Mini vMac 2.8.2 released

[Robert]

Macintosh emulator

 

September 20, 2006 This is not really news, but Mini vMac 2.8.2 is now officially released, with no change from the June beta. It includes localized versions for French, Italian, and German, and has a native Intel Macintosh version. More minor changes include an improved stopped mode, and some better error reporting.

 

The overlong beta period was mainly due to delay in writing up documentation for the new build system. But lately, on getting back to looking at this, I feel the current form isn't appropriate for Mini vMac. It may be powerful and easy to use, but it fails to be simple and maintainable. And I think I have a better idea, which can be based of the current code. But this will need to wait for a future version, and so I'm releasing Mini vMac 2.8.2 now.

 

Pierre Lemieux provided the French translation of the program strings. Pierre Lemieux has also translated much of the Mini vMac documentation, available on his website at http://pages.videotron.com/plemieux/minivmac/.

 

Fabio Concas and Gianluca Abbiati provided the Italian translation. (Fabio Concas has previously ported Mini vMac to Pocket PC, available on his website at http://digilander.libero.it/jpdefault/mvm_index.html.)

 

Detlef Kahner provided the German translation. (He maintains the website Classics For X.)

 

The localizations are a compile time option. Now that the work has been done on Mini vMac to support French, Italian, and German, it wouldn't be too hard to support other languages, that use a similar character set, if anyone wants to volunteer to provide translations. See the Localization Page and the Localization Forum.

 

Mini vMac now has a 'Stopped' mode as an on/off toggle, instead of stopped being one of the set of speeds. So you can stop the emulation and then resume it, without having to remember what speed you were running. The implementation of Stopped mode is improved; the emulation is truly stopped, which fixes a potential issue with spurious sounds. The native cursor of the real machine is now shown while in stopped mode.

 

The ROM not found message now tells the name of the file it is looking for. There were many reports that indicated this was needed. It also gives a web page address for further information.

 

This message, and other error messages and informational messages are now displayed using platform independent code similar to the control mode. This improves the X version, which previously would just write messages to stderr or stdout, which could easily be missed, or be lost entirely depending on how the program was launched. It also means the non ascii characters (such as accented characters used in the French and Italian translations) are displayed more reliably across all versions.

 

If the ROM isn't found the program now doesn't immediately quit, but enters the stopped mode. This allows the error message to be seen using the new display method.

 

A number of other error messages have been added or improved. If the ROM file is too short, Mini vMac gives an error saying so, and a different error if there was a some other problem reading the ROM. In the X and Windows versions, if it doesn't recognize a command line argument, it will give a warning.

 

There are numerous refinements to the user interface strings, many of which were suggested by Pierre Lemieux.

 

The Windows version should now work better when the real computer isn't fast enough to emulate at 1x speed, allowing other programs and the computer as a whole to remain responsive.

 

In the Windows version the function keys F3 through F12 are now passed through to the emulated machine, to match the Mac and Linux versions. (F1 and F2 are used for the option and command keys.)

 

In the X version, the open command has been removed, instead of having a command that just gives a message saying not implemented (because an 'open a file' dialog isn't part of basic X). This is possible because of the more flexible way of displaying the help screen which was needed for the French and Italian localizations.

 

In the X version, switching between normal mode and Magnify mode and Full Screen Mode may now work more reliably on more operating systems, though it may sometimes flicker a bit more.

>> Get it HERE.