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09 Aug 03 : Released AutoCopyROM v1.0b1.

Introduction

In the process of testing software, it is sometimes required that testing be done on older Macintosh® computers, particularly those that have the original 68000 processor, or have a small black & white display.

It is not always practical to test on actual old machines, so there is an alternative - the use of a Macintosh emulator. There are many emulators for different non-Macintosh machines and non-Mac OS® operating systems, such as popular game consoles, that run on a Macintosh running Mac OS. Particularly on Power Macintosh G3 and Power Mac® G4 machines running Mac OS X, there is enough horsepower to easily emulate older machines. This includes emulating older Macintosh computers. There are several popular Macintosh emulators available for the Macintosh (or for Microsoft® Windows™ and Linux®).

More information on Macintosh emulation.

Most of these Macintosh emulators require you to have a legally obtained copy of a ROM from an older Macintosh machine that you wish to emulate. To this end, there is a popular utility called CopyROM written by Philip "PC" Cummins that will extract the contents of a real Macintosh ROM, and save the ROM contents to a disk file, for use by emulators.

CopyROM is very helpful, but it has one shortcoming - it won't be of help if the Macintosh you trying to extract the ROM contents from has a non-working ADB port, since you won't be able to interact with the CopyROM dialogs using a mouse and/or keyboard.

Why might this be a problem you ask? It is not uncommon for older machines to have the ADB pico-fuse on the logic board blown by hot-plugging an ADB keyboard/mouse (we all do it, but ADB does not support hot-plugging). It is possible to repair the ADB pico-fuse by soldering on a new fuse, but this is not practical for a lot of people. In my particular case, I recently blew the ADB pico-fuse on a Mac SE/30 that I use for software testing, and I had a Mac IIx rescued from the trash that had a blown ADB pico-fuse (ironically both machines have the same ROM version).

I set out to find a software solution. Initially I developed a System Extension (INIT) that patched CopyROM's operation on the fly to generate Return key events. This solution worked on some machines, but tended to crash on others.

So I re-implemented the features of CopyROM in a new application, that doesn't require user interaction. Hence AutoCopyROM was born.

More information on CopyROM, vMac, and vMac for Mac OS.

System Requirements

Any Macintosh (except Macintosh 128K, Macintosh 512Ke) running System 6.0.4 or later (Mac OS X not supported, except in Classic mode).

Disk space required is less than 15 K; available free memory required is approximately 384 K

Download

Files are stored as StuffIt (.sit) binary files, or Apple Disk Copy device image (.dmg) files, or MacBinary (.bin) files, or BinHex (.hqx) files. You may require an appropriate FTP client and/or web browser settings.

• AutoCopyROM v1.0b1 (released 09 Aug 03).

  The ".mac" (or iDisk Public Folder for user "teague") web site appears to have more reliable file transfers.

  [ .mac | HTTP | FTP ]

Online Support

Support is available via EMail.

Online Documentation

Documentation is not yet available online for AutoCopyROM. The documentation is provided as part of the downloadable package.

Change History

09 Aug 03 :

AutoCopyROM

v1.0b1. First public release

Known bugs

None.