$285.00

For this project I will add a compile time option to Mini vMac for emulation of a Macintosh II. It will emulate a keyboard, mouse, and black and white screen. (Color output will not be supported for this project. That will be a later project made possible by this one. However, Color Quickdraw will be present, allowing some software to work that doesn't work in the Macintosh Plus or SE emulations.) Sound output will not be supported. (That will be a future project.) Only the Macintosh II ROM will be supported. (There may be future projects to emulate later models, made possible by this project.) The floating point unit will not be emulated beyond the extent needed (if at all) to boot the system. (Again, later project.) A maximum of 8 megabytes of emulated RAM will be supported. (24 bit addressing only.)

The work for this project involves disassembling the Macintosh II ROM, supporting two emulated VIA chips instead of just one, and emulating a NuBus video card. This project will likely require a couple months of my time to complete, not including the time to support it later, which is likely to be greater.

3/8/08 update - To clarify, this project does not include emulation of the MC68851 PMMU chip that was optional on the Macintosh II. This would be a possible later project, but not a very likely one. Emulating the PMMU would be complex, and likely make the emulation much, much slower. The PMMU is required for other operating systems such as A/UX, but very little Macintosh software requires the PMMU, so it is not related to the prime goals of Mini vMac. This is not to say it will never happen, but I'm not likely to work on this in the foreseeable future without strong persuasion (i.e. pledges).