BasiliskII idiosyncracies:

BasiliskII is an older program that has been brought along through the years. There are a few idiosyncracies. It remains under active development. See <http://basilisk.cebix.net/> for more details.

There is considerable available information regarding how to set up BasiliskII, for example <http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basiliskii_osx_setup>.

To use BasiliskII, you first configure the emulator options with the BasiliskIIGUI application. Once you have it configured the way you want, you can launch BasiliskII directly from the BasiliskIIGUI application. For future uses however, you don't need to open the BasiliskIIGUI application; you can launch the emulator directly with the BasiliskII application.

Full screen mode appears to work very well. To toggle between full screen mode and windowed mode, use control-return in the emulator. You can change screen dimensions and colour depth while in full screen mode to suit your needs, although some of the video modes and colour depths have obvious artifacts.

At present there is a bug when option-clicking in the emulator, for example when trying to move the control strip. A workaround is to option-right click with a mouse or similar device, which for the moment works as a standard option-click.

Sound appears to work in most programs, but not all. I presume some older programs directly accessed the hardware of Apple Sound chip, and these would likely be the ones that have no sound output. There is no workaround that I know of.

Sometimes, when restarting MacOS within the emulator, the emulator will crash inelegantly. It seems to depend on the screen color depth, but in an irregular and not fully predictable fashion.

The JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler is written in 32bit i386 code, so at the moment the only way to have the JIT is to compile the emulator that way. The slirp networking code also appears to be 32bit only. The default installation option is 32 bit with the current MacPorts version of BasiliskII.

It is possible to build the emulator in an x86_64 (64bit) configuration on suitable hardware. On a 64bit build, the BasiliskIIGUI might lead you to believe the JIT compiler is set, but it really isn't enabled. The JIT is not presently compatible with 64 bit mode. If you want confirmation of this, you can see details in the MacOSX Console application, or if you run the application from the command line, you will see the details there. If you have slirp networking selected and launch a 64bit build of BasiliskII, it crashes inelegantly. There is active development going on to bring the 64 bit build of BasiliskII up to full functionality.

On a 64 bit build of BasiliskII, I have noted some idiosyncracies using the mouse in the menu bar region when in full screen mode. I don't know of a workaround for this, other than to switch to a windowed mode (control-return). The 32bit builds don't appear to have this issue, and are currently the default.