I’m being a bit unfair as far as Alpha’s go it’s rough to get going but wow it’s GREAT! For starters it’s a Quadra 800 so System 7.1 through 8.1 will work. Also this has full 68040 capabilities so yes that means MMU and YES A/UX (and NetBSD!) will run
As always you can find more on emaculation, the best source for news and info on emulating the Mac.
Additionally you can find the setup guide here.
Many of my Shoebill/Cockatrice III images didn’t work at all. Some at least were picked up as blank disks. I had less luck with freshly created raw/vmdk or qcow2 disks. Not sure at all. My minimal 7 2gb disk worked fine as a donor, and even converting to a vmdk was fine. Sooo YMMV. But hey it’s an Alpha and YES IT CAN WORK.
Another plus is that the idle loop works fine so it won’t burn 100% of your CPU. This could possibly be a great gopher server!? Time will tell.
I wonder what branch they’re using? Would like to build this myself on Linux…
That Qemu build was created from https://github.com/mcayland/qemu/tree/q800.upstream. It will run AUX. To get a binary that can boot and run MacOS revert the latest commit and build again.
Can you share the installed image
That’s awesome! I’ve always loved the concept behind A/UX but I’ve never been able to try it myself (my SE/30 is under-specced)…until now! It turns out to be pretty awesome. (I’ve been testing on macOS using the Cocoa front end.)
The Mac environment in A/UX 3.1.1 is compatible with most things I’ve thrown at it, including Netscape, MS Word, WordPerfect, the famous Aaron platinum extension, and Adobe Type Manager (but not Adobe Acrobat, which fails to install its fonts in the System).
The Unix side is showing its age (my kingdom for pre-configured tab-completion and history!) but is perfectly respectable, albeit quirky, even for the time (I think; it predates my use of Unix systems by a few years). Lots of extras are included. I love how configuring TCP/IP in Unix also makes it available to the Mac environment.
It would have been interesting to see development on A/UX continue.
Thanks for the post, and thanks to those that did the work.
Have you tried using something like hfdisk (https://www.codesrc.com/gitweb/index.cgi?p=hfdisk.git;a=summary) to try to figure out what the difference is between your good and bad disk images?
The UFS is able to mount. Best I could figure is that it’s non blessed system 7, and it being 3.0.0 which won’t run on a Quadra 800.
I already did a dump/restore onto bigger disks so it’s kind of too late now. At least the partition tables and UFS was fine, I can always reinstall Soft PC.