The goal of the Gryphel Project is to help preserve software made for early Macintosh computers, the computers that Apple sold from 1984 to 1996 based upon Motorola’s 680x0 microprocessors.
The center of this project - a family of free and open source emulators that allow such software to be used on modern computers
The rest of this project - software for the early Macintosh, links to alternatives to Mini vMac, links to related forums, lists of books, and more.
April 4, 2021 - permanent link
The MkKeysTl command line tool now supports multiple platforms, as was done for SigChkTl and SigWrtTl.
Compiling command line tools for m68k and mppc targets is now automated like all the other supported platforms. Except that they are not reproducible builds yet. It does not seem to be possible to clear junk out of the “Reserved for system use” area of a resource fork without the operating system immediately putting junk back in. Another approach would be to have to my tool for creating a “.sit” archive file clear this area in its output.
March 9, 2021 - permanent link
I noticed that some Apple System Software disk images I have fail the new test in Mini vMac 37 that is designed to protect files that aren’t actually Macintosh disk images by refusing to mount them. (The -ndp option, which defaults to on.) The boot blocks of these System Software images are garbage.
So today’s Mini vMac 37.03 beta no longer looks at the boot blocks, but only checks the master directory block.
February 14, 2021 - permanent link
The SigWrtTl command line tool now supports multiple platforms, as was done for SigChkTl.
While doing this, I worked out how to automate compiling command line tools using a networked virtual machine (in this case to compile for Apple Silicon), like is done for the Mini vMac Variations Service. To finish being able to compile for all supported platform with one command, I next should figure out how to automate compiling command line tools for m68k. Perhaps by using, for now, the technique used for compiling Mini vMac 3.5 for m68k, which is slower than current methods, but fast enough when not for the Variations Service.
January 30, 2021 - permanent link
A Chinese translation for the Mini vMac user interface has been anonymously contributed.
Unfortunately, as mentioned on the Mini vMac Localization page, displaying Chinese characters is not currently feasible for Mini vMac. I used Google Translate to convert the characters into Pinyin, and added a Chinese Pinyin page. This translation can be included in the next branch of Mini vMac. But I gather, from people who have previously considered doing the Chinese translation (1 2 3), that it would not be very useful. (Elsewhere I have seen it compared to an English speaker trying to read English written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Even without previous practice it is doable, but slow and awkward.)
Previous news - News Archive
:
Thanks to Donald Shepherd, Chris Hanson, Stephen Barbieri, Benjamin Yackley, Samuel Davidoff, Chad Stanke, Colin Ng, Andrew Macfarlane, John Miller, Mark Smith, Todd Katz, Steve Torello, Byron Formwalt, Katherine Palacios, Dallin Pincock, David Goodson, Jay Petersen, James Weiner, Roger Clark, Keith Palmer, Andy McConn, Felix Orsini, Elliot Nunn, Herbert Wetli, Pacific Alarms, Olivier SIGG, Sylvain Pellet, Yvan BARTHELEMY, Tim Johnson, Richard McConnell, Dimitri Boone, Andrew Richards, Steven Hirsch, Ton van der Liet, Vincent Penichou, Reinhard Zielinski, Pierre Beck, Klaus Ritter, Christopher Courtney, Robert Hoppe, Jerome Acks, Martin Nobel, Nathan Lee, Jose Manuel Mendez Magan, Marie Friis, Jason Galarneau, Cedric Tremblay, Deborah Carne, Michael Sprague, Andrew Y., Attila Fehervari, Jesse Cochran, Manu Heikkila, Parinya Tantasin, Kamil Korolczuk, Jan Baumgartner, Shearwood Frames, Carl Lewis, Richard Cini, Chris Hanson, Michael Dennis, Jim Dickison, Glenn Petrie, Nicolas Geissler, Padawer, Chris Hanson, Anthony Easa, John Schilling, Holger Burmester, Michael Grundmann, Conscious Shell, Guillermo Grana Gomez, Luke Anderson, Matthew McFarlane, Chris Hanson, Jason Buss, Toby Ord, Jadan Sloan, Codey Vargas, Wesley Wilkinson, Peter Krstanovski, Xiangtian Wei, James Licata, Ian Murray, David Templeton, Benjamin Watson, Galen Tackett, Michael Longval, Jeff Halter, Mark Brethen, Mohamed El-Rouby, Deniz Ersu, Tam Chi Hang Keith, Jonathan Badger, Casey Mulvihill, Galen Hunt, Cloud Propeller, Inc., Carly Marshiano, Chris Rutter, Ryan Fialcowitz, Anonymous, Dean Brissinger, Anonymous, Chaled Schmidt, twocargar Multimedia, R D Bridges, Berend Vosmer, 0xroy, keith struan, Steve Crutchfield, Mario Cavigli, Tak Chung Lung, Ben Lacara, Ignacio Arango Valderrama, robert lloyd, James Adams, Thomas Teixeira, David Steedman, Alessandro Bruno, Brian Martin, Jeremy Landry, Jacob Ochs, Gianluca Abbiati, Brielle Harrison, G2K Argentina S.A., Piotr Jaczewski, david frydman, Maxim Prochshenko, Mason Shell, and Josh Young for sponsoring 184 days of health insurance.
Thanks to Yu Tsz Lui, Edzard Ceadda Stanislaus III, Arnaud Abbati, Scrutinize My System, and John Leake for sponsoring 15 months of web hosting for the Gryphel project.