[NTLK] MPW simulator to run ARM6asm etc.

[Eckhart Köppen]

Insane - in an awesome way :) I would only need ARMCpp and ARMLink...
maybe AIFtoNTK and Packer.

Eckhart

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 1:01 AM, Matthias Melcher <mm at matthiasm.com> wrote:
>
>
> Just as a follow-up. I did get to solve many issues and I have ARM6asm more than half-way working. I should get the rest of the Newton MPW tools to run as well (NTK is not one of those - sorry). This will help me writing native code for Einstein, maybe even rewrite parts of the ROM.
>
> Anyway, techie stuff follows...
>
> Matthias
>
>
> ================================================================================
>     mosrun
> ================================================================================
> http://code.google.com/p/dynee5/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2FAlienate
>
> mosrun, short for "MacOS runtime environment", is a program that will run
> arbitray MPW tools on Mac OS X, Linux, and MSWindows. The main purpose is to
> run the Apple Newton developer tools, such as the cross compiler and the Rex
> builder, natively and as part of a build chain. But other MPW tools will
> likely run well without modification.
>
> mosrun is a simulator for a MacOS 7.6.6 environment, paired with a Motorola
> 68020 emulator that will make the binaries run on other machines. Only the
> first few kBytes of RAM are emulated to provide better access to MacOS global
> variables. The rest of the RAM is used directly, requiring the MPW Tools to
> be linked in 'far' mode (32 bit vs. 24 bit). The host needs to run in 32 bit
> mode as well.
>
> The emulator is a copy of Musashi's m68k. It runs perfectly for what I need,
> providing a simple clean interface.
>
> The simulator part is based on Inside Macintosh I-III and what ever other
> documentation I could gather from the 'net. It is currently an utter mess as
> this project is still in the proof-of-concept stage.
>
> The MPW interface is not documented. File handling uses a Unix/BSD style
> interface, but is still based on a lot of reverse engineering and guess work.
>
> No Apple ROMs are needed.
>
>
> As of July 28th, 2013:
>
> 1. the code basically works. There is still a lot that wants to be implemented
>    and fixed, but the idea has proven to work. ARM6asm launches, opens files,
>    writes text, and (almost) reads files. If no parameters are given, it
>    finishes without crashing. Yay!
>
> 2. the code itself is an utter mess though. As soon as I get mosrun to
>    completely run ARM6asm, I will need to reeingineer and document the code.
>
> 3. Usage is 'mosrun ARM6asm'. If ARM6asm was correctly copied from MacOS,
>    keeping the resource fork intact (that's where the code lives!), it should
>    output the m68k code as it is executed, and the ARM6asm Usage text.
>
>
> Alternatives:
>
> BasiliskII, Mini VMac, and other emulators:
>   this requires to set up an entire MacOS system with MPW and tools. It is not
>   (easily) possible to launch tools inside MPW from the host computer though.
> Executor:
>   Does what mosrun does for graphical MacOS applications. It seems to be lacking
>   the MPW interface, plus I could not get it to compile.
> Classix:
>   Very similar to mosrun, but focusses on PPC. Some of the Newton tools are not
>   available in PPC though, only in m68k.
>
>
> No warranties, no claim, enjoy.
>
>
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> ====================================================================
>