ExpanDrive

iPhone developers, it seems, have been coming after Mac users of a certain vintage, retrofitting classic Mac games for the glitzy new portable platform. But after dropping a fat $5 on the iPhone/iPod Touch remake of Crystal Quest, I’ve gotta say I’m disappointed.

Among my beefs were the chincy techno score, the few missing sounds (the ominous “blib”* as Nasties entered the arena; the “gasp” as you cleared a level), and the complete omission of the original manual. “Stay cool at all times. Uncool dudes get stomped on”; those weren’t mere game instructions, they were rules for life.

Fortunately, thanks to the heroic efforts of a few bold hackers, the mini vMac emulator we all know and love has been ported to the iPhone. Now Crystal Quest and host of other Mac Plus classics are just waiting to be installed on your iPhone.

To be fair, Crystal Quest is all but unplayable (you can steer or you can shoot—pick one) but the near-identical aspect ratios of the 512×342 Mac Plus and 480×320 iPhone make for a seriously well-rendered experience in many older games. My personal favorite, The Dungeon Revealed, plays as well as ever.

Getting the emulator running does require a bit of work; you’ll need to jailbreak your phone, and to add the namedfork.net repository to Cydia, which will allow you to download the minivmac emulator like any other non-Apple Store app.

Once you’ve installed it, go to your computer and download a Mac Plus ROM, OS 6.0.8, and whatever Mac Plus-compatible classic Mac games you want to play. You’ll need to put the OS and the games on 800k disk images (file extensions should be .img), and then—using Expandrive, of course—add everything to /Applications/minivmac.app/ on your iPhone.

Read through the basic gesture instructions, and fire up the Mini vMac app. If you’ve put everything in the right format and the right place, the app should play the old Mac beep, and ask you to insert a disk. Chose whichever disk image you put OS 6 on, and the emulator should boot from there.

If your disks appear as locked on the emulated desktop (a padlock icon appears in the upper-left corner of their windows), you’ll need to open Mobile Terminal on your iphone and enter the following if you want to save your games:

login root
[Enter your root password at prompt. Default is "alpine".]
chmod 777 /Applications/minivmac.app/[name of game's disk image here]
logout

That should do it. Drop any questions in the comments. I’ll get to them as soon as I can.

*actually, the “blib” is there—just couldn’t hear it over the techno.