Let’s chat about some new Apple progress! As the title suggests, the machines I’m going to discuss are not quite Apples. First up is the Laser 128 series. Earlier this year the Laser 128 got a bunch of supported BIOS revisions, its correct video ROM, and support for its built-in mouse port. Plus the original revision of the hardware was supported to allow the oldest known BIOS revisions to run correctly.
Great! Except this led to a regression – by default the 128 was using the incorrect character set from the font ROM (international rather than US English). This caused characters like the familiar AppleSoft ] prompt to show as the wrong thing. Also, the Laser 128EX and 128EX/2 models didn’t get the new character ROM at all – no Laser triangle logos in MouseText! Both of these things have been fixed for the upcoming MAME release, 0.239.
Beyond that, the Laser 128 had a unique feature – a switch selected if slot 1 was a serial port or a parallel port. MAME didn’t previously support that switch at all, you were stuck with serial printers while MAME currently only emulates a parallel printer (the Epson ActionPrinter 2000, which is back compatible with the old FX-80/MX-80). Added for 0.239: all Laser 128 models (including EX and EX/2) now have a switch in the Machine Configuration options to flip slot 1 to parallel, and it works.
While I was at it, I found a ROM dump for the Franklin Ace 500, which like the Laser 128 is an Apple IIc clone, and like the Laser 128 it has its own unique twists on the hardware that made it not just a drop-in-and-run proposition. There was some very non-standard banking on the ROM, and a few other undocumented twists. (Apparently a technical manual for this machine existed, but only the user’s manual has been scanned, which is unfortunate). The machine is still marked as “not working” for an important reason: ProDOS-based and custom-boot software works great, but standard DOS 3.3 System Masters will crash during booting. On the plus side, the Franklin’s internal mouse interface is fully supported. And unlike the Laser, slot 1 is fixed to a parallel printer. But MAME supports that too, so it’ll be there when the remaining gremlins are worked out.
On the non-clone non-Apple II front, the progress from earlier this year where we started supporting CD-ROMs on the 68K Macintoshes had a problem: only some versions of MacOS would recognize the discs. This was traced down to our not properly emulating a “genuine Apple” drive. Some versions of MacOS would only recognize certain models of CD-ROM drives and they had to support an undocumented extra SCSI command to return the string “APPLE COMPUTER, INC.”. It ignored drives that didn’t pass the whitelist or support the undocumented command. We’ve now fixed that 100% so MacOS thinks we’re an original Apple CDSC drive, just one that returns data a lot faster.