Idle is a minimalistic lisa 2 emulator. Idle stands for "Incomplete Draft of a Lisa Emulator".

Idle developpment was started in September 2006, first boot of an OS (Macworks) was in december 2006. Idle is still in developpment.

Idle emulates the following:

• A lisa II/5 with an attached 5Mb profile.
• Inputs from mouse, keyboard.
• no sounds for now (but will be easy since VIA emulation is accurate).
• no serial interfaces for now (will take some time...). 

More about Idle... 

• Download binary;
• Download/Browse source;
• Getting boot ROM: Idle needs a 16kb (that may be split into two 8Kb files) bootstrap ROM to start. The original rom files are not provided here.
• • Using the original ROM (H revision): the files booth.lo and booth.hi must be saved in the bios directory. The emulator makes an internal patch of this rom set (to skip the SCC loopback test);
  • An alternate and free boot ROM : (work in progress...come back later...).
• Using Floppy Images:
• • Idle uses floppy images in disk copy 4.2 format (filesize 419284 byte);
  • WARNING: Images are written back only when disk is ejected (this may prevent floppy corruption).
• Installing an OS:
• • Lisa OS : Lisa OS is a 4 or 5 floppy distribution. Boot with first disk, choose install, then insert the correct disk when needed. At the end of the process click finished and "Start Up". Idle will then go to integrated debugger (because a double exception is received). Restart the emulator and Lisa OS will start from profile.
  • Macworks : Start whith macworks disk, then (when a floppy with a question mark is displayed), insert the macworks system disk. You should be able to install macworks on the 5Mb profile HDD.
  • Xenix : Xenix is currently unsupported. The "hdinit" command fails with a core dump, due to a stack overflow.
• Elements of the emulator / Credits:
• • Allegro Game library: All direct X stuff (or X windows stuff for linux) is efficiently handled by the great Allegro game library.
  • Musashi 68k core: The CPU emulation was originaly written by Karl Stenerud (Musashi Copyright 1998-2001 Karl Stenerud.  All rights reserved.)
  • MAME and MESS: The VIA emulation derives from the MAME Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. The lisa driver (written by R. Nabet) for MESS was a great source of information.
  • Idefile: The profile protocol is well documented on this profile/Widget replacement hardware.
• Platforms that may run Idle:
• • Win32 : the main developpement platform.
  • Linux: in the near future (as soon as I reinstall Linux on my PC)
  • Macos X (a work in progress ?)
  • Macos 8/9: I ported back Allegro (4.0) to Macos 8... But Idle fails to start for now...
• Links for Lisa enthusiasts:
• • The mac mothership
  • The 68k macintosh liberation army   
  • The Lisa FAQ
  • The LisaList
• Other lisa Emulators:
• • Lisaem : The first project started (ca 1998), the last published (2007) also the first to run Lisa OS.
  • MESS lisa driver : The first published project that runned some lisa software (macworks). Very interesting hardware disk emulation.
  • A macworks (lisaworks?) specific emulator was also started (ca 1998) but never published.