Virtual ][ v8.6

October 28th, 2018, 20:44 Posted By: wraggster

Virtual ][ v8.6 is released. Virtual is a commercial Apple II emulator for Mac OS. Virtual ][ lets you play the old Apple games, because it supports all graphics modes, lets you control the game paddles with a USB game pad or mouse and emulates the internal speaker. When you want to temporarily interrupt gameplay, Virtual ][ allows you to save the entire virtual machine, and continue later on from where you left off.

But Virtual ][ also supports more "serious" software, because it emulates many peripheral devices: floppy disk, hard disk, mouse, serial port, matrix printer, even cassette tape! It also emulates the Z80A processor, allowing you to run the CP/M operating system.

And for the technically inclined: you can configure the machine by "inserting" and "removing" emulated peripheral cards, change the CPU speed, or even install your own emulated character generator ROM. The "Inspector" feature allows you to closely observe the behavior of the emulated machine and debug Apple II programs.

If you have original diskettes and a working Apple II, Virtual ][ can help you convert the diskettes to the Mac, even if they are "copy protected".

The program automatically indexes all Apple II disk images on your Mac, so you can find an Apple II file instantly, by entering its name.

You can download an evaluation version and try the program first. If you like the program, you can buy a license and fully enjoy the nostalgic fun of the old Apple ][ computer.

Virtual ][ requires an Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" or better.

Virtual ][ v8.6Changelog:
* Added a keyboard shortcut to enter and exit full screen.
* The Inspector's instruction trail now also shows the processor cycle count at the start of each instruction.
* The instruction trail can now be saved as a tab-separated text file.
* Increased the maximum capacity of the instruction trail to 9999999 instructions (a tenfold increase). This is enough to capture roughly 35 to 40 seconds of CPU activity at regular speed. Be aware that saving such a large trail takes some time and results in a big file!
* When ejecting a diskette, the disk image was always saved, even if the disk had not been modified. This bug was introduced recently, and has now been corrected; a disk image is only saved if the disk contents have acually been changed.
* ProDOS disk images with a ".po" filename extension and a size of 800 KB (or larger) can now be mounted as an OmniDisk, and are also processed by the Spotlight importer.
* Disk images with a .nib extension now show up in the disk search window as "custom file system".
* Fixed an issue in the SCSI card emulation that could corrupt the "screenhole" memory locations in auxiliary memory, whereas it should have used main memory. In the revised ROM code the screen hole memory isn't used anymore at all.
* If a USB or Bluetooth game controller is connected, the option to use the keyboard arrows as a joystick is now disabled. It appeared that the latter option could corrupt the values received from the game controller (even without touching the arrow keys).
* Powering up a virtual machine with an OmniDisk resulted in a boot failure if a higher numbered slot contained a card with expansion ROM. This now works as it should.
* Changed built-in web links from http to https (for servers that support https).

http://www.virtualii.com/

via http://www.emucr.com/2018/10/virtual-v86.html

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