Subject: Re: Boot up m68k Mac (Re: NetBSD PPC)
To: SUNAGAWA Keiki <kei_sun@ba2.so-net.ne.jp>
From: Erik E. Fair <fair@clock.org>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 06/08/1998 21:34:26
In principle, it is possible to boot a 68000-based Mac into netbsd
directly; you just have to set up an environment sufficient to satisfy what
the Mac ROMs want to see and load.

In practice, I have no idea what the requirements are (this is not
something that Apple has carefully documented that I know of), so I don't
know how hard it would be to do.

It occurrs to me among the people *outside* of Apple who might know are
those who have worked on various "accelerators" (i.e. additional CPUs) for
those Macs. I am thinking of

	SONNET Technologies http://www.sonnettech.com/
	DayStar Digital (gone - assets purchased by MacWorks)
	Radius (gone - Merged with SuperMac, and purchased by Umax)
	Applied Engineering (gone)

Each of these companies produced "add-in" CPUs for various models of the
68k-based Macintoshes that were faster than the stock CPUs; they had to be
intimate with the details of booting the Mac to get MacOS to run on their
CPU instead of the main one on the motherboard...

Now, whether they will part with any of that information is another matter.
If we can convince that we're expanding the market for their hardware
products, perhaps they will...

	Erik <fair@clock.org>