GrayBox

WatchSmart

So here's a newish emulator that came up on my own forum:

https://launchpad.net/graybox/

It seems to be a new ROM-less, MacOS-less emulator. Sort of like what Executor and Carbonless Copies were back in the day.

Quote:

"GrayBox enables you to run classic Mac apps on Mac OS X... without "Classic"!

GrayBox is similar to Apple's BlueBox/Classic. Like Classic, GrayBox interleaves its windows as peers to those of native apps. Unlike Classic, GrayBox runs each app in its own protected memory space.

GrayBox runs only early B&W apps. Currently, it has been tested only with MacDraw 1.9.5; see http://www.dejamac.com/software/macdraw/. "

Pixelcade

Wasn't there a NES emulator called Gray Box that was discontinued?

WatchSmart

I think that you are correct!

iBatman

There was Graybox and Graybox Z I believe I loved those Emulators.

nwassault

Looks pretty neat. I'm particularly waiting for a HyperCard release. Porting the Finder? I could see some value in it, but for all its problems, the OS X Finder has abilities we wouldn't have dreamed of in that era. Will it run desk accessories?

iBatman

Emulation of older OS 7- OS 9 games would be awesome. There were some very good games for that era! It stinks to not be able to play them on our new Macs.

WatchSmart

Well, there are of course Mini vMac, Basilisk II and SheepShaver for all your old gaming needs!

nwassault

I ended up trying it. It does work on Snow Leopard, at least on my machine. Keep in mind, you will need to have Rosetta installed to run it, though the system should give you the option to download it if you try to open MacDraw without having it installed. However, MacDraw can't display anything within a document when it saves a file. Curiously, saving the file as a PICT saves the drawing/text/whathaveyou but doesn't display the document background at all, according to Preview running in 32-bit mode.

After using MacDraw, I can see that the Finder would be only a curious little toy, since it only has access to the bundle's system folder and to the Documents folder. I don't see any reason why Desk Accessories and Extensions, even Control Panels, wouldn't work, at least from an architectural perspective, since the bundle has a Finder binary and a System file. That said, we'd need a port of the Font/DA Mover to use Desk Accessories, and this version of Font/DA Mover would have to be able to install into the System file of every GrayBox bundle. I would like to see Color QuickDraw support and feature parity with System 7 and Mac OS 8 (since I jumped in during that era), but it beats starting up an emulator each time. Also beats the annoying process of trying to find ROMs and disk images.

I downloaded the source (which was a pain to figure out how to do) with the intent of messing around with it, but it requires Metrowerks CodeWarrior, which means I'd have to switch over to my iBook to work on it, since all I've got on my MacBook is XCode.

iBatman

If those ran games like Dark Forces and Star Wars Ep 1 Pod Racer :p

WatchSmart

A closer look suggests that Greybox does contain a Macintosh ROM, in the file "Sosumi."

nwassault

Any idea what make of Mac the ROM comes from? My guess is Mac Plus, as that's the main machine Mini vMac emulates, right? Importing it into Audacity as raw data and playing it is inconclusive, though, because it doesn't have a startup sound. As for the Sosumi file name, I thought it might have been a theme file, but I guess, considering the origins of the name Sosumi, it makes sense for it to be the ROM.

Squirrel

Yes, it's a Mac Plus ROM.

The Mac Plus was the first Mac with a 128KB ROM (which is the file's size), and there's a date at the end of the ROM stating Nov 6, 1985 (a few months before the Mac Plus was released).

jack59splat59

iBatman wrote:

If those ran games like Dark Forces and Star Wars Ep 1 Pod Racer :p

That would be sweet. I still have the originals though. lol