Mac Emulation / Daydream for NeXT

[Pentad]

Please forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere but I have been following the recovery of the Mac emulator for the Next computer called Daydream. I did not even know there was such an emulator for the NeXT computer and to be honest I was surprised given the bad blood between Apple and the founding members of Next. (Though this was a 3rd party product)

DayDream was very much like Amax on the Amiga as you had a box with Mac roms attached to the computer (in this case the DSP port) so the emulator could be legal.

What I found most interesting was that it took over the entire computer. I would have thought they could run a Mac emulator concurrently with NextStep given the power of the NeXT computer and the multitasking ability of the Unix based OS.

You can read more here (and download the manual!):

http://www.osnews.com/comments/29661

I believe the article (or someone) claims this is the first Mac emulator which I believe is wrong.  I think the first is MagicSac for the ST. However, given the power of Amax, Emplant and ShapShifter (through some dubious code) the Amiga's emulation ability really puts Daydream to shame.

I loved Emplant and used it all time when I was in college. People were shocked that I could run a Macintosh right alongside my Amiga at speeds better than the Mac!

There are videos of it booting and running.  Also, you can grab a copy that does not require the external rom box so you can use it on the Next emulator Previous.  

Pretty interesting,
-P

[paul1981]

http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340

AMax has 1989 Copyright stamped on its PCB which is way earlier. Amiga and ST weren't real computers though, didn't you know?

[darkage]

http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340

AMax has 1989 Copyright stamped on its PCB which is way earlier. Amiga and ST weren't real computers though, didn't you know?

I got one of those Amax units.   Friend gave it to me for free but I never used it.  I should probably dig it up from storage somewhere.

[Raffaele]

I believe the article (or someone) claims this is the first Mac emulator which I believe is wrong.  I think the first is MagicSac for the ST. However, given the power of Amax, Emplant and ShapShifter (through some dubious code) the Amiga's emulation ability really puts Daydream to shame.

-P

Actually article on OSNews says this DayDream emulator is de-facto first Mac Clone, not first "emulated" Macintosh.
Also short original article on Flickr talks about there was sort of "official" support to MacOS 7.5.

For a certain period in the nineties (1995-1997) Apple licensed its system to third party manufacturers whom started producing Mac Clones.
In the end Apple decided that Macintosh market should not became as PC World of IBM Clones (maybe clones were better then official Macs, or perhaps Clones manufacturers granted bad support to customers and thus damaging Apple in various ways), so Apple withdrew any licences.

I think this was the legal situation of Daydream.

On the other hand AMAX and Emplant were "NO OFFICIAL" clones and their boards sure could mount Mac ROMS but these ROMS should be purchased directly from Apple, that in parallel with withdrawing licenses also stopped selling official ROMS replacements.

I strongly suspect they made this move right just for the fact Amiga emulation ran better than original Macintosh machines ;-) plus it multitasked with Amiga side, making Amiga equipped with Emplant boards sort of supercomputers! :-D


[EDIT]

It was Steve Jobs returning at Apple in 1997 that stopped selling licenses to third parties.

[Pentad]

http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340

AMax has 1989 Copyright stamped on its PCB which is way earlier. Amiga and ST weren't real computers though, didn't you know?

I could not find a release date for MagicSac/Spectrum on the Atari ST but I know they did create a Macintosh emulator for the ST first. Amiga folks may not know this but it is one of the reasons we got A-Max.

The programmers who did MagicSac/Spectrum on the Atari tried to port it to the Amiga and failed.  They basically got a very slow, limited memory (64k?) emulator that on ran in Chip Memory.  They announced (via Usenet I think) that they had given up and said the Amiga was not capable of having an emulator given its OS, custom chips,  and memory configuration.

Simon Douglas thought this was crap and decided to write one himself.  Over a weekend, he had the Macintosh boot screen up and running. It took longer for the other drivers and polish but he ended up creating A-max.

You purchased A-max, a set of Mac roms, installed them in the external box, and plugged it in.  Poof!  A working Mac emulator (you could even allocate the 256k Kickstart memory!)

It was also incredibly easy to dump the roms to a file, load them into the correct memory location, and then patch A-max.  A full Mac emulator on one floppy disk. :-)

I was able to talk with Simon Douglas at an Amiga show -a long time ago- and he spoke in great detail about the development of A-max.

Emplant took up the mantle from A-max and did a multitasking Mac emulator.

Not to be outdone, Amax IV was released with very similar features.

Both great products and great designs.  Though I bought and used Emplant for college so I do not know very much about Amax IV.  However, I wish I knew what happened to Simon Douglas...seems like he fell off the planet.

Jim Drew has written much about Emplant, UU, and showing his product off to Apple. It was pretty cool to show people your Mac emulator running right along side your Amiga back in the day.  Good times!

[B00tDisk]

I wonder if an 040 powered Amiga could make a good go at emulating a similar flavor of NeXT machine.

[Pentad]

I wonder if an 040 powered Amiga could make a good go at emulating a similar flavor of NeXT machine.

I had wondered that too.  The 040 Macs where emulated pretty well. Previous works pretty well on the PC/Mac, I wonder if it would be hard to port to the Amiga?  I think it is based off of Hatari which is using SDL.

-P

[B00tDisk]

I had wondered that too.  The 040 Macs where emulated pretty well. Previous works pretty well on the PC/Mac, I wonder if it would be hard to port to the Amiga?  I think it is based off of Hatari which is using SDL.

-P

NeXTStep is a fantastic OS even today and, I will just say this flat out, better than AmigaOS of the same vintage.  Getting it to run on Amigas powerful enough to do it would be quite a feat.

[psxphill]

I wonder if an 040 powered Amiga could make a good go at emulating a similar flavor of NeXT machine.

MacOS was quite a simple operating system & loading and patching the rom was all you really had to do.

NextStep is much more complex. A better option would be to start with an Amiga port of BSD 4.3 and use the Next binaries

[olsen]

Please forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere but I have been following the recovery of the Mac emulator for the Next computer called Daydream. I did not even know there was such an emulator for the NeXT computer and to be honest I was surprised given the bad blood between Apple and the founding members of Next. (Though this was a 3rd party product)

DayDream was very much like Amax on the Amiga as you had a box with Mac roms attached to the computer (in this case the DSP port) so the emulator could be legal.

I actually have this in storage, along with the hardware it attaches to.

At the time when this hit the market, it must have been the highest-resolution (black & white) Macintosh display that you could want to use, although shelling out for a NeXT cube or NeXTstation would have been quite an investment. But then again, some DTP users were willing to go that far. The NeXT megapixel display was quite good at its time in terms of resolution, sharpness and contrast.

I do wonder if this solution qualified as an emulator. It took over the display hardware and the CPU, but the Macintosh hard disk contents were still stored on the NeXT hard disk as a file. So supposedly a layer to manage the hard disk access would have had to be part of this solution.

DayDream shipped with a System 7 setup, and (funny enough) because you could not upgrade it much, it started to suffer from Mac OS 68k Y2K bugs. It still works, but everything connected to time keeping and the current date is wonky.

[olsen]

MacOS was quite a simple operating system & loading and patching the rom was all you really had to do.

NextStep is much more complex. A better option would be to start with an Amiga port of BSD 4.3 and use the Next binaries

If I remember correctly, the BSD kernel API and userland code grafted onto the MACH kernel used in NeXTstep is significantly older than 4.3BSD, somewhere in the ballpark of 4.2-Net/2 release. Also, you'd have to find a Mach-o binary loader to match it. Doable, but probably not a lot of fun in the long run.

[psxphill]

If I remember correctly, the BSD kernel API and userland code grafted onto the MACH kernel used in NeXTstep is significantly older than 4.3BSD, somewhere in the ballpark of 4.2-Net/2 release. Also, you'd have to find a Mach-o binary loader to match it. Doable, but probably not a lot of fun in the long run.

I don't know, blame wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Unix

I have no idea how fun it would be to run NeXTSTEP. Although you could probably find out by running the x86 version on a PC, 3.1+ or OpenStep.

[nicholas]

This works on virtual box with a bit of fiddling.

https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/4x

[darkage]

I was just watching a youtube video about NeXTStep OS.   The default windows manager kind of reminders me of WindowMaker which was my preferred windows manager for Xwindows when I was big into Un*x and XFCE wasn't around. .

was just thinking it has 68k code, hmm running on an Amiga possible ?   I know we have NetBSD.. (I love OpenBSD btw)

Edit - opps Ive caught up on the discussions above..   too much work to port

[olsen]

I don't know, blame wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Unix

I have no idea how fun it would be to run NeXTSTEP. Although you could probably find out by running the x86 version on a PC, 3.1+ or OpenStep.

I actually did a few experiments in this area recently (OpenStep), and some 15 years ago (NeXTSTEP).

You can install OpenStep for Intel in a virtual machine and give it a spin. You are limited to the very basic graphics hardware support offered by the installation disks, which takes a lot of fun out of using the system (it's greyscale 640x480 VGA). OpenStep and its precursors were intended to be used with a high resolution display, and without it, things become very uncomfortable very quickly.

Both OpenStep and NeXTSTEP are now so old that it is next to impossible to build or install any contemporary software on them. Say, you wanted to play MP3-encoded files or use SSH either as a client or a server application.

Today such software expects a POSIX-ish host, and both OpenStep and NeXTSTEP are far removed from that. These operating systems sit among the branches of the original Unix tree, with distant cousins such as HP-UX, IRIX or SunOS on other branches. Portable Unix software had to account for the minor and major differences between these platforms that shared common ancestors, but were at times so different that it took extra effort to port the code to those platforms.

Because NeXTSTEP is an "exotic" Unix, building client software required the respective project's "configure" script to run and produce useful results, which in turn would permit the code to be built. This step almost always ran into trouble, because either the respective script supposedly supported some version of NeXTSTEP, but that was not the version I was using, or the NeXTSTEP support was by now incomplete and untested. Tinkering with the script sometimes allowed for it to produce some useful build files, but once the compiler and linker got to work, the code failed to compile or link because it had never been ported or tested on NeXTSTEP.

I tried this with OpenSSH and LAME, but both failed in the early stages of the build process. That was in 2001. For OpenSSH one of the obstacles was in building the crypto libraries it needed, and that failed, too. One could, given enough time and patience, port such software properly, but this seems like a really tall order. Even the 'C' compiler is so old that you would have to port a more recent version first.

Long story short: in my opinion you can have a lot more fun with your Amiga than with the NeXTEP or OpenStep platforms today, and that used to be true even 15 years ago