MagiC on the Macintosh - this has long been a healthy combination not just for Apple enthusiasts. With MagiCMac X, ASH is now poised to enhance the OS flagship Mac OS X with the most professional of all Atari emulations. We took a bite of the Apple.
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Few emulators have changed the Atari world as profoundly as MagiCMac did in the 1990s. After Atari's withdrawal from the computer market, many disappointed Atari fans saw the Mac as an ideal alternative and more advanced platform for their beloved software. Apple itself supported this migration of what was then a considerable user base by launching joint advertisements with MagiC distributor Application Systems Heidelberg in Atari magazines and even allowing ASH onto their CeBIT booth. While MagiCMac was one of ASH's bestsellers for years and the Macintosh successfully established itself as the number one alternative for many ex-Atari users, Atari emulations for PC - not least their own MagiC PC - have now overtaken the "Atari in Mac" in sales figures. Nevertheless, many MagiC users still prefer the Mac as their host system, which certainly has a lot to do with a long-held reservation towards Intel and Microsoft, and a corresponding preference first for the 68k and now the PowerPC platform. Especially in the design sector, Calamus fans swear by the Mac, which has a strong position in this market.
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With the release of the current Apple operating system Mac OS X, professional MagiC users were faced with a choice: either temporarily abandon the "Atari" or continue working under Mac OS 9 - as the Atari emulation ran neither under Mac OS X nor in the Classic mode of the new operating system. As so often in the history of Atari platforms, it was once again a waiting game. For a long time, many MagiC fans increasingly doubted whether their operating environment would be implemented on the current Apple OS, until finally, due to pressure from the Calamus development house invers Software, a first demo version appeared on the internet. Meanwhile, Application Systems is even selling a version 1.0, making it high time to take a deeper look at the best Atari emulation to date.
The reason for MagiCMac's fast emulation speed in the early 90s was certainly due to the fact that Apple, like Atari, relied on the 68k CPU series, which meant that the program only had to perform minimal emulation work. When Apple ventured the switch to PowerPC in the mid-90s, the company ensured that old programs weren't left out in the rain with a 68020 emulation integrated into Mac OS, and it didn't take long before MagiC was working perfectly on the Power Macintosh - continuing to this day under classic Mac OS without problems up to the latest GHz machines.
Mac OS X changed the situation. Apple understandably cut old ties and no longer integrated 68k emulation into its high-tech operating system. This meant the end of simple MagiCMac porting, and chief developer Andreas Kromke had to completely rebuild the Atari emulation from the ground up. The result is MagiCMac X, and "under the hood" a lot has changed.
For MagiC to run under Mac OS X, a new 68k emulation was needed. MagiCMac X emulates a 68020 CPU without FPU, just like the classic MagiCMac. The source material from the multi-emulator M.A.M.E. was used for this purpose. For speed reasons, the 68k emulation is written completely in PPC assembler. To make optimal use of the available processor power, the emulated 68020 "Atari" uses its own thread. This provides additional power even on multiprocessor systems.
MagiCMac X uses the Carbon library of Mac OS X. In theory, this would also allow it to run under classic Mac OS, but this is not the case with MagiCMac X. Mac fans will now caution that MagiCMac X might run faster as a native Cocoa application, which is quite irrelevant for an emulation however. Carbon is fundamentally not slower than Cocoa, it just doesn't provide as many functions. For MagiCMac X to run faster under Mac OS X, it wouldn't need to use Cocoa; rather, there would need to be native NVDI drivers that pass VDI calls directly to Apple's Quartz surface system. However, since NVDI is currently not being developed further, this is unlikely to happen in the medium term.
MagiCMac X requires at least Mac OS X version 10.1.2. However, ambitious users are already using the Jaguar version of the operating system anyway.
MagiCMac X uses a heuristic method to update OS X's double buffer. If this fails, the Atari screen must be manually rebuilt. The background buffer is not used with 256 colors.
At this point, we can therefore already anticipate one limitation: NVDI 5 is only partially usable under MagiCMac X: The printing functions work for the most part, but the screen display is not accelerated since there are simply no suitable screen drivers available - these accessed QuickDraw functions of classic Mac OS directly, which no longer exist in Mac OS X. If you want to use NVDI 5, you must delete the corresponding screen drivers (nvdidrvh.sys, nvdidrvi.sys etc.). According to the developers, it's possible that the screen drivers of the NVDI-4 version might work - however, due to the lack of this old version, we couldn't test this claim.
The MACPRN printer driver from NVDI also doesn't work. This specifically means that printing is only possible with printers for which Atari drivers exist. This practically reduces the selection of printers to zero, since serial and parallel printers are not supported under Mac OS X and today's Macs only allow printer connections via USB interface anyway. Calamus users can breathe easy though: invers Software provides a Calamus printer driver called "MacXPrint" that makes printing possible under the current Apple operating system.
All other MagiC users are left out in the cold for now - a major drawback for the new version of the emulator. There is hope that an NVDI printer driver will be developed that enables printing for all MagiCMac X users.
However, installing NVDI is still recommended for displaying scalable fonts. This function of the fast driver system works without problems under MagiCMac X.
Unlike previous versions, MagiCMac X now also runs in a size-definable Mac window. Strictly speaking, only the window frame is drawn, with the "Atari" still making its output directly to the Macintosh screen. The advantage of this "pseudo-window" is higher output speed even in window mode. In practice, however, errors occur in the redraw of the MagiC window when other programs make output over the emulation during multitasking.