When you start BasiliskII a “Basilisk Settings” window pops up. You can configure certain features of Basilisk from it. The current settings are saved to disk in a file called ”.basiliskII_prefs” in your home directory.

The settings are divided into six groups:

Volumes
Scsi
Graphics/Sound
Keyboard/Mouse
Serial/Network
Memory/Misc

Figure 1: The Volumes Window

The main part of the volumes pane is a list that contains all volumes to be mounted by BasiliskII. If this list is empty, BasiliskII will try to detect and mount all HFS partitions it can find. A CD-ROM drive is always automatically detected and used.

For Mac Volumes, BasiliskII can use Mac HFS partitions, whole Mac HFS formatted drives, and can also emulate hard disks in single Linux files (“hardfiles”).

Mac HFS partition: a part of your hard disk formatted for HFS
Mac HFS volume: a hard disk formatted for HFS
Hard file: a file on your linux partition to be used as Mac hard disk

To add a Mac HFS volume or partition to the list, click on “Add…”, go to the ”/dev” directory in the file panel, click once on the partition you want and click on “OK”. The selected partition device name should then appear in the volume list. After adding volumes or partitions to the list, you should unmount them on the Linux side. To remove a Mac volume, select it in the list and click on “Remove”.

BasiliskII will show a “Linux” disk icon on the Mac desktop that allows access to Linux files from Mac applications. In “Linux Root” you specify which Linux directory will be at the root of this virtual “Linux” disk. The default setting of ”/” means that the “Linux” icon in the MacOS Finder will correspond to your Linux root directory. The MacOS will try to create files and folders like “Desktop”, “Trash”, “OpenFolderListDF” etc. in the directory you specify as “Linux Root” (provided that you have access rights to that directory). If they annoy you, you can delete them.

To boot from CD-ROM, set the “Boot From” setting to “CD-ROM”. The “Disable CD-ROM Driver” box is used to disable BasiliskII's built-in CD-ROM driver. This is currently of not much use and you should leave the box unselected.

Double-clicking on an entry in the volume list will add or remove a “*” in front of the device name. Volumes marked with a “*” are read-only for the MacOS under BasiliskII.

Figure 2: SCSI Settings
FIXME : exact syntax of entries

Figure 3: Setting Screen and Sound preferences

You can use the follow settings to control screen size, quickdraw accelleration and sound output:

Video Type: Video Type can be “Window” or “Full Screen”
Window Refresh Rate: select the refresh rate from the dropdown list. A faster refresh rate, however, slows SheepShaver down
Width: The width of the screen to use. Select from the dropdown list. “Maximum” uses current screen settings
Height: The height of the screen to use. Select from the dropdown list. “Maximum” uses current screen settings

Quickdraw Acceleration: SheepShaver can accelerate certain quickdraw functions. Select to use the acceleration.

Disable Sound Output: Select to disable sound output if sound takes too much processing power.

Audio Output Device: Choose a different output device if the preselected one is not to your liking

Audio Mixer Device: Choose a different mixer device if the preselected one is not to your liking

Please note: the actual screen size can be choosen from within Mac OS, through the “Monitors” control panel

Figure 4: The Mouse and Keyboard settings

To define the keyboard layout and mouse behaviour, the follow settings are available:

Use Raw Keycodes: When selected, the selection box below comes available to select a raw keycode file, that will be used to map your keyboard.

Mouse Wheel Function: The mouse wheel function can be “Cursor Up/Down” or “Page Up/Down”. Page Up/down means one mouse wheel knotch will move the visible area of the screen one page up or down. Cursor Up/down is used in combination with “Lines to scroll”

Lines to scroll: Sets the number of lines the cursor is moved up or down on one mouse wheel knotch.

Figure 5: Selecting port and ethernet interfaces

You can select to which devices the MacOS modem and printer ports are redirected. You can assign them to any serial ports you have (/dev/ttyS*), or even to parallel ports (/dev/lp*, useful for printing if you have Mac drivers for parallel printers, like the PowerPrint package from gdt.

With “Ethernet Interface” you select which Ethernet card is to be used for networking. It can either be:

eth0 (the name of a real Ethernet card or
tap0 (the name of an Ethertap interface or
slirp (using an internal DHCP server)

Using a real Ethernet card requires the “sheep_net” driver to be installed and accessible. See Networking for more information about setting up the network.

Figure 6: Choosing the memory available to MacOS and pointing to the ROM file

With “MacOS RAM Size” you select how much RAM will be available to the MacOS (and all MacOS applications running under it). BasiliskII uses the Linux virtual memory system, so you can select more RAM than you physically have in your machine. The MacOS virtual memory system is not available under SheepShaver (i.e. if you have 32MB of RAM in your computer and select 64MB to be used for MacOS in the BasiliskII settings, MacOS will behave as if it's running on a computer that has 64MB of RAM but no virtual memory).

FIXME : Descriptions

“Mac Model ID”

“CPU Type”

“ROM File” specifies the path name of the Mac ROM file to be used. If it is left blank, BasiliskII expects the ROM file to be called “ROM” and for it to be in the same directory as the SheepShaver application.

The “Ignore Illegal Memory Accesses” option is there to make some broken Mac programs work that access addresses where there is no RAM or ROM. With this option unchecked, BasiliskII will in this case display an error message and quit. When the option is activated, BasiliskII will try to continue as if the illegal access never happened (writes are ignored, reads return 0). This may or may not make the program work (when a program performs an illegal access, it is most likely that something else went wrong). When a Mac program behaves strangely or hangs, you can quit BasiliskII, uncheck this option and retry. If you get an “illegal access” message, you will know that something is broken.