À (At) 16:56 -0500 5/12/02, Andrew Thiel écrivait (wrote) :
>I mean with the intent of making copies and selling them in a new Newton=20=
>or part of an upgrade. Is that legal? If it is, my mistake, I guess the=20=
>job might be a little easier!
Oh yeah, this is of course illegal. It rules out a complete hardware
part. We would need to have some mechanism for the user to transfer
the ROM from his unit to the new PDA (or to move the ROM board to the
new unit).
>At any rate we may just want to avoid the ROM copying/modification just=20=
>to satisfy the laws of Newton users in all their respective countries.=20=
>I've never truly understood the restrictions placed on what you can and=20=
>cannot do with ROMs. Anyone have more info?
You can do plenty of things.
Mostly:
- define some hardware stuff to override the defaults. Like how much
RAM, how fast, where.
- define drivers for hardware stuff including a new implementation of
the PlatformDriver. There are two implementations of it in NewtonOS,
the Runt one in NewtonOS 2.0 and the Voyager one in NewtonOS 2.1. My
suggestion is to write one for an emulator. And one for the battery
driver for example. All this stuff work the same. I only know two
exceptions of hardware stuff that isn't accessed via a driver that we
can easily replace: the screen and the PCMCIA cards. I might have
missed some others, though. Both are pretty obvious. I've decoded
most of the PCMCIA controller flags and the screen is just video
memory as Brian Parker noticed.
- include packages like NewtWorks.
- include patches like system patches that patch functions from the JumpTable.
It's all I recall right now.
> > Hence the emulation idea. It would have been crazy two years ago
>> considering then hardware. But today hardware could handle that
>> properly.
>
>But what hardware will you put it on? Putting it on a tablet computer=20
>would cause it to lose instant-on capabilities, and all the PocketPC's=20=
>I've seen have screens too large for my wobbly, childish handwriting.=20
You mean too small?
All PocketPCs I know are smaller than my MP2K1.
I wouldn't take a TabletPC with me, shall it run NewtonOS. Too big
and not enough autonomy.
>Please prove me wrong! If there is a tablet that is the right size,=20
>turns on instantly, and would run your proposed emulator than it would=20=
>be much better than my idea.
Well, in any case we'll have to adapt to the current hardware or
design our own. As I see it, an emulator would fit everyone needs.
Most MP130 users here prefer its smaller size, so they might prefer
smaller PocketPCs.
Plus between a dead Newton and a working PocketPC with a color but
smaller screen running NewtonOS on top of NetBSD-hpcarm-big-endian,
what would you choose? :)
Building our own hardware, even from Compaq's plans, would cost more
than what current hardware costs unless we build dozens of thousands.
Plus once this hardware will die, we'll be nearly at the start point.
Paul
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