I’ll cover it more in detail in future columns. This is just a sample of what you can accomplish with Mini vMac. If you want the emulator to run at actual Mac Plus speed (8 MHz), press Control-L. To view the emulator in full screen just type Control-F. Once Mini vMac is up and running, you use it just like a Mac Plus. If you’ve made it this far, pat yourself on the back. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should see the familiar Welcome to Macintosh greeting. Now just drag the disk image into the window You should see the blinking question mark icon (above). Once you have your disk images made, start up Mini vMac. Disk copy 6.2.2 does not handle 400K or 800K disks correctly, so you can’t use this version. To be able to use your system and program disks with Mini vMac, you’ll need to use a utility such as Apple’s Disk Copy 4.2 to create 400K or 800K disk images. The Mac’s ROM image is copyrighted by Apple, so if you don’t own the computer, you are breaking the law by using it. Name the file “vMac.rom” and put it in the same folder as the application. Next, transfer this file to the computer you will be running Mini vMac on. Use the CopyRoms utility to copy the ROM image from your Mac Plus to a file. In order to emulate a Mac Plus, you’ll need to obtain a Mac Plus ROM image. I would recommend putting it in a folder called Mini vMac. Just uncompress the archives and put the application anywhere you want to. I use the stable version of Mini vMac (2.6.1) under OS X. The file that you have to download depends on your operating system. To get Mini vMac installed on your computer, first download Mini vMac (link below). Development of vMac has stagnated for a long time, so Paul Pratt decided to continue improving it and created Mini vMac. Mini vMac is a Mac Plus emulator based on vMac. This’ll also make it easier for me to import screen shots into my articles.

I own a Mac Plus, but since it’s so old and slow, I prefer to emulate it using Mini vMac (based on vMac) on my blueberry iMac DV. Windows couldn’t match the flexibility and ease of use of the Mac OS until several versions later. I’ve always been interested in why the Macintosh OS has looked so good and was so easy to use from its first release. Even though our PC was by far the more powerful computer, I preferred using the Macs at school due their good looks and ease of use. We had a 75 MHz Pentium PC at home running Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

My school district is very poor, so even though it was 1997, we were using five-year-old LC IIs. My first experience with Macs was in second grade when we were finally old enough to “graduate” from Apple IIs.

I specialize in the lowest of the low-end spectrum, and I’ll be covering Apple’s older Macintosh operating systems starting from 1.0 and working up to 6.0.8 – and the Macs that run them.

Old mac emulator