On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 05:21:04PM -0500, Rick Thomas wrote: > > On Aug 11, 2004, at 3:44 PM, Sven Luther wrote: > >On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 03:12:49PM -0400, Rick_Thomas wrote: > >>Here are a few practical suggestions: > >> > >>Has anyone looked at "inside Macintosh" or some of the other early Mac > >>technical docs? I wonder if this code is, maybe, described there? > > > >The real problem is that i am not a mac user, since i came from the > >amiga > >world, and am currently working for genesi, who produce the pegasos and > >MorphOS, which is an amiga OS reimplementation. We have information > >about the > >boot block, but not the code in question. I know that it is mostly trap > >instructions, and do some basic mac rom calls. If we were able to know > >which > >rom calls those are, and what they do, this would be enough for a > >clean room > >reimplementation. > > I've been doing some research into this. In particular, I've been > looking at the "Monster drivers tech note" available on Apple's Tech > Support web site. > > As I mentioned in another thread, calls to the OldWorld Mac ROM, for > anything other than a floppy, are actually calls to a patched/extended > image of the ROM -- patched and extended with whatever driver > information is needed to help the ROM code read from the device in > question on that particular type of Mac. Those patches/drivers are > licensed IP of Apple (or a third-party vendor if Apple doesn't directly > support booting from the device in question.) > > The patches/drivers get installed on your hard disk by the Apple disk > partitioning utility (or a similar third-party utility) which is only > available as part of MacOS (or from the third party vendor). > > It appears that re-writing the boot code part of miboot is really just > the tip of a very large iceberg. To be truly "free", you have to > provide a substitute for the patches and drivers.
Which is why miboot is only recomended for floppy things, and not CD/disk based ones. Friendly, Sven Luther
