macs and not the newer Power PCs or G-series. This means they can only run from Mac OS 7.1 to 8.1.
Lets get started
Ok the first thing you need to do is download an emulator. There's a few you can choose from but the one I'm going to discuss here is called Basilisk II. There's a lot of tutorials on installing and setting up Basilisk and other Mac emulators at http://www.emaculation.com/, this is where I learned it and if you like you can just go there =) I'm going to go through a step by step set up and installation procedure the way I experienced it. This is what you're going to need (explained below):
| - The Emulator - download here (Windows 9x/NT/2k version, even though it doesnt say 9x it works) - A Macintosh ROM file (different from game roms) - you either need to own a Mac to get this or you can download one here - Mac OS (Version 7.1-8.1 depending on your rom) - you can download 7.5.3 for free from Apple here - HFV Explorer - download - A disk boot image - download me!
Ok let me go a little more into detail on each of these. The Emulator is pretty self explanatory. It's the program that you're going to use to emulate the Macintosh. There's a Linux and Windows version. I'll be discussing the Windows version here only. The Basilisk II home page is here, and the link to the Windows port is above. The Windows version, although it says NT and 2000 only, works fine on 95/98. You need to download the correct version for your computer then unzip it into a new directory (ex. c:\basiliskii\ ). The Macintosh ROM file is a little more complicated. The ROM on a mac contains a small amount of system code which allows you to install an operating system (similar to CMOS on IBM clones). To legally use the emulator you have to own a Macintosh pc (which you obtained it from). There's a lot of ones you can buy for cheap (got mine for $20.50 + shipping) on ebay. Jim Watters wrote a very good article on extracting the ROM file which you can find here. If you use the one from the link above (no that's not mine), you can skip this process. Depending on which ROM you get decides which operating systems you can use. The ROM file must be captured from a 680x0 Macintosh system (the 680x0 can be 68020, 68030, or 68040, and tells what type of processor it is). And must be either 256k, 512k or 1 meg in size. Next we have the Mac OS. This is the operating system for Apple computers and is made by Apple. The only versions that work with the emulator are 7.1 through 8.1. If you want to use 8.x you need to have a compatible ROM image (the emulator will tell you if you do, it's mostly 1 meg images from the Quadra series). If you don't want to pay anything you can download 7.5.3 from Apple's site (link above). It's 19 .bin files. You want to perserve these in their original format so dont try to open them or let the browser convert them when you download. If you can get the cd or original disks then the install process is even simpler. Also Mac OS 8 has a lot of great features and is easier to use then 7. HFV Explorer is a small tool that lets you create virtual Mac drives and also copy files to and from Mac formated drives. You need this. The boot disk image isn't required if you have the cd or disks for Mac OS, but if you are going to use the downloaded version then you want this.
Create a Hard Drive
There's two ways to do this but this is probably the easiest. First unzip HFV Explorer to a new directory. Then run it. Choose File->Format New Volume... and you'll be presented with this screen: Fill in the Volume name. This is what will show up under the drive on your Mac desktop. You can change this at any time so it's not really important but I'd do something like "Mac OS 7.5.3". Next choose a volume size. 50 or 100 megs is plenty for the OS and some programs, but if you have more space or want more space then go ahead and make it bigger. Click the ">>" button and it'll bring up a dialog that lets you choose where to save the drive and what to name it. Just put it in the BasiliskII directory for now. Your screen should now look something like this (with less drives), noting the Mac OS 7.5.3 Drive at the top: If you're using a cd/disks of MacOS then you can skip to the next section. If you're using the downloaded version of MacOS then now you can explore your hard drive and copy the 19 files you downloaded onto the drive. Just drag them onto it and accept the default settings in the transfer box that pops up. Since this program has no status bar you have to wait until the hard drive stops being accessed or the hourglass cursor turns back into a pointer to know when it's done copying.
Install and configure the emulator
By now you should have all the files downloaded and have the emulator unzipped into a directory. The first thing you want to do is go to the directory open \setup\CD-ROM drivers\. Now if you're running this on Win9x go to that directory and copy cdenable.vxd to the \windows\system\ directory on your computer, if NT or 2k go to that directory and copy cdenable.sys to \WinNT\System32\drivers. Also if you're using WinNT you need to delete the program BasiliskII.exe and rename BasiliskIINT.exe to BasiliskII.exe. Now we need to configure the software. To help I created a small pop-up window of the config program. Click here to view it. Within this window you can click on the Info, General, Memory, Screen, Disk, Floppy, and CD tabs to change views. You can also click the close button (on the pic) to close the window. Run BasiliskIIGUI.exe. First click on the Memory tab and where it says "ROM file path" enter your ROM file or browse for it. You can also set how much memory you want to allocate to the emulator for running the MacOS. This is the same amount as the MacOS will have to use to run software. 16 megs is a good amount to run almost any program, but it never hurts to up it if you have plenty of ram in your system. Switch over to the General tab and here you can define a few more options. Mainly you can choose what type of processor you wish to emulate and enter what type of ROM you have. If you have a MacOS cd or disks simply choose the ROM type from the list and head to the next part (if you downloaded the one above it's "30 (Mac Quadra 650)"). If you're going to use the boot disk image you downloaded above, set the model ID to #7. Also important here is the "68881 or 68040 FPU emulation enabled" check box. When I tried to install the operating system with this checked at first I kept getting errors. When I unchecked it and ran it again it worked fine though. So you may want to uncheck it now or you can wait to see if you get any errors. Next choose the Screen tab. You can choose what resolution you wish to run the emulator in here. I recommend 800x600 or 1024x768, depending on what you have your windows resolution set to and how big your monitor is. Also running it in windowed mode works fine, or you can choose full screen (you can switch between the modes within the program with alt-tab). The floppy and cd tabs are similar. Just choose the drives you wish to allow the emulator to access. I recommend doing both your floppy and your cdrom drive. Make sure you have CD-ROM enabled and if you're going to install MacOS from the original disks then you want to have boot from floppy enabled. Finally choose the Disk tab. This is where you specify hard disks for use in the emulator. You want to add both System70_boot.dsk and the disk you created earlier with HFV explorer to the installed disks.
Installing the OS
At this point you should be ready to run Basilisk II for the first time. You can either hit run on the configuration program or run BasiliskII.exe. If you're installing from a cd/disks make sure they're in the drive and it should automatically start the installation. If you're using the downloaded version then you should boot up to a Mac desktop with two drives in the upper righthand corner. Open the "MacOS 7.5.3" drive (or whatever you called it). It should have the 19 installation files. Run "System 7.5.3 01of19.smi". A screen will pop up with a license agreement, hit Agree. It should now start unpacking all the files. If you experience an error at this point you may want to shut down and go back to the config and make sure FPU Emulation is off. Otherwise it should add another icon below your disk drives that says "Sys7.5 V7.5.3 CD Inst". Open this drive and run the Installer program. Hit the continue button and a configuration dialog will pop up. On this screen, first at the top click the drop down menu and change it to Custom Install. Then click the arrow to the left of System Software to expand it. Check the "Universal System for any Macintosh" option. And finally at the bottom where it says "Destination Disk" make sure it has "Mac OS 7.5.3" chosen, if it has anything else hit "Switch disk" until it's right. Now just hit install and let it work. When it's complete hit "Quit" and choose "Shut Down" from the "Special" menu at the top of the screen.
Booting up
Ok, almost done! Run the Basilisk II configuration program one more time (BasiliskIIGUI.exe). Choose the disk tab. Now move the "System70_book.dsk" back from installed to available drives. Now choose the general tab. Select the Model ID of the ROM you have and turn on FPU emulation if you want and turned it off earlier. Then press Run and your new Mac should be ready to go!
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