hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (12/14/89)
Sorry if this sounds stupid, I was a little bleary when I thought it up... Folks were talking about the intricacies of producing legal Mac/BIOS ROM clones. 2 programming teams, one to analyze the existing code and document it, one to reimplement according to team 1's specs. I don't care for Macintoshes or PCs very much. I'd really like to see some detailed TOS docs though, and this sounds like the ideal approach to getting it. Original source code from Atari would be pretty cool, but they don't even give that to registered developers any more. (Much to my chagrin, $300 after the fact, y'know? }-) How 'bout a team of ST programmers getting together to analyze TOS 1.4, and publish their specs? That ought to be at least as useful as the original source code, and doesn't require any effort on Atari's part. Ideally the Atari system programmers themselves would be best suited to the task, being most familiar with everything, but they're already pretty busy. And, I suppose, being so thoroughly familiar with the code, they may overlook mentioning some things that they take for granted. It would be a lot of grungy work to explore the ROMs from a total outsider's viewpoint, but it would be useful... I'm not particularly interested in cloning TOS ROMs. i don't have the desire (or the resources!) to produce ST clones. But I *would* like to have enough docs to write my own mods to TOS. I can't see this being a bad thing, look at all the info you can get about MSDOS, and look at the sophistication of most DOS programs... -- -=- PrayerMail: Send 100Mbits to holyghost@father.son[127.0.0.1] and You Too can have a Personal Electronic Relationship with God!
RiddCJ@computer-science.birmingham.ac.UK (Chris Ridd) (12/17/89)
In digest #801, Howard Chu wrote: >... How about a team of ST programmers getting >together to analyze TOS 1.4, and publish their specs? Funnily enough, I was thinking along similar lines a few days ago! Since it seems that we have a lot of TOS and GEM gurus reading the net, why doesn't everybody write in and contribute information (uses, bugs etc etc) on all the functions on the ROMs (not just 1.4 necessarily)? I don't think we need to produce full specs for the ROMs, which would probably take too long anyway, but specs for the standard library functions would be really good. (I mean GEMDOS, BIOS, XBIOS, LineA, VDI, AES). /* * Snail mail address: * Chris Ridd, "Wave after wave, each mightier than the last * School of Computer Science, 'Til last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep * Birmingham University, And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged * UK Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame" * */