[NTLK] Announcing Leibniz

[Matej Horvat]

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 23:54:10 +0100, Steve White <stepwhite at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Leibniz is an emulator for the Runt based Newtons – OMP, MessagePad
> 110/120/130, Motorola Marco, Sharp ExpertPad, and even the NuBus
> ARMistice boards.

Thank you for preserving history! With Einstein being talked about so much  
lately, I was just about to ask whether there was any hope of ever  
emulating OS 1.x. This is incredible!

> I know
> Lindy diagnostics has been documented before, but the diagnostics on the
> OMP seems relatively undocumented.  I only learned of it a couple of
> years ago due to the “OMPRepairManual.pdf”, and as some list members may
> remember, actually utilized this to dump my first batch of ROMs
> (Notepad, OMP 1.3).

Have you documented the exact dumping procedure anywhere, for curiosity's  
sake?

> Leibniz is available for download, complete with (crummy) source code
> from:
>
> https://github.com/pablomarx/Leibniz

Under what license? I assume GPL from the third-party libraries.

Can it be compiled for Mac OS X versions older than 10.6?

Are you going to document the Runt hardware, or is it already documented  
anywhere? It would be nice to eventually emulate it on other operating  
systems, since Objective-C isn't the most portable language.

> ROM dumping on the v1.x devices was a mystery to me.  To the best of my
> knowledge, third party native code wasn’t supported until v2.0.

It was (NTK can generate BinCFunctions that run on OS 1.x), but I've never  
investigated why C++ functions aren't.

At some point, I experimented with running assembly code on OS 1.x with  
the goal of dumping the ROM, but I kept getting bus errors and never found  
out why.

> I had been intrigued for some time with an “easter egg” in the v1.x
> software, where in the Extras drawer you tap the top right, followed by
> the top left, and you’re presented with a sheet with three options, one
> labelled “Serial debugger”. About a year ago I set out to figure this
> out – and was able to, especially thanks to some old information from
> philz.  Effectively the underlying protocol is the same as what Hammer
> and Newtsbug uses, it just lacks the “frame encapsulation”.

I was going to try Hammer and Newtsbug eventually, but thanks for letting  
me know so I don't have to waste my time and be disappointed. ;) Is there  
any known debugger out there that supports this older protocol?

Matej