bdb@cl.cam.ac.uk (Brian Brunswick) (03/28/90)
The response that I got from my original query about whether I should put the mac emulator that I have produced into some kind of free distribution has generally been interesting. The general consensus seems to be that AMAX copies the mac roms into ram, and so it is probably legal for me to do the same. I will therefore proceed to produce what I hope will be an early beta test version, and then send it to some of the numerous people who volunteered for this - thanks very much! This version will have protection style techniques in it to try and enforce its use with hardware - ie it will check in nefarious places for the presence of the mac roms at some fixed address that I have yet to designate - any good suggestions? Please don't expect any replies for the next two weeks though, as I am going down, and leaving my beloved amiga behind. In answer to some of the questions asked: Do I have any way of transfering data from mac disks - like the AMAX middle few tracks technique? No. I initially got data across by serial transfer - of entire disk images. Now, I plug my amiga scsi drive into a mac, and write data onto the mac partition of it. Can it use the 68000, as most amiga owners have this? Yes, but only if you have 4MB of expansion memory, or memory that can be wangled to give 128k at 0x400000 and a decent amount below this. So far, I need to have the roms at their original 4MB base address, since, although the roms themselves are relocateable, the patches that are applied by the mac system as it starts up are not. With a 68010 or greater, one can fake it by generating an address error at 4MB, and relocating all references. I'm not too sure that this worries me anyway - If one is building a bit of hardware, the trivial upgrade to a 68010 is easy, and <L10 anyway. So anyway, to hopefully quote Fu Man Chu, THE WORLD WILL HERE FROM ME AGAIN! And to the person who wanted me to email them the mac roms - no chance! Brian Brunswick, bdb@uk.ac.cam.cl, bdb10@uk.ac.cam.phx. Short .sig rules!