BarFly is a Freeware music notation program written for Mac use and gets rave reviews from its users. Its author reports on the ABC List that he has experimented with a FREE Mac Emulator for PC acess to BarFly. I extracted the following text - I'm flat out with performances over the next few weeks, but maybe a combination of PC and Mac gurues could give it a try. To date this subject has drawn no further discussion on the ABC List. Regards, John

I've been experimenting with a free Macintosh emulator for PCs to see if I could get it to run BarFly, and have achieved at least partial success. The emulator is called "Fusion" and can be downloaded from . While the emulator software is free, there are a couple of catches. You need a ROM image file copied from a real Mac, and also a Mac system CD (or floppies). Fusion only emulates the old 680x0 processor Macs, and will run System 7.1 - 7.6 or OS 8 (depending on the ROM file you use).

I installed it on a 500 MHz Pentium III machine running Windows 98. Being thoroughly ignorant of Windows, I encountered a number of problems. First, the setup prgram told me that I needed a DOS based mouse driver (the emulator is a DOS program; you have to re-start the machine in MS-DOS mode to use it). The website of the manufacturer of my mouse was no help, but I eventually found a Microsoft mouse driver which worked. After I installed that, Windows started putting up error messages on startup to the effect that the program "POINTER.EXE" was out of date and could not run under Windows, so I edited the Windows.ini file to remove the reference (did I do the right thing?). Anyway everything works now.

I could not get the emulator to recognise the CD-ROM drive, so I installed the only Mac system I have on floppies (7.5). Installation took a very long time (I think because the floppy drive is very slow when reading Mac format disks), so I was pleasantly surprised when it booted up faster than any real Mac I've ever seen. I was even more surprised to find that programs run on it much faster than they did on the ancient Mac which is being emulated (the ROM file came from a Quadra 650).

The display seems to be fixed at 640 x 480 in 256 colours, and the mouse cursor movement is a bit jittery, but otherwise it looks and feels just like a real Mac. There are two outstanding problems, one being the CD-ROM access and the other the lack of sound. I suspect that both of these are due to lack of the appropriate driver. The Fusion docs say that the CD requires something called MSCDEX, with no further information. I found soething called Mscdex.exe in the windows\command directory and started it. It put up a message saying that MSCDEX v2.91 was already running. Maybe I need a specific driver for the Hitachi DVD/CD drive that's in place.

The other, and more serious problem is the lack of sound. Here, the docs say that you need an MS-DOS based sound driver, and I haven't had any luck in finding one. The sound card is a Soundblaster PCI 128, and if anyone has any suggestions as to where to get the driver I'll be grateful.

If anybody else wants to play around with this, I have a few Mac ROM files which I have collected from old machines which are about to be scrapped, and which I can give away (I hope!) without infringing Apple's copyright.

Phil Taylor