Home Page Forums MAME MAME Question about mounting ISO images

This is my third question in as many days, but I am making good progress teaching myself about emulating the Macintosh in MAME. I come from many years of using SheepShaver and Mini vMac.

My current problem is that I am having quite a lot of difficulty getting ISO images to mount. In fact, the only one I can get to mount so far is the Apple Legacy Recovery ISO from the Macintosh Garden which is linked in the setup instruction thread on this forum.

Every other ISO I try does not mount or show up on the desktop. These either started out with the ISO extension or were switched from Toast to ISO. They are all properly functioning images that I have used in SheepShaver for years. I also tried downloading fresh copies from the Macintosh Garden, and testing them first in SheepShaver to make sure there is no file corruption.

The command I am using is -cdrom "C:\Emulation\MAME\media\Apple Legacy Recovery.iso" , which works fine, for this ISO only. It fails with every other ISO I tried.

So what I do not understand is - what is the key difference between all my own ISO rips and the ones on Macintosh Garden, and the Apple Legacy Recovery ISO which is allowing that one image to work?

OK, I figured it out myself. I was using System 7.1, and although some ISO images will mount right off the bat, such as the Apple Legacy Recovery CD, others need to have the Apple CD-ROM Software 5.1.1 installed first.

Right, Systems below 7.5 need the CD-ROM software installed to mount CDs on the Finder desktop.

MAME has a "software list" of pre-vetted CD images in .CHD format (so they're compressed on disk and decompress on the fly) available where you find the ROMs. Right now it's only the Legacy Recovery disc and various System 7 and 8 versions, but more will be added in the future. (I'm in the process of compiling the Apple developer CDs into that format, and CD-ROM games should start appearing too).

There was a fix recently applied for dragging a CD-ROM into the Trash and having it eject properly, so if you're still on the last release some trickery is required to make that work. (Close all windows and applications from the CD, go into MAME's File Manager and change the CD-ROM to "empty", and then drag the icon into the Trash).

Thanks for the explanation, and for the excellent progress being made in this area. With very limited development of SheepShaver and Mini vMac, it is quite exciting to see where things are headed under MAME. If PowerPC machines eventually becoming available to emulate that will be brilliant.

Since it hasn’t been mentioned explicitly, if the CD has an Apple Partition Map, it can contain a SCSI CD-ROM driver that will be loaded by the boot ROM if the CD is in the drive at boot. This is how bootable CD-ROM installation media for 68k Macs works. Since your other ISO images lack a driver, you need to load one some other way (as you’ve discovered, the Apple CD-ROM software works).

ameath: I want PowerPC to work a lot and I'll be looking into that pretty soon.

Right now, if you use a System 7.6 boot floppy and write-protect it (turn off write permission on the file in whatever OS you run MAME under) the PowerMac 6100 will boot all the way into the installer with working mouse and keyboard. It's *so* close.

@R. Belmont

Don't mean to highjack this thread - and forgive me, and please ignore - if the rest of this post results in garbage, but :

Isn't IBM's RS/6000 line (like the C10 model ?) based on the PowerPC architecture as well ? I seem to recall some very preliminary work being done for that platform, perhaps even by you ? If so, would any progress on PowerPC also benefit those systems ? Just curious.

Bugfixing the PowerPC emulation would definitely help POWER as well, yes. The PowerPC 601 used in the first PowerMacs is kind of a foot-in-both-camps chip that supports POWER instructions that aren't in later PowerPC chips.

That's good to hear. Thanks for the info and the update. I'll crawl back under my rock now.