> Interesting change in Apple policy - from putting Apple II ROM listings > in the manual.
Yes, after their bad experience with the Franklin Ace clone and lawsuit, Apple developed a completely different corporate attitude. No more Woz-like openness (he even passed out schematics of the Apple I!). > Do you mean that the ROMs aren't pure M68000 code, but are decrypted on > the fly (or, on boot, into RAM) before execution? > > I'm surprised if no-one has dis-assembled the early Mac ROMs. I imagine that people have done it, but haven't been able to publish their results. Certainly people have made clones by just copying the roms, or making small tweaks to them, but Apple's army of attorneys have cut them off at the knees. The ROMs are pure 68000 code, but figuring out what's going on is a different matter altogether. To get everything to fit, they used a lot of idiosyncratic tricks (e.g., the icons are represented in compressed form, not simple bitmaps) which, to my knowledge, are not understood outside of a small group. Maybe we could invite Andy Hertzfeld to tell us a bit more about this issue... --Cheers, Tom -- Prof. Thomas H. Lee Center for Integrated Systems, CIS-205 420 Via Palou Mall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-4070 http://www-smirc.stanford.edu 650-725-3709 voice, -3383 fax -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
