[NTLK] MPW simulator to run ARM6asm etc.

[Matthias Melcher]

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


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    mosrun
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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.