Basilisk II is an Open Source 680x0 Macintosh emulator developed by Christian Bauer. That is, it enables you to run 68k MacOS software on your computer, even if you are using a different operating system. However, you still need a copy of MacOS and a Macintosh ROM image to use this program. Basilisk II is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The Basilisk II JIT project aims at improving the run-time performance of the emulator. In technical terms, it uses dynamic recompilation techniques to translate original 680x0 code into native code (currently x86 and x86_64). The engine is derived from Bernie Meyer's just-in-time (JIT) compiler engine for UAE. Further bug-fixes and improvements were made for Basilisk II.
NOTE: the JIT currently requires you to set 68040 emulation. Hence, it also requires a Quadra ROM image. The JIT is not used in other cases, and (slower) interpreter is used instead.
Please read the other Basilisk II documentation in the "General Documents" directory.
There is also a user-contributed help available online.
You may need to boot with a CD-ROM in the drive if you intend to use it.
Graphics performance is probably sub-optimal. The MacOS X port is missing the VOSF video graphics optimization because Mach syscalls are not fast enough to achieve that (vs. Linux).
I have no Mac Intel handy. This port was completely developed remotely with minimal testing through VNC. As such, I have no idea whether performance is on par with the Linux versions or not, nor could I test host-specific support (CD-ROM, Audio, etc.).
Besides, should you encounter problems with this port, I won't be able to process them unless they are reproductible on Linux or MacOS X 10.2.8 platforms. Otherwise, either fix the problem yourself, or send me the hardware. I currently don't need MacOS X for Intel, so I won't buy this hardware simply for Basilisk II development purposes.
There is a very minimalist graphical prefs editor: BasiliskIIGUI.app. It's actually a PowerPC application that should also work on Intel platforms correctly through Rosetta. The GUI will generate your prefs file in ~/.basilisk_ii_prefs.
Should you wish to manually edit your preferences, please see the General Documents/README file and/or online help for detailed description.
Here is my configuration file, you mostly have to edit with the correct paths and filenames to suit your purposes:
disk /Users/gwenole/MacOS/MacOS_810.dsk extfs /Users/gwenole/MacOS/transfert/ screen win/800/600 ether slirp udptunnel false rom /Users/gwenole/MacOS/Mac_Q630.ROM bootdrive 0 bootdriver 0 ramsize 67108864 frameskip 2 modelid 14 cpu 4 fpu true nocdrom false nosound false noclipconversion false nogui true idlewait true jit true jitfpu true jitdebug true jitcachesize 8192 jitlazyflush true jitinline true keyboardtype 5 keycodes true keycodefile /Users/gwenole/.basilisk_ii_keycodes mousewheelmode 1 mousewheellines 3 ignoresegv false