GoKawiilRecently, I have been successful in making A/UX boot and run stable on my vintage Macintosh emulator; Snow. A/UX was Apple’s version of UNIX that ran on the 68k-based series Macs. It required a Memory Management Unit to achieve process isolation; either the optional 68851 PMMU on the original 68020-based Macintosh II or the integrated MMU in the 68030- and 68040-based machines. It also required an FPU; making it only run on the higher end machines such as the Macintosh II series and later the Quadra, but the LC was out of luck. A/UX Penelope is a nice resource on A/UX compatibility info.
You can try A/UX 3.1.1 on the Macintosh IIx emulated by Snow in your browser on Infinite Mac.
Recently I had the chance to play with a newly archived A/UX 1.1 installation media set, courtesy of Dominic Sharp, whom I had been talking to on Tinker Different. Dominic obtained this set and wanted to archive it publicly, but wasn’t sure about the state of the disks. I’m not aware of any A/UX 1.1 software being publicly archived; the closest is a preinstalled image of 1.1.1, which didn’t work yet on Snow at the time. Dominic agreed to share the set with me so I could give it a try and fix Snow in the process.
The set consists of 34 floppy images, all 800K GCR. They came as raw flux images, which I first converted using Applesauce.
First, the proper emulated hardware had to be available. Snow emulates the machine, CPU, FPU and PMMU required, but only emulated the Macintosh Display Card 8-24, which I wasn’t sure was supported by A/UX 1.x, which is particularly picky about its video hardware. According to A/UX Penelope, the Macintosh II video card (“Toby”) is natively supported, so I first implemented this card as an additional option in Snow.
Then it was time to get to work with the installation. A/UX came with lovely very UNIX-y binders, which you definitely needed as the OS and installation aren’t exactly straight forward.
Luckily, that is archived on Bitsavers. Armed with my digital binders, I proceeded with the installation.
To start off the install, we begin with the “System setup and README” disk. We need to partition the disk, and then do something counter-intuitive: install System 6 on a Mac partition. This is because there’s a Mac application that kicks off the A/UX boot process: SASH; the A/UX standalone shell. This ‘pre-boot environment’ allows for launching an A/UX kernel and also some disk and recovery operations.
Partitioning is through the familiar HD SC Setup and can be pretty straightforward; the included HD SC Setup includes a template layout for A/UX.
And then, we can move on to install a pretty bare System 6 and afterwards copy the contents of the “SASH and utilities” disk to the new installation.
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