Emulating a Mac IIx on Raspberry Pi

Yup, I have a failing for 512×384 screens …

Running Mini vMac on a Raspberry Pi is hardly news. But maybe running it as a colour Mac II is. The screen size I’ve chosen is closer to a Color Classic, for no other reason that I like it.

To build a Mac II-capable version of Mini vMac, you’ll need the Alpha source code. You’ll also need a working Mini vMac setup, as it uses a 68k Mac program to set up the source. Pretty much any basic setup and bootable disk will run this okay:

Mini vMac building on an emulated Mac Classic booting from the System 7 Network Access floppy image (no, I couldn’t boot from Classic’s hidden boot ROM disk)

The build options I chose are:

-t larm -ccs -m II -hres 512 -vres 384 -depth 3 -mf 2 -magnify 1 -em-cpu 2 -mem 8M

I’ve chosen to swap the Ctrl key with the Command (⌘) key, as most non-Mac keyboards work better with this.

The build program will export a file out/minivmac-3.5.0-larm.tar that you can unpack into the full source code. It’s a really simple build, and fast, too.

Now you’ll need a Mac IIx ROM image (which I’m not supposed to help you find, but it’s an easy search) and OS image disks from the Mini vMac System Software page. Have fun!

1 comment

  1. If you’re unlucky enough to be trying to build this on a recent Mac OS, this will work but XCode complains a lot:
    -t mc64 -api cco -ev 6400 -m II -hres 512 -vres 384 -depth 3 -mf 2 -magnify 1 -em-cpu 2 -mem 8M

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