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This article first appeared in the December 1999 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
It's been a while since I wrote here about my friend, Greg, the hacker. Greg's been playing around with personal computers for more than twenty years, and proudly calls himself a hacker. Of course, one of Greg's pet peeves is the way the word "hacker" has been hijacked by computer challenged journalists to be synonymous with teenaged cyber-criminals with too much time and too little common sense. He still fondly remembers the days when a hacker was anyone who was obsessed with the innards of their computer. He'll carefully explain that the teen cyber-nuisances are crackers and not hackers. But, then, he knows the war of words is lost as long as computer-illiterate television reporters refuse to listen.
Greg's been tinkering with computers longer than I've known him, and he has just about one of everything running in his basement. His wife, Liz, who confines her computing to Quicken, word processing, and surfing, calls his basement playroom the Cyber-Dungeon. She tolerates his habit, because, as he reminds her, he could share the hobbies of his father and younger brother: bass fishing and beer. She knows only too well that his brother's goal in life is to live on his bass boat, with occasional trips to the nearest mini-mart to load the pickup with essentials like twelve-packs of Bud and Marlboros. I imagine her attitude is something like "cut your losses and count your blessings."
It's usually pretty interesting to see what Greg's up to, and right now he's fascinated with emulation--making one computer act like it's another computer.
Just about anyone who's used a Mac in the last few years has heard of Virtual PC from Connectix. It's a program that simulates an Intel standard PC, complete with sound and Ethernet cards, right inside your Mac. It's even fast enough to be useful, although a modern Wintel box is a lot faster. Connectix also has Virtual Game Station, a Sony Playstation emulator that also works impressively well.
Greg is into some less well known emulators.
"I'm going retro right now," he says. "I expect my tired old Apple IIgs will soon be heading to the great trash heap in the sky. I still think the old Apple II machines are a lot of fun to play with, and I've got a lot of junk written with the original AppleWorks. Bernie ][ the Rescue could be called Virtual IIgs. On a G3 or G4 Mac, it's for sure the fastest Apple II ever to appear."
Bernie ][ the Rescue is the unlikely name of a shareware ($35) program that emulates the old Apple IIgs. The IIgs was the last and most powerful of the Apple II computers. It was introduced in 1987 and was upgraded at least three times until production ceased in late 1992. The IIgs was never a best seller, because Apple's big push was behind the Mac by the time the IIgs appeared.
Although it sounds like a 97 pound weakling by today's standards, the Apple IIgs was pretty powerful in its time. It had a 65816 processor running at a snappy 2.8 MHz and could accommodate a whopping 16 megabytes of RAM.
Even better, it had an emulation mode allowing it to run the thousands of programs written for its predecessors, the Apple II, II+, //e, //c and //c+.
Greg thinks of the original Apple II series as the "Model-T of computers." In fact, like so many who learned microcomputing back in the late 70's and early 80's, he began by learning everything about his father's Apple II with 16K of RAM and 6502 processor whizzing along at 1 MHz. "There's a lot of good software from back then. Some of the best games I've played are the original Lode Runner and Qix. It's fun to take them out and have a look once in a while. AppleWorks is still a pretty lean and mean program, especially with the powerful add-ons from long gone companies like the Beagle Brothers and Applied Engineering."
Greg had his venerable IIgs and his shiny new 350 MHz G3 Mac set up side-by-side. Both were running the original Apple II Lode Runner. The Mac looked a little smoother, and its sound was a little cleaner, but they were both pretty much the same. Of course, I'm ignoring that the Mac was running the game in one small window, while it took up the whole screen on the gs.
Greg laughed a little and said "You know, at first I didn't think the games would be playable. When I first turned Bernie on, it was so fast I couldn't keep up. That was great in AppleWorks, but games were impossible. I took a big spreadsheet in AppleWorks and timed how long it took to compute. The G3 with Bernie was almost 50 times faster than the gs. Luckily, there are settings in Bernie to slow down the emulation, so Lode Runner is pretty much like normal. I wasted a lot of time on that game when it first came out!"
Bernie isn't the only Apple II emulator on the Mac, but it does seem the most solid and complete. Shortly after the PowerPC Macs were introduced, Apple even had their own emulator, called Gus, available. Gus is gone, but a half dozen others remain. A summary of most of them can be found at Emulation.Net (www.emulation.net). There are even several that run under Microsoft Windows and DOS.
All of the emulators have one big problem: the Apple II ROM. Every Apple II has a built-in program that makes the Apple II know it's an Apple II. This ROM program is still copyrighted by Apple, and they're not making it available to anyone outside the Cupertino mother ship, even though they've been asked to do so many times.
"I have a real Apple IIgs, so there was no problem making an image file of the ROM to use on the Mac," said Greg. "The docs with all the emulation programs tell you how to do this. But, the special ROM must make it hard to get new users for these programs."
He continued, "I don't know why Apple doesn't just hang the ROMs out on the 'Net. It's not like they're ever going to need them again. Of course, part of the ROM is AppleSoft BASIC which is really owned by Microsoft. The rumor is Microsoft won't let their code out, so Apple's hands are tied. Of course, the ROMs are out there, unofficially. Anyone willing to put a little time into a Sherlock search can find them pretty quickly."
Microsoft finally released the free Outlook Express 5.0 mail client for the Mac. It's a major overhaul of version 4.5, with many new features.
As usual, the system requirements have gone up along with the version number. It won't run on any Mac OS prior to 8.1 and wants between eight and ten megabytes of RAM to behave normally. It also seems slower doing many things.
The POP functionality is the same as before, but the IMAP support has been greatly improved. Version 4.5 is extremely sluggish logging into an IMAP server, while 5.0 is almost as fast as other very capable IMAP clients such as Mulberry and PowerMail. A big problem with 4.5 was that it would get confused when deleting a group of messages from an IMAP server. This problem seems cured in the latest version.
This release is not without problems. Shortly after it came out, Microsoft released the following security advisory.
"Users may experience a Trojan Horse type security issue that makes it possible for a malicious sender to send an MHTML message to an OE 5 user that will automatically download a file to the user's default Download folder without the OE 5 user's knowledge. (The location of the default Download folder is set in IE or Internet Config.) The downloaded file can be anything, including an executable. This scenario is similar to malicious users sending out messages containing harmful attachments in that the user has to explicitly take action (opening the attachment, or in this case, opening the downloaded file) in order for any damage to occur--the file is NOT automatically opened or executed on the user's machine. Since the user is not aware that the file has been downloaded, the user may encounter the file later and open/launch it. Since the file can be an executable, launching it could cause damage to the user's machine. Users should NEVER open any file in the Downloads Folder unless they know where the file came from."
Outlook Express is a free download from Microsoft (www.microsoft.com/mac).
Adobe quickly repaired the problems experienced by Mac OS 9 users with Adobe Type Manager. The new version 4.5.2 of both Adobe Type Manager and Adobe Type Manager Deluxe are available (www.adobe.com/support/downloads/atmmac.htm).
There will be no meeting of the Louisville Computer Society in December. The next meeting will be January 28.
The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
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