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MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation)
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TOPIC: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation)

MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 4 months ago #4528

Just a quick note... a while back I was wondering about the state of Mac emulation as Sheepshaver seems rather neglected. Somebody noted that Qemu was promising (at the time) but it wasn't quite functional.

Not cutting edge news, but Qemu is now in much better shape (as pictured below). I haven't been able to get sound to work (and despite the 'AGP graphics' message I doubt there's any GPU/OpenGL support). Quite neat thought! Any suggestions on what I could try out in order to test the quality/status of the emulation?

Last Edit: 4 years, 4 months ago by jetboy.

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 4 months ago #4529

jetboy wrote:
Any suggestions on what I could try out in order to test the quality/status of the emulation?

Got a copy of Unreal (1998)? That can test the Game Sprockets library and several graphics modes.
Unreal Tournament (1999) is another possibility.

glTron is freeware and can test OpenGL.

Pangea Software still has a link for the Bugdom demo.

I used to run MAME with a RAVE renderer back in the day. Not sure if you could find that specific build today, but here's an unofficial build from 2016.

I'd recommend a CPU benchmark program, but I can't find anything for MacOS 9.

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 3 months ago #4530

Squirrel wrote:
jetboy wrote:
Any suggestions on what I could try out in order to test the quality/status of the emulation?

Got a copy of Unreal (1998)? That can test the Game Sprockets library and several graphics modes.
Unreal Tournament (1999) is another possibility.

glTron is freeware and can test OpenGL.

Pangea Software still has a link for the Bugdom demo.

I used to run MAME with a RAVE renderer back in the day. Not sure if you could find that specific build today, but here's an unofficial build from 2016.

I'd recommend a CPU benchmark program, but I can't find anything for MacOS 9.


Unfortunately I've had some issues trying to mount Bugdom's .dmg within the emulation environment (I got the latest Disk Copy but the mounting process hangs - dunno if it's an emulation issue or otherwise). I've got Bugdom and Unreal on CD (somewhere... packed away in my shed) so I'll crack them out at some point and have a go.

For now, I got Weekend Warrior running. It works! Which is kinda cool because I think it's one of the (few) games that only ever ran on a PPC Mac. Thus, I'm pretty impressed that it works. I think it uses software rendering but maybe others can advise better based on:
- 'Even if you have a 250mhz 604e, you'll have to shrink the game play window 30% for it to run at the desired 20 frames/second if you don't have a 3D accelerator card.' ... the speed is fine at at fullscreen.
- The graphics are boxy but I can't remember what they looked like on (for example) my Performa 5200 (no GPU) v my Bondi iMac (Rage Pro [and Voodoo 2]).
- Screenshots below.





Last Edit: 4 years, 3 months ago by jetboy.

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 3 months ago #4531

jetboy wrote:
Unfortunately I've had some issues trying to mount Bugdom's .dmg within the emulation environment (I got the latest Disk Copy but the mounting process hangs - dunno if it's an emulation issue or otherwise). I've got Bugdom and Unreal on CD (somewhere... packed away in my shed) so I'll crack them out at some point and have a go.

For now, I got Weekend Warrior running. It works! Which is kinda cool because I think it's one of the (few) games that only ever ran on a PPC Mac. Thus, I'm pretty impressed that it works. I think it uses software rendering but maybe others can advise better based on:
- 'Even if you have a 250mhz 604e, you'll have to shrink the game play window 30% for it to run at the desired 20 frames/second if you don't have a 3D accelerator card.' ... the speed is fine at at fullscreen.
- The graphics are boxy but I can't remember what they looked like on (for example) my Performa 5200 (no GPU) v my Bondi iMac (Rage Pro [and Voodoo 2]).
- Screenshots below.

That's weird regarding the Bugdom .dmg. Perhaps you could repack it into a .zip on OSX.

I have a copy of Weekend Warrior that came with my PowerMac 6500 (250Mhz 603e). Most of the games that came with that model say "accelerated for the 6500" on them. It ran fine in fullscreen, either 800x600 or 1024x768, I can't remember what I had. The graphics were boxy. I only beat that game once, lol.

It's pretty nice hearing about the state of PPC emulation. I'd love to get MechWarrior 2 going again (the disc is next to Weekend Warrior, taunting me), even if it's through SheepShaver on my G5 Quad.

Attached images have been broken here for a while. I haven't seen any of the mods comment on it.

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 3 months ago #4532

Deleted
Last Edit: 4 years, 3 months ago by jetboy.

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 3 months ago #4533

Squirrel wrote:

That's weird regarding the Bugdom .dmg. Perhaps you could repack it into a .zip on OSX.

I have a copy of Weekend Warrior that came with my PowerMac 6500 (250Mhz 603e). Most of the games that came with that model say "accelerated for the 6500" on them. It ran fine in fullscreen, either 800x600 or 1024x768, I can't remember what I had. The graphics were boxy. I only beat that game once, lol.

It's pretty nice hearing about the state of PPC emulation. I'd love to get MechWarrior 2 going again (the disc is next to Weekend Warrior, taunting me), even if it's through SheepShaver on my G5 Quad.

Attached images have been broken here for a while. I haven't seen any of the mods comment on it.


Sorry - just updated to images to be external ones. Pretty awesome that you beat it. If I'm honest, I think I always fell just short. Might have to put some serious effort into beating it for bragging rights.

LOL the 6500... that was a beast! I remember when a mate got a Performa 6500 tower and I was mightily jealous. It was 300Mhz and had 128Mb of RAM in it, which seemed ridiculous at the time.

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 3 months ago #4534

jetboy wrote:
Sorry - just updated to images to be external ones. Pretty awesome that you beat it. If I'm honest, I think I always fell just short. Might have to put some serious effort into beating it for bragging rights.

LOL the 6500... that was a beast! I remember when a mate got a Performa 6500 tower and I was mightily jealous. It was 300Mhz and had 128Mb of RAM in it, which seemed ridiculous at the time.

Weekend Warrior was either hard, or I sucked at it. The blockyness of the 3D models in your screenshots is just how I remember it. However, I don't remember the textures being that bad.

Good luck trying to complete it!

I still remember shopping for a new Mac at Circuit City. I was looking at the 6500 and another model with a ~180MHz 604 processor. I still wonder if the 604 would have been the better choice.

The 6500 tops out at 128MB of RAM. I got mine up to 96MB. And replaced the internal modem with an ethernet card. DSL was freaking great compared to dialup.

The Zip drive was awesome. I'd take a disk to college, fill it up with whatever I wanted, and come home to mess with it. I saw a few clicks-of-death on both Zip and Syquest drives. Never happened to me though (on any platform). When the HD died, I installed MacOS to a Zip disk and used that to get some work done while a replacement HD was on order.

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 2 months ago #4541

Squirrel wrote:

Weekend Warrior was either hard, or I sucked at it. The blockyness of the 3D models in your screenshots is just how I remember it. However, I don't remember the textures being that bad.

Good luck trying to complete it!



Yep, lotsa old(ish) games are that special kinda hard 'ay! I just remember the controls being really imprecise and it being a royal pain trying to 'hit' something (and when you finally did, there'd be very little time left on the clock).

Another special game was 'lagtris'. A former member of these forums ('zacks' I think, or something like that) challenged me to a game of NES tetris in network mode using 56k modems. Basically you'd play as normal then get an update about how your opponent was going every 10 seconds (I'll admit that more often than not it was me who ended up being surprised by a massive pile of blocks coming outta nowhere). Again, it was a special kinda hard and 'zacks' (think that was his name) was the master of it (don't think I beat him once... mighta chucked the odd tanty).

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 4 years, 1 month ago #4542

FWIW I updated to Catalina a while back and it still works. Pretty cool...
- 32-bit (Windows) apps via Crossover
- PPC OS9 apps via Qemu

Re: MacOS 9 on Qemu (G4 emulation) 1 year, 2 months ago #4644

Just so you know... work's being done on the qemu-system-m68k module too. It's not merged into the main binary yet, but you can download versions from EMaculation that will run System 7.1 through 8.1 and A/UX 3.0.1 through 3.1.

Of course, SheepShaver and BII are both still being updated (just not so much the emulator cores) as well.

I've got my Mac Emulation Project fully moved over to an M1 Mac running Ventura, and it's all running smoothly except for OS X 10.6.

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