CrossOver is a form of Wine that’s been developed by CodeWeavers. This is one of the best free MAC emulator software for Windows emulator to play playing favorite Nintendo games.But unfortunately not everyone has the means (space, money, time, spouse’s approval) to keep that vintage computer around, ready to be used when you feel like. There is also the problem to load a program in the machine if the disk or tape is not available, or it just refuses to work, or there is no modern interface to help out.In 2013, Microsoft released a free officially-supported solution to help Mac developers test with Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 on Macs: Go to Select your desired testing OS ('Mac')Wine also stands for ‘Wine is not an emulator,’ which makes perfect sense as it’s a tool that only runs Windows apps. Nestopia is compatible with popular games and supports for the controller.However, if you are a Mac OSX user, your option list is shorter, and if you start looking around, most of the options available haven’t been updated for ages, or they don’t offer a good overall experience (lack of features, poor UI, etc).For this article, we decided to dig deep the most known option for Mac OSX – the Virtual ][ emulator, created by Gerard Putter in 2003.Virtual ][ is a commercial software that, even after 12 years, is still actively maintained by its creator with constant updates and bug fixes.These are the main features of the emulator: These amazing piece of software promises to run all your beloved software directly on your modern machine, and a lot of them do deliver an almost complete experience… but how about the noises, smell, keystrokes….?The Apple II family of computers has its fair share of emulators available, as shown in sites like Zophar’s Domain with its Apple II emulator list. I don’t believe you will find a single soul who would prefer to use the retro computer for the actual development instead of modern tools like cross-compilers, IDEs, etc.This is when the emulator comes to save the day. So unless you run Mac OS X 10.6 or earlier (why would you), there is no way to directly install Internet Explorer on Mac.For those who like to spend the time programming retro games or applications, the fun is to code for the machine, but not in the machine.
Ie Emulator Full Power OfAnd if in the future you need more, you only need to pay the difference to get the full license.Another characteristic of the evaluation version is that every 10 minutes, the emulation will pause for 1 minute, showing the following nag screen:Screen asking you to register the softwareAlthough it breaks a little the flow of your experience, the nag screen won’t prevent you to evaluate the software properly. Full license mode: this lifts all restrictions and unlocks the full power of the program.The following table is extracted directly from the software documentation:Full use of matrix printer emulation (no “Evaluation Version” watermark)Use Unix named pipes for serial I/O (experimental)You’re entitled to all future improvements of the programIntelligent power management (as described in Setting the speed)Can resume a machine from a previous sessionA license gives you the right to run Virtual ][ on one computer at a time (you can install it on multiple computers though).The $19 limited license is pretty much what one wanting to play games and do BASIC program will need. This license is mainly intended for users who want to play the old Apple ][ games. Limited license mode: this lifts some of the restrictions of the evaluation mode.Really neat!A feature that is common on most emulators is the ability to speed up the CPU, which can be done turning the knob Speed in the toolbar. That means that I can use a modern text editor to create the BASIC program, and to see it running, just copy and paste it. I was gladly surprised that Virtual ][ has full integration with Mac OSX, including the capability to paste a text typed in the host text editor into the emulator itself. You can have up to two disks on your system, which can be manipulated using the options on the right toolbar, as shown below:This is probably the only UI characteristic of Virtual II that, at least for me, was a little bit confusing to use. This takes a while to get used to, but it is the price to pay to have the best Apple II experience.Probably the best source of Apple II programs is the thousands of disk images available over the Internet, and Virtual II is able to support them without any problem. Again, this is a great feature to be used when you play games.When operating the keyboard, the user has to remember that, as the original Apple, you have to use the left arrow to go back and retype a command, instead of using the Backspace key. Following that, I opened the emulator again, and selected File -> Open Recent, and selected the state file I had saved before. As expected, the plotting continued from where it had stopped before. This is really handy when you are playing a very hard game, for example.To test that I executed my BASIC rainbow again, and while it was plotting the lines, I closed the emulator, saving its state. Beat making software for macAnother proof that Virtual II is very committed to give the real hardware experience is that, when the unit is being accessed the LED goes on and the perfect sound effect of a floppy drive is played.As mentioned before, to eject the disk from a specific unit, you must click over it – you will see the lid getting opened and another sound effect is played. After the disk is inserted into the select unit, that unit will animate closing the drive lid, and emitting a nice sound effect. You do can drag and drop files on them from Finder, and after the disk is already inserted you can eject it by clicking on it.Alternatively, you can insert a new disk, by clicking on the small diskette at the top left of the toolbar, which will open the usual Open File dialog box:After selecting the desired file (disk image), the user can actually select in which unit the floppy goes in, selecting the Drive 1 or 2 option.
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