The Apple /// computer, codenamed “Sara”, has been something of a white whale of emulation for over a decade now. In the late 90s Chris Smolinski of Black Cat Systems started an emulator named Sara. It was originally for 680×0-based Macs running the “classic” MacOS, and later moved targets, first to PowerPC, then to Mac OS X, and finally to Intel Mac OS X.

smf‘s ongoing refactor of the ATA/IDE code finally allowed cleanly adding Phil Bennett‘s long-awaited support for Turret Tower. Here’s a few screens – it plays OK with a Xbox 360 pad to do the analog steering.

I’ve previously posted pre-formatted Macintosh HDD images; here’s a similar 100 MB .chd for the Apple II series using the CFFA2 card emulation. This image is set up for an enhanced IIe or IIgs with ProDOS 8 2.0.1 and BASIC.SYSTEM and contains 4 partitions (3 at 32 MB, 1 at 4 MB). Assuming the CFFA2 card is in slot 7, the first 2 partitions are slot 7 drives 1 and 2 and the second 2 are slot 4 drives 1 and 2. Use your favorite ProDOS utility to populate the partitions.
The 100 MB image is here.

Kale worked out the problems with the GD-ROM subsystem that prevented Dreamcast from booting in MESS. It goes something like this:

And you can read more from the man himself right here.

Stefano Teso meanwhile has been busy with Valkyrie, the Hikaru emulator with nothing to hide.

Samuele Zannoli has continued to plug away at the Xbox 1-based Chihiro hardware, with the result that OutRun 2 now boots and (very slowly) shows a few 2D screens. I don’t think it does anything more, but I could just be impatient.

UPDATE: Haze was more patient and got to this 4th screen, after which it crashes:

Samuele Zannoli has continued to plug away at the Xbox 1-based Chihiro hardware, with the result that OutRun 2 now boots and (very slowly) shows a few 2D screens. I don’t think it does anything more, but I could just be impatient.

Moving on from the last post, Christian made some additional fixes to the effects processor so now the “rotating speaker” effect works. In case you’re unfamiliar with what that means, you’ll probably understand quite quickly listening to this. It’s a classic sound used in the blues, rock, jazz, and even electronica.

Christian Brunschen continued working on the Ensoniq synthesizer components and got the ES5510 effects processor chip working. Some bugs definitely remain, but by and large the effects programs for the 16-bit Ensoniq synthesizer drivers in MESS now do what they’re supposed to.

Fedora 19 “Schrödinger’s Cat” was released about a week ago, and current SVN now supports compiling MAME and MESS using the GCC 4.8.1 that it comes with. Sync latest (or wait until u1 if you’re scared) and you’ll be ready to go.

Since MESS is now at the point where it’s pretty easy to add support for SNES add-on hardware, I recently asked etabeta to add a skeleton for the SNES SA-1 add-on chip, which I then fleshed out.