Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color

mediamogul

About a month ago, I played and beat the original Apple ][ version of PoP1. I can remember seeing it for the first time and being amazed by that fluid animation. The SNES version is often touted as being the definitive version, but I wanted to say that I've beaten the original. I can't think of another game, besides possibly the original 'Double Dragon' that has been ported so many times. PoP2 didn't get anywhere near as many ports, with most having vastly inferior graphics and many omitted levels, making the MacOS the best by default. It's really tough though.

edmaul69

@mediamogul question for you, why is your modelid set to 14. according to apples website there is no such number and the quadra 900's model id is 20 on their site

https://support.apple.com/kb/TA47453?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

mediamogul

@edmaul69

I set everything up through a GUI on my Mac. If memory serves, I believe I just selected the Quadra 900 from a pull down menu and the model ID was set from there. Have you noticed any improvements by setting it to 20?

edmaul69

@mediamogul i only got as far as verifying it booted. I stumbled across the info while setting up a second basilisk running everything like a mac plus since mini vmac cuts off the sides on non widescreen tv's. :( hopefully it gets fixed at some point.

mediamogul

@edmaul69

I thought you'd find it funny to hear I got Basilisk II online with MacOS 8.1. I just got through browsing the web with Netscape Navigator 3.1. Back in the day, I used to use an early graphical chat program called 'The Palace' that is apparently still operational, so I may also give it a go sometime out of nostalgia. Other than that, I can't think of too many uses for this. Still, if your interested in surfing the web like it's 1995, just add ether slirpto your basiliskii.cfg file, then open the TCP/IP control panel in the emulated Mac and set it to DHCP.

edmaul69

@mediamogul that is awesome to know! Im not at a location where i can use an ethernet but in a week i move back to colorado 3000 miles away so i might be able to test this there.

edmaul69

@mediamogul im also hoping to find out how to get internet working in windows 3.11. I would love to play around with both os' online. Im curious how well they both work and compare them. My luck i will catch a virus.... :) i am aware there are definitely limitations of what i can do. I have internet explorer 3.0 already installed on mac os8.1. So i will have to try that out too.

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

Im not at a location where i can use an ethernet

WiFi will work too if it's available and you're looking to give it a go. Of course the emulated Mac will still think it's Ethernet.

edmaul69

@mediamogul nm. I have it working. Just need to find a site that works.

edmaul69

Bbs corner was a site i could get to load. Internet explorer 3.1 works better than netscape 3.1 though.

mediamogul

@edmaul69

For something a little more modern (2006), icab 2.9.9 is supposedly the last 68k browser to receive any updates. While I was looking around, I also found MacIRC. I may try using it to connect to the RetroPie IRC channel for gits and shiggles sometime.

guitarmandp

@edmaul69 do you have a .cfg file I can paste or can you tell me where I need to put the code if [ "$2" = "basilisk" ]
fbset -depth 8
fi

And what the name of the file and the location is to get the 8 bit color working on my Mac emulator? Thanks

edmaul69

@guitarmandp So that goes in

/opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onstart.sh

And you put the same thing but with a 32 instead of 8 in

/opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onend.sh

Now you need to put basilisk in 16 color, then b&w. Now exit. Go into the retropie menu, go into retropie setup. In there go into, Configuration / tools, then go into dispmanx -.... choose Enable for basilisk so it is enabled. Now exit and restart. Go into basilisk and change the display to 256 colors. Now anytime you go in it is not guaranteed to work. You might get a black screen. You need to repeatedly press ctrl and esc together to get out. You might need to reboot the pi. Now you have to reset the pi to try again. It will never work a second time. If you want to go back to higher quality display you need to set it to 16 color b&w again. Then go into retropie setup again and disable dispmanx. In 256 color mode it can take you several tries resetting before it works.

Meneer Jansen

@mediamogul said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

is dispmanx supposed to be on or off?

I have mine turned on.

What are your runcommand options on boot? Are you using a buffer size or a specific display size?

Nothing was changed for any of these. Basically, after I got a working disk image on my desktop computer last May, I transferred it and the ROM, as well as the configuration file over to the Pi. It remained that way until I tried changing the color depth a few days ago.

How does one turn dispmanx on? I've got a lot of troubles getting BasiliskII to work with 8 bit (256) colors too.

[edit] Sorry guys, didn't read tje post above this one. I cannot delete this post any more, mods may delete it.

Meneer Jansen

I had to do a complete clean re-install of Retropie. I chose this time to not use the BasiliskII executable that I compiled myself for the Pi but to use the methods described here to get it working. This is what I did to play Prince of Persia 2 The shadow and the flame.

Install BasiliskII via the Retropie script.
Hattrick: enable 'dispmanx' in Emulationstation/Retropie. Go into the Retropie Menu (in Emulationstation), go into retropie setup. In there go into Configuration / tools, then go into dispmanx choose Enable for basilisk so it is enabled.
Download the "PoP Macintosh Total Pack" for Windows from [Removed]. It includes he Mac version of PoP2. Install this "Pack" in Windows (or Wine). Go to: "C:/Program Files/Oldgames/Prince of Persia 2 Mac".
From that Windows dir copy the files "emulation.rom", "Starterdisk.hfv" and "Oldgames.HFV" to: /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh. Rename those files to "mac.rom", "disk.img" and "disk02.img".
Add the following line to: /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/emulators.cfg:

--disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk02.img
Set the Mac to 256 colors (8 bit color).
For some reason it's not needed on my Pi to set the framebuffer to 8 bit (fbset -depth 8). Even stranger: it makes BasiliskII and the Pi crash.
Do NOT disable overscan in /boot/config.txt. That is: do not uncomment the line "#disable_overscan=1". See this topic by me.

Maybe the Wiki has to be updated a bit...

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen

I must have missed your last post. Glad to see the game working. Unfortunately, I had to remove your link to the game files. I know that at some point the original 'Prince of Persia' was open sourced, but I don't think that ever happened with PoP2. Also, the disk image that contained it also had a few other installed titles, such as 'Lemmings' and a few of it's expansions, which I don't believe are intended to be freely distributed either. If you can find a notice from the copyright holders regarding open source or public domain status, or even a news article to the same effect, re-posting the link won't be an issue.

Edit: Looking at it a little closer, the linked disk image was built on MacOS 8 and only 7.5.5 is free to distribute.

For some reason it's not needed on my Pi to set the framebuffer to 8 bit (fbset -depth 8). Even stranger: it makes BasiliskII and the Pi crash.

I believe it ended up crashing on occasion for me as well. However, every time I would set the emulated Mac to 256 colors, it would result in a black screen otherwise. Perhaps something has changed. I'll look at it a little later today and see.

Do NOT disable overscan in /boot/config.txt. That is: do not uncomment the line "#disable_overscan=1".

This is very interesting. I haven't noticed overscan having an effect on other emulators, but then again I haven't really tested anything with it on verses without it either.

Meneer Jansen

@mediamogul My apologies for posting a link to software/os-es that are copyrighted! You were right to remove these links. The site I got it from is so old that I thought is was a "legit" place on the internet (I was wrong).

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen

There are a lot of misconceptions about old computer software and the legality of propagating it. ROMs are generally cut and dry, but there's a lot of gray areas to get lost in here. Unfortunately, the link in question was indeed infringing copyright.

I tried setting the emulated Mac to 256 colors again through BasilliskII and the screen went black as it did before. This must be a pretty serious crash, because I couldn't even kill the software through the command line. I plan on trying it again with the overscan enabled as you mentioned earlier, but I've got some people coming over tonight to game and I don't want to start making universal changes that I don't have time to troubleshoot if they go south.

edmaul69

@mediamogul so do i need to have overscan enabled or not? I get a black screen all the time. More than 50% of the time i try to go into it. I dont have overscan disabled. I have overscan settings set for top, bottom, left and right

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

so do i need to have overscan enabled or not? I get a black screen all the time. More than 50% of the time i try to go into it.

I haven't had a chance to test overscan yet, but I think I might know why you're getting a black screen so often. Something that I wasn't really aware of at the time was that in changing the framebuffer's color depth from runcommand-onstart.sh, it creates a race condition to where if jzintv loads at the wrong time, the script could potentially have no effect.

I've only just thought of this due to another runcommand-onstart.sh problem I ran into lately with something else, but it might explain things. I'll test it out on mine, but if this is indeed the case, one solution would be to prevent jzintv from loading for a second or two to give the script time to change the framebuffer. Adding a two second sleep like the launch command below might do the job.

basilisk = "sleep 2; /opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/bin/BasiliskII --rom /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/mac.rom --disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk.img --extfs /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh --config /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg"