minivmac @3.2.3 needs some trickery to find and use ROM...

[ken-cunningham-webuse]

Just to start off, I find this port to be amazing. The background activities that generate all the MinivMac versions seem quite astounding, and the portfile looks like a work of art. Impressive.

When the port runs, it runs as the macports user, I assume. I don't have a macports user folder on my machines and so I had a slight hiccup in that the Mac Plus Rom location had to be changed in the Portfile from

~/Library/Preferences/Gryphel/mnvm_rom/vMac.ROM

to another location. At first I tried hard coding in the full path to my home folder's preferences folder, and although the ROM was found, this ran into a permissions error and miniVmac wouldn't open it. Rather than change permissions all the way up the chain, ultimately it lived well in

/Users/Shared/Library/Preferences/Gryphel/mnvm_rom/vMac.ROM

once I checked all the permissions and ownership to make sure it and the enclosing folders were readable by all.

I'm not sure if there's really anything that can be done to make this process easier for someone -- or perhaps I missed something obvious and made it harder on myself somehow.

Now that it's working well, I'll try to see how to use it to generate some of my own custom vMac builds. Great port.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Thanks for the compliments! It's been complicated, ever since the Mini vMac build system became self-hosted in version 3. I've had a lot of back and forth with the developer over the years, and he's made a few changes to better accommodate our automated builds, which finally landed in Mini vMac 3.3, which has been a development release for awhile, but was only just promoted to a stable version and I haven't had time to update the minivmac port with that yet. Until I do, please use the minivmac-evel port instead.

Mini vMac is supposed to allow the ROM file to be in several locations, but I think I ran into permissions problem as you did with recent MacPorts / macOS versions when trying to put it in my home directory. I've had the best success just putting it in the same folder as the app (/Applications/MacPorts/Mini vMac) so that's what I do now and what I recommend.

You can build custom versions of Mini vMac if you're willing to edit the portfile and add your own variants. I intend to make this easier, where you could write a config file for each custom build you want and the portfile would read it.

[ken-cunningham-webuse]

Great tricks in that portfile! Once I had it built I did just that with the ROM -- into the application directory -- the trick was the bootstrap version needs to find a readable ROM to boot to build the other apps, and there's the rub... maybe somewhere in the $prefix like ${prefix}/share/minivmac ? Anyway, I have it all working well now, and anyone who has trouble will find this thread and solve it. Thanks. -K

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to ken.cunningham.webuse@…:

Great tricks in that portfile! Once I had it built I did just that with the ROM -- into the application directory -- the trick was the bootstrap version needs to find a readable ROM to boot to build the other apps, and there's the rub...

There shouldn't be any rub. Placing the ROM file in /Applications/MacPorts/Mini vMac should have worked.

[kencu (Ken)]

It would seem there is nothing to be fixed here in the ticket I opened years ago.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

And fortunately as of version 36 minivmac no longer needs a copy of itself to build, so the portfile and the build process will become greatly simplified; see the minivmac-devel port.