Virtual II Emulator Updated

Posted by: Bill Martens Date: August 9, 2018 0 Likes 138 Views

The Virtual II Emulator has been updated.  Virtual II version 8.6 is a highly rated shareware Apple II emulator and has received a host of Bug fixes and enhancements including:

  • 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).

Several of the enhancements or fixes are those provided to Gerard Putter by A.P.P.L.E. staff over the past several weeks as well as other members of the Apple II community.   Virtual II fully supports the WOZ format and the author has worked closely over the past half year with John Morris, creator of Applesauce and the WOZ disk image format in order to provide the best possible support for the format.

One of the features we also see implemented is the mounting of 800K or larger ProDOS order disks as SCSI based OmniDISK images.

Virtual II Version 8.6 requires MAC OS X 10.11 or higher.  The last version which runs on older systems (Mac OS 10.7 to Mac OS 10.10) is also available for download.

For more information on the Virtual II emulator, check out their website.  You can download the latest version of the Virtual II emulator or purchase the full emulator package from the Virtual II website at: https://www.virtualii.com

Author: Bill Martens
A.P.P.L.E. Chairman of the Board and Club president -- Bill worked for the founder, Val J. Golding and A.P.P.L.E. from 1981 to 1982. In 1999, he began archiving the materials which were distributed and sold by A.P.P.L.E.. That project led to the group that remained of A.P.P.L.E. Bill was involved in the financial industry in Tokyo and has over 20 major office infrastructure projects to his name. In March 2001, he retired to write books and to spend more time pursuing personal interests. As the president of the users group, Bill is in charge of distribution of Call-A.P.P.L.E. magazine as well as the organization of this web site. Bill currently resides in Tokyo, Japan and Shelton, Wa splitting time between the places.
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