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Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator

281 points by ColinWright

by thristian

8 subcomments

For some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/
For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years.
For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidelity emulators like 86Box and MartyPC.
The C64 has VICE, the Amiga has WinUAE, even the Apple II has had high-quality emulators like KEGS and AppleWin, but the Mac has mostly been limited to high-level and approximate emulators like Basilisk II.

by wk_end

1 subcomments

I suppose - owing to its accuracy - that this doesn't have some of BasiliskII's killer features: it patches the OS/ROMs to add support for super-high resolutions and (mostly) seamless integration with the host's file system and network.
It's a shame that Basilisk - possibly owing to its inaccurate but killer features - is as janky as it is, because it's really remarkably pleasant to use when it works.

by mdavid626

3 subcomments

Little help - how can I find ROM-s? I tried to download some using sites found in Google, but the emulator always says "Unknown or unsupported ROM file". How can I find usable roms?

by jakedata

4 subcomments

Much of my early post-college work is stored across a stack of Mac formatted Bernoulli disks. The software requires an ADB dongle to run, so physical hardware is required. I wonder if any of those ADB to USB adapters could be mapped into the emulator?

by chiffre01

0 subcomment

I tried loading this with the standard Mac OS 7.1 install disks readily available, with a Mac plus rom. Drive 0: disk ejected? Mini vMac seems to work. I guess it needs some work still.

by nxobject

0 subcomment

I'm surprised HD20 support is listed as "not applicable" for SE, II, etc: I think all models listed except for II have HD20 boot support in ROM. I use an HD20 emulator with my physical Mac SE.
It's one of the most convenient ways to get arbitrary-sized disk images both into emulators -- both Mac emulators and physical floppy emulators.

by gbraad

0 subcomment

It is a reimplemented 68K emulator in Rust, so shares nothing from Musashi or UAEs code (wellknown cpu cores in C).

by Rochus

1 subcomments

Does the Mac - like the Lisa - also require cycle accurate emulation of the hardware? I spent some time with lisaem and made experiments with Qemu, but the Lisa OS makes assumptions about hardware timing which cannot be met by the latter.

0 subcomment

by car

1 subcomments

Feels so real, great work.
Any chance this could be made to emulate an Atari ST?

by DrNosferatu

0 subcomment

Any Flatpak, Snap or Scoop editions?

by trollbridge

1 subcomments

Was this inspired by MartyPC?

by cemyazar3131

0 subcomment

Pls play my game

by darqis

0 subcomment

Obligatory You know nothing Jon Snow quote

by ColinWright

1 subcomments

The original submission was to a post that explains why this is news, and not just a random project:
A brand new 68k Mac emulator quietly dropped last night!!
“Snow” can emulate the Mac 128k, 512k, Plus, SE, Classic, and II. It supports reading disks from bitstream and flux-floppy images, and offers full execution control and debugging features for the emulated CPU. Written using Rust, it doesn't do any ROM patching or system call interception, instead aiming for accurate hardware-level emulation.
* Download link (Mac, Windows, Linux): https://snowemu.com
* Documentation link: https://docs.snowemu.com
* Source link: https://github.com/twvd/snow
* Release announcement: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12509
-- https://oldbytes.space/@smallsco/114747196289375530
I understand why links get re-written, but I think the context is relevant and can help the random reader who is unfamiliar with the project.

by the_other

4 subcomments

Off-topic...
I wish Apple would bring back the white menubar background and the coloured logo.
The white menubar makes the whole computer easier to use in a small but constant way. The coloured apple icon would suggest they no longer have their heads stuck up their assess and might bring back "fun" rather than "showing off" to their design process. And then maybe, maybe... with that "suggestion" symbolised in the UI, we can hope they might bring back the more rigorous user-centric design process they used to be famous for.

by ChrisRR

1 subcomments

I'm not sure why OP links to this site, but the actual project is here
https://snowemu.com/
https://github.com/twvd/snow