Basilisk II Atari

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Icky
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Basilisk II Atari

Post by Icky »

@agranlund has been busy with System 7.5 and Basilisk II Emulator
So.. this is super early and far from done, but it just managed to boot to desktop and I thought that was exciting enough to share :)
It's the Basilisk II emulator and I've been off and on toying with porting it to the Atari. Here it is booting an .iso image of the System 7.5 installation CD.

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andresv
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by andresv »

This is very interesting! Thanks for sharing.

The emulation seems to be enough for running MacOS, so my question is: what's missing?

Agv
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Badwolf
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by Badwolf »

Very cool. I saw Anders popped up in my YooToob feed but hadn't had a look at that yet!

I do love me an emulator project. :D

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rubber_jonnie
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by rubber_jonnie »

That's pretty damn impressive.
Collector of many retro things!
800XL and 65XE both with Ultimate1MB,VBXL/XE & PokeyMax, SIDE3, SDrive Max, 2x 1010 cassette, 2x 1050 one with Happy mod, 3x 2600 Jr, 7800 and Lynx II
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stephen_usher
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by stephen_usher »

Yeah... might mean that after 30 years I finally get my TT to run as a Mac, seeing as Spectre GCR doesn't work on it.

(I do wonder why Spectre GCR actually runs slower on the ST+TF536 than it does on a stock ST.)
Intro retro computers since before they were retro...
ZX81->Spectrum->Memotech MTX->Sinclair QL->520STM->BBC Micro->TT030->PCs & Sun Workstations.
Added code to the MiNT kernel (still there the last time I checked) + put together MiNTOS.
Collection now with added Macs, Amigas, Suns and Acorns.
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thorsten.otto
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by thorsten.otto »

IIRC this was already ported to Atari.
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Badwolf
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by Badwolf »

thorsten.otto wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 10:14 am IIRC this was already ported to Atari.
I know it had an Amiga port, I wasn't able to find an Atari one.

I know of Aladdin (ST only), Spectre in its various guises (ST and TT) and of MiniVMac (full blown port -- actually emulates 68k instructions! Slower than a wet weekend in the West Country. Not sure if it'd even be usable on a CT60).

BW
DFB1 Open source 50MHz 030 and TT-RAM accelerator for the Falcon
DSTB1 Open source 16Mhz 68k and AltRAM accelerator for the ST
Smalliermouse ST-optimised USB mouse adapter based on SmallyMouse2
FrontBench The Frontier: Elite 2 intro as a benchmark
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mfro
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by mfro »

Badwolf wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 12:07 pm... MiniVMac (full blown port -- actually emulates 68k instructions! Slower than a wet weekend in the West Country. Not sure if it'd even be usable on a CT60).
about x2 than original speed on a FireBee. Pretty usable, I'd say (I don't use it anyway as I don't have any interest in prehistoric Macs).
And remember: Beethoven wrote his first symphony in C.
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agranlund
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by agranlund »

This has been an off and on thing for a while now. Mostly off to be fair - there's only so much staring at a debugger one can take :lol:

Pretty excited that it now actually runs!
There are many things still left to do before I consider it usable by people other than myself but the hardest part is done.

It supports OS7 and OS8. Even though OS8 officially requires a 68040, it does run on '030, with the same caveats that applies if you do it on a real Macintosh..


I have long considered removing the ET4000 in favour of playing with Troed's doubleST idea, but I think I'll keep the gfx card in now:

(sorry about the dusty Atari pictures, it's been tucked away unused and unloved for quite some time)

IMG_5222j.jpg
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IMG_5230j.jpg
IMG_5230j.jpg (150.34 KiB) Viewed 8753 times

Going to try and hunt down a few Macintosh II-era games. Warcraft1, the later Sierra games, and so on would be really cool to try out.

IMG_5213j.jpg
IMG_5213j.jpg (197.46 KiB) Viewed 8753 times

Access to video memory is obviously slower than on an equivalent Macintosh due to the slow 8Mhz Atari ST bus. I suppose a Mega STE, TT and Falcon would fare better in that regard.
Mono through the Shifter is obviously a lot quicker but 256 color on the ET4000 is fully usable and feels quick, or at least exactly the same as the ET4000 does in TOS/MiNT.

Disk speed is crazy slow at the moment. The hdd/cdrom disk image code is a bare minimum naive implementation at the moment, just enough to make it work for now.

thorsten.otto wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 10:14 am IIRC this was already ported to Atari.
You are probably thinking of Mini vMac which has quite hefty system requirements due to emulating the CPU. (Or a direct port of generic SDL Basilisk II, with CPU emulation)

This runs directly on the CPU so will get near native speed.
Of course, there is some overhead in providing the virtualised environment for Mac (and TOS, since I keep it around and working) but it's nowhere near the penalty of emulating the CPU.
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PhilC
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Re: Basilisk II Atari

Post by PhilC »

Nice work @agranlund
If it ain't broke, test it to Destruction.
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