Posted by Sirwinston on 22, 2001 at 12:12 AM:
In Reply to: Heh, you sound a lot like me.. (more) posted by GadgetMan on 21, 2001 at 9:05 AM:
Unless you prefer to run from DOS, I highly suggest you try Basilisk II for Mac emulation. The Windows port has its homepage at http://gamma.nic.fi/~lpesonen/BasiliskII/ and even though it's called "Basilisk II for Windows NT" it runs perfectly well under Win9x.
I swear by it myself. After trying Fusion and the demo of SoftMac 2000, Basilisk II gave me the best performance--I haven't found a game for the 68k Mac yet that won't run trouble-free at full speed on Basilisk II, even on my older PC. But what I'm really looking forward to is a good PPC Mac emulator; the creators of Fusion are supposed to be working on one for the PC and Amiga, but so far all they've released is screenshots of the Amiga version running on a machine with a PPC card. Not exactly inspiring. What really annoyed me is when Darek Mihocka, the guy who does SoftMac, claimed that he had a working PPC Mac emulator for the PC but wasn't going to release it because most people don't have fast enough PCs.
I actually started on the Mac back in college, which is why I love emulating System 7.5.5 and MacOS 8 and playing those old Mac games I used to play. Barrack was always a favorite, and although it's simple, that old Risk 2 is addictive.
One word of warning, if you do try Basilisk II: Fusion doesn't use a standard HFV format; it changes a few bits, and Basilisk II likes to change them back to the standard format, so accessing an image repeatedly with both will lead to corruption. So if you try it, back up your HFV first.
I've been getting more and more into collecting Abandonware, though I still spend more time collecting ROMs from both arcade and console systems, and even more time playing the games themselves. :-) It all started when I found out that there were roughly fifty billion add-on levels for Duke Nukem 3d, and then I was hooked on DOS games...
I figure that my future cab will probably be completed at a time when I've switched to a faster computer for it, and so it'll probably use an interface coded in HTML or XML for ease, running under Active Desktop. I know, I know, Active Desktop eats resources, but when "idling" it only takes 1% CPU time on my Duron so I figure a cab running off a mid-gigahertz Athlon will fare well even with it activated. I picture a desktop, no taskbar or any clutter like that, with graphics from games cycling through a small box like they do in the old Retrocade, with game categories linked on the desktop to a pop-up menu system. Clicking on a game would bring up a HTML or XML page about the history of the game, with nice graphics from it, and a big "Play This Game" link at the top. For example, clicking on Tomb Raider would bring up a page with a short history of the series and its impact as a first 3rd person shooter, with graphics of all the models who've played Lara Croft and a few CG shots put together as the page's background, with links to "Play Tomb Raider" "Play Tomb Raider 2" "Play Tomb Raider: Last Revelation" etc. It'll take me forever to do that for most of the games, though. :-)
As a side note, have you been keeping up with the progress of Windows XP? Word is that Beta 2 is compatible with about 95% of DOS games and 90% of Windows 9x games, and that they're going to be improving compatibility even after it ships in September. I'm really looking forward to installing it--once the first service pack is out, of course; hopefully it'll finally bring universal Windows and DOS compatibility, with stability that's sorely lacking in Win9x.