Emulators Online - SoftMac Online Documentation -Online Documentation Updated January 17, 2003 Welcome to the SoftMac Online Documentation page. This is where we show you how to download and install the latest releases of SoftMac 2000 and SoftMac XP.
Users have reported that the emulator has been slow recently. We have found that a possible cause of slowdown is that the temp directory for the emulator ends up with too many stale files inside. As a workaround, in 28.0.8+, we do not store ADB liveness check files in that directory anymore.
If you have purchased SoftMac on CD-ROM you should also consult the printed manual which came with your CD-ROM. If you are currently running an older version of SoftMac (prior to 8.20) by all means go to our and run the latest SoftMac installer. This will install the latest online releases of SoftMac, Gemulator, and Xformer. After you read this documentation and get the software installed, there are two other pages you should read:. The page has tips on optimizing the performance of both Windows and Mac OS. You'd be amazed at how much you don't know about your computer!.
The step-by-step page covers the real life example of freshly install Mac OS on a new computer, something you will need to do if you are installing Mac OS for the first time on your PC Changes and improvements in the Gemulator 2000 and SoftMac XP releases A little bit about the history and capabilities of SoftMac. We have been offering PC users the ability to run both Atari ST and Apple Macintosh software on MS-DOS based PC for about 10 years now. For most of that time, the functionality of emulating and running Atari and Macintosh was provided in a single combined product called Gemulator, first on MS-DOS, and then later on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. In 1998 after releasing Gemulator version 6.0, we split Gemulator into Atari specific and Macintosh specific product lines. The Atari emulation product retained the name Gemulator, while the new Macintosh emulation product was named SoftMac. The original release of SoftMac 2000 launched in 1999 at COMDEX Las Vegas was thus the 7th generation of emulation technology and was also called SoftMac version 7.0 rather than version 1.0.
SoftMac 2000 included the obligatory Y2K bug fixes, Pentium III and Athlon optimizations (which had both been released earlier in 1999), and Windows 2000 fixes (which was about to be released in early 2000). During the spring and summer of 2000 we released the SoftMac 7.1 (Service Release 1) and SoftMac 7.2 (Service Release 2) upgrades to add some additional Windows 2000 and Windows Millennium fixes. Although we are treating the 8.0 release as a 3rd service release, the 8.0 release is actually based on a new emulation engine. In almost all cases the 8.0 engine is faster over the previous generation, while using significantly less disk space and memory. Most of our SoftMac 8.0 benchmarks (Speedometer, Photoshop, Fractals, boot speed, etc.) are faster across the board compared to version 7.2.
The new version 8 engine also eliminates the problem in version 7 of using Gemulator for running 24-bit 68000 code (i.e. 32-bit 'dirty' code) and using SoftMac to run 32-bit clean code. The good news is the new version 8 engine handles 24-bit and 32-bit address equally well, eliminating the need for two versions of SoftMac.
As a bonus, you can now even bring up the Memory control panel in Mac OS and toggle 24-bit and 32-bit addressing and it will work just fine, increase the stability and compatibility of our product quite a bit with older Mac software. The changes also allow other control panels and Mac OS utilities, such as Monitors & Sounds and Drive Setup, to work better than before. Another major change was the addition of the new Auto Configure command. Your email feedback indicated that our products, especially SoftMac, were hard to set up due to the numerous settings that had to be specified before using the product. Now with Auto Configure, you need merely answer a few simple questions and have the product running in a few seconds. The product will figure out and set various options automatically, although you are still free to manually adjust them at any time. In July 2001, we launched SoftMac XP based on the version 8.1 engine which added support for Windows XP.
In April 2002 we released SoftMac XP version 8.2 which contained significant rewrites to deliver significantly faster performance on both Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon XP processors, from 30% to 100% faster. Finally, we added the Tools menu to Gemulator and SoftMac which adds disk imaging commands directly to the emulators. While this functionality already exists in the separate Gemulator Explorer utility, many users found it annoying to switch between the emulator and the disk utility. So we put the most common Gemulator Explorer features directly into the emulators - formatting a blank Macintosh floppy disk, creating a disk image from a floppy, writing an image back to a floppy, and creating blank hard disk image files. Overall, since the original release of SoftMac 2000, we've updated it to support quite a few more Macintosh ROMs including ROMs that no other emulator supports, we've added the disk imaging features mentioned above, fixed compatibility problems with Mac OS, worked around bug in Windows drivers and difference in various Windows releases, added the Auto Configure feature mentioned above, and made many other changes.