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Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator
GitHub repo: https://github.com/twvd/snow https://github.com/twvd/snow, Announcement from creator: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12509 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12509, Originally-submitted source with further details: https://oldbytes.space/@smallsco/114747196289375530 https://oldbytes.space/@smallsco/114747196289375530
- the_other 1y agoOff-topic... I wish Apple would bring back the white menubar background and the coloured logo. The white menubar makes the whole computer easier to use in a small but constant way. The coloured apple icon would suggest they no longer have their heads stuck up their assess and might bring back "fun" rather than "showing off" to their design process. And then maybe, maybe... with that "suggestion" symbolised in the UI, we can hope they might bring back the more rigorous user-centric design process they used to be famous for.
- xenonite 1y agoWhat about setting a white background, which yields a white menubar? A color logo might be added with an overlay app – or you reminisce a black&white screen.
- trinix912 1y agoSo are we supposed to make custom backgrounds with a 30px white bar on top instead of expecting this to be an option in the settings like in every other sanely customizable OS?
- raihansaputra 1y agoseconding the overlay app, i forgot the name but there was an app that can configure the appearance of the menubar. maybe it's my menubar icon organizer? Not dozer or bartender, but can't recall right now
- egypturnash 1y agoIce organizes menubar icons and can alter the bar's appearance.
- thm 1y agohttps://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/23/macos-tahoe-beta-2-menu-bar-background/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/23/macos-tahoe-beta-2-menu...
- SkyeCA 1y agoAre they really changing the UI up again? I am actually so done at this point. The endless UI churn drives me absolutely mad, but I suppose when there's nothing left to do, making it look different is easy. I suppose a built in volume mixer is still too much to ask for though.
- jamwil 1y agoDo you harbour an honest expectation that computer UIs will look the same in 2035 as they do in 2025? That would prove to be a silly thing to hope for if you were to backtest it. It’s not churn its change, and it’s inevitable. No sense getting worked up over it.
- coldpie 1y agoSure, why not? My desktop environment hasn't significantly changed since I first set it up in 2007. The screenshots here[1] span more than 20 years (XFCE 4.0 was released in 2003) and, aside from different user-selected theming choices, look substantially similar across that whole time. [1] https://xfce.org/about/screenshots https://xfce.org/about/screenshots
- jamwil 1y agoI like XFCE but you can’t cherry pick a niche DE that is designed for minimalism and extrapolate that to computer UIs writ large, which was the subject of my comment. Gnome, KDE, Windows, macOS… all evolve regularly.
- hadlock 1y agoLinux desktop hasn't changed appreciably since the advent of Windows 2000, perhaps even NT4. That's 1996 or 29 years ago. XP changed the color of the start button and rounded the edges, and Windows 8 had a purple theme but it's been a remarkably consistent design. I think the only reason Microsoft has made any changes to the start bar is so that the marketing department had something visually different to show consumers, since it's such a central part of the GUI. KDE and XFCE are so similar I often forget which one to install on a new computer. The only improvement I've seen has been for mac they have the command+space launcher which is functionally like the win+type the app you want. Graphical file browsers haven't changed since the original Mac and/or Win 3.1. Mac has never had a good tree view IMO but they do have a version of it. The only reason UIs would change at this point is to keep UI/UX folks employed and busy, and give the marketing department something new to talk about.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- celsius1414 1y agoTurning “Reduce Transparency” on in Accessibility > Display will solidify the menubar in both light and dark modes. I go through phases with transparency off or on.
- the_other 1y agoSame. Sometimes I enjoy the translucent menus. They make the machine look "glossy" and expensive. But they're definitely harder to read than opaque flat ones. With "reduce transparency" on, it's better, but the menubar still isn't white. It's a textured light grey that's closer to the look of an unfocused app window than the solid, dependable, flat thing I wish it still was.
- thristian 1y agoFor some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/ https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/ For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years. For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidelity emulators like 86Box and MartyPC. The C64 has VICE, the Amiga has WinUAE, even the Apple II has had high-quality emulators like KEGS and AppleWin, but the Mac has mostly been limited to high-level and approximate emulators like Basilisk II.
- xdfgh1112 1y agoThat article is objectively true but .. I've never seen such a grotesque dismissal of the hard work people have done for free.
- tom_ 1y agoFor the amount of time and effort that went into that article, the author could surely have fixed at least one of the things they complain about! And they don't seem to understand the C #include mechanism at all, so should we even pay attention to their technical criticisms in the first place?!
- ndiddy 1y agoI don't know if you read the whole article. The author did make a Mini vMac fork to clean up the build system and code, she linked it at the end. https://github.com/InvisibleUp/uvmac https://github.com/InvisibleUp/uvmac .
- tom_ 1y agoHa. I was starting to find the article a bit tiring and the moment my eyes landed on the Conclusion heading I stopped right there. You shouldn't trust my criticisms either.
- jakedata 1y agoMuch of my early post-college work is stored across a stack of Mac formatted Bernoulli disks. The software requires an ADB dongle to run, so physical hardware is required. I wonder if any of those ADB to USB adapters could be mapped into the emulator?
- ChrisRR 1y agoIf you've not backed it up already that data might be gone. If it's valuable to you then I'd recommend finding out sooner than later
- jakedata 1y agoGood advice of course. It is not valuable, and it is not my product - I merely worked on it. The real value was guiding me _away_ from a career as a programmer (and the friends we made along the way).
- kalleboo 1y agoAll of the ADB to USB adapters I know of only support mice and keyboards and have internal firmware that maps to USB HID. You'd have to write a custom firmware to make a raw pass through to an emulator... It would probably be easier to crack the software!
- mrpippy 1y agoThe Griffin iMate was the most popular ADB-USB adapter from the time, and probably supports non-input devices (it would’ve been the only option at the time to make those dongles work).
- kalleboo 1y agoAh yeah, the ones that were sold at the time would work if you passed through USB to an emulator that supported USB hardware, or reverse-engineered their proprietary protocol. I was only thinking of the modern options when I wrote my comment.
- DrNosferatu 1y agoAny Flatpak, Snap or Scoop editions?
- mdavid626 1y agoLittle help - how can I find ROM-s? I tried to download some using sites found in Google, but the emulator always says "Unknown or unsupported ROM file". How can I find usable roms?
- reaperducer 1y agoLittle help - how can I find ROM-s? I tried to download some using sites found in Google, but the emulator always says "Unknown or unsupported ROM file". How can I find usable roms? These seem to work: https://archive.org/details/mac_rom_archive_-_as_of_8-19-2011 https://archive.org/details/mac_rom_archive_-_as_of_8-19-201...
- mdavid626 1y agoVery nice, thank you. I try to run some of them, e.g. Macintosh Plus. It does accept the ROM, but it just shows a flashing floppy disk icon and doesn't do anything else. How could this be fixed?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- duskwuff 1y agoThe icon is telling you that you need a disk to boot from. https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/start.html https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/start.html has some links.
- wsc981 1y agoThe Mac Plus didn’t have an internal hard drive. So you need to start the OS from a floppy. My father used an external hard drive with his Mac Plus, back in the day.
- numpad0 1y agoMacintosh ROMs aren't OS, they're like BIOS images. The OS were supplied in forms of either CD for data + minimum OS on floppy, or a 40-ish box of floppies. Apps on Macintosh were supplied as disk images often compressed in hqx formats. You'll need PC Exchange and StuffIt Expander - think of those as equivalents of a file extension renaming tool, and 7-zip. Installation of apps was often accomplished by dragging and dropping the application icon from installer image to Applications folder, although some did came with Windows-like installer apps. Unmounting disks and installer images was done by moving disk icons to Trash(recycle bin). It's the most intuitive and straightforward feature of classic MacOS, followed by "Shut down" menu being under "Special".
- ChrisRR 1y agoI'm not sure why OP links to this site, but the actual project is here https://snowemu.com/ https://snowemu.com/ https://github.com/twvd/snow https://github.com/twvd/snow
- ColinWright 1y agoPersonally I find an announcement like the one linked more helpful and useful to create a context, rather than linking directly to the project. Links to the actual project are in the submitted post, so you can get an overview before then being directed to the project itself. As always YMMV, indeed, YMWV, but I like seeing the announcement giving the context rather than a bare pointer to the project.
- ColinWright 1y ago... and while I appreciate the rationale behind it, I'm always saddened when a carefully chosen link that suits the way I think, giving and overview and a context with links to the projects, is then over-written by the direct link to the project that doesn't give a sense of why it's interesting or relevant. But as the Man in Black says in The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment".
- tomhow 1y agoWe can have our cake and eat it. The guidelines are clear that the original/canonical source is what we want on HN: Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. But you're welcome to post a comment with links to other sources that give the extra information and context, and we can pin it to the top of the thread, or do what I've done here and put them in the top text.
- ColinWright 1y agoWe won't agree on this. I understand the rationale, and as someone who moderates other communities I can totally understand why this is administered as a blanket policy. Having said that, it does sometimes result in what I think of as sub-optimal situations where information is unnecessarily lost or obscured. In particular, adding a link to the original post, as you have done here, is likely to be of minimal value. People will click on the headline link, wonder what it's about or why it's "news", and close the window. On the other hand, clicking through first to the post means people will see the context, then those who are interested will click through to the project site(s). I've done this analysis in other contexts and found that the decision tree for engagement and user-information is in favour of linking to the post, not the project. But as I say, I understand your position, and in the end, it's not my forum, not my community, and not my choice.
- wk_end 1y agoI suppose - owing to its accuracy - that this doesn't have some of BasiliskII's killer features: it patches the OS/ROMs to add support for super-high resolutions and (mostly) seamless integration with the host's file system and network. It's a shame that Basilisk - possibly owing to its inaccurate but killer features - is as janky as it is, because it's really remarkably pleasant to use when it works.
- hedgehog 1y agoAn accurate emulator with clean codebase is a good starting point onto which to add patches/shortcuts. I've looked through the Basilisk patching code, it's not really complicated, and there are a handful of partial Toolbox reimplementations including the bits in Basilisk, Executor (author is in the comments here), MACE, etc. It would be some work to port but mostly direct translation of the code & adding test infrastructure.
- duskwuff 1y agoAs an aside, I really wish MACE would open-source their work. They've made some impressive progress, but I worry that work's going to go to waste if it stays closed.
- hedgehog 1y agoAha, I got MACE and Advanced Mac Substitute (AMS) mixed up. AMS looks less complete but has source available. https://www.v68k.org/advanced-mac-substitute/ https://www.v68k.org/advanced-mac-substitute/
- nxobject 1y agoOne way to add devices that doesn't require ROM or software modification, but _does_ require modifying the emulator: create a virtual memory-mapped device off 68K bus, and write a driver/CDEV to drive it. The SE and Macintosh II had blessed but different expansion options, after all. For earlier models, there are unused apertures in model memory maps that are at least 2KB large, but they do differ between models.
- ColinWright 1y agoThe original submission was to a post that explains why this is news, and not just a random project: A brand new 68k Mac emulator quietly dropped last night!! “Snow” can emulate the Mac 128k, 512k, Plus, SE, Classic, and II. It supports reading disks from bitstream and flux-floppy images, and offers full execution control and debugging features for the emulated CPU. Written using Rust, it doesn't do any ROM patching or system call interception, instead aiming for accurate hardware-level emulation. * Download link (Mac, Windows, Linux): https://snowemu.com https://snowemu.com * Documentation link: https://docs.snowemu.com https://docs.snowemu.com * Source link: https://github.com/twvd/snow https://github.com/twvd/snow * Release announcement: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12509 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12509 -- https://oldbytes.space/@smallsco/114747196289375530 https://oldbytes.space/@smallsco/114747196289375530 I understand why links get re-written, but I think the context is relevant and can help the random reader who is unfamiliar with the project.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- trollbridge 1y agoWas this inspired by MartyPC?
- GloriousCow 1y agoFunny you mention that, I'm actually friends with twvd and we share a discord server and trade UI ideas as we both use the same GUI toolkit. Snow actually uses the disk image library I built for MartyPC. Inspired is a strong word. I didn't invent the concept of an accurate emulator, although I'm certainly a fan of his approach.
- Rochus 1y agoDoes the Mac - like the Lisa - also require cycle accurate emulation of the hardware? I spent some time with lisaem and made experiments with Qemu, but the Lisa OS makes assumptions about hardware timing which cannot be met by the latter.
- retrac 1y agoThe early Macs used the IWM, which is basically Wozniak's 1977 Disk II controller reduced to one chip. The same trick with cycle-exact code, that was used in the Apple II, is also used in the Mac. It's why the cursor stops moving sporadically when writing to a disk. The Mac has a 60 Hz interrupt timer that also tracks the cursor. It needs to be switched off when writing. There's a story on Folklore.org by Andy Hertzfeld that mentions it in passing: > Woz's disk technology required that the software feed it new data every 32 microseconds exactly. If we were even a single microsecond early or late, it would cause a glitch in the data and ruin it. In order to write the routines, I needed to know how fast the Macintosh executed each instruction. The manual gave the number of clocks for each instruction, but I wasn't sure how long it took to fetch from memory. So of course, I asked Burrell what the timings were, but I was surprised at his response. > "I don't know. The Mac is synchronous, just like the Apple II, so each instruction has the same timing, every time you execute it, so you will be able to write disk routines that have exact timing. I don't know what it is, so we'll just measure it. Why don't you write your routine and we'll measure it with the logic analyzer." -- https://www.folklore.org/Nybbles.html https://www.folklore.org/Nybbles.html This reminds me that all of the unusual Apple II disk stuff like spiral tracks and different-sized sectors and different nibbilization schemes were also, at least theoretically, possible on the Mac. I wonder if they were ever used for copy protection?
- chiffre01 1y agoI tried loading this with the standard Mac OS 7.1 install disks readily available, with a Mac plus rom. Drive 0: disk ejected? Mini vMac seems to work. I guess it needs some work still.
- car 1y agoFeels so real, great work. Any chance this could be made to emulate an Atari ST?
- msephton 1y agoHatari is already excellent? https://github.com/hatari/hatari https://github.com/hatari/hatari And there's also Clock Signal (CLK) "A latency-hating emulator of: the Acorn Electron and Archimedes, Amstrad CPC, Apple II/II+/IIe and early Macintosh, Atari 2600 and ST, ColecoVision, Enterprise 64/128, Commodore Vic-20 and Amiga, MSX 1/2, Oric 1/Atmos, early PC compatibles, Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum." https://github.com/TomHarte/CLK https://github.com/TomHarte/CLK
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nxobject 1y agoI'm surprised HD20 support is listed as "not applicable" for SE, II, etc: I think all models listed except for II have HD20 boot support in ROM. I use an HD20 emulator with my physical Mac SE. It's one of the most convenient ways to get arbitrary-sized disk images both into emulators -- both Mac emulators and physical floppy emulators.
- cemyazar3131 1y agoPls play my game
- darqis 1y agoObligatory You know nothing Jon Snow quote
- gbraad 1y agoIt is a reimplemented 68K emulator in Rust, so shares nothing from Musashi or UAEs code (wellknown cpu cores in C).