Hello.

(I'm CCing the list on this again because much of this should be seen
by anyone else with an interest in native booting and I don't want to
have to say it twice.)

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 11:43:54PM -0400, Louis  Guillaume wrote:
> I'll try your suggestions tomorrow, thanks. If you need help with any of 
> this please let me know. I don't have much background in things this 
> low-level, but really am trying to learn.

Well, one thing is that very few people have much background in the
low-level guts of starting up on a Mac without MacOS. Or starting up
MacOS. It's mostly undocumented, half the information in the old
Inside Macintosh doesn't apply, even less of the information in the new
Inside Macintosh applies...

Most of the help I need is in testing on various machines once I have
a version up that might work on something other than an SE/30.

If you want to mess with the code, you'll need to know C, 68k ASM, and
have some idea of how to program for the old MacOS. Copies of IM I -
IM V will come in handy, along with all the other usual references.

Oh, and right now it will probably only compile on an a.out system
such as 1.5.1. Once things are generally working I'll look at making
it compile as ELF (if someone else wants to take a stab at this,
compare the aout2bb program in the booter source to the one in
src/sys/arch/amiga/stand/bootblock/aout2bb and replicate the changes
in a copy of src/sys/arch/amiga/stand/bootblock/elf2bb).

> Of particular interest would be getting this to work on IIci models. I 
> have some of these, which I use as my firewall. Thanks again,

Well, I have (or had, before my drive crash, hopefully I have an up-to-
date copy on my LC II) an updated version with support for automatic
video card detection and such. It's a couple features away from being
usable for all II-series Macs (well, one feature away: Gestalt IDs).
At least, I hope that's all that's missing... I'll try and get what I
have so far publicly available by the end of the week.

Unfortunately, my LC II, which is a Universal ROM system, sadmacs while
trying to initialize the Resource Manager. I don't have very many Macs
to work with, but I believe that this would affect all Universal ROM
systems, and the IIci has such a ROM.

One thing you might try is seeing if the boot disk works at all in an
IIci. If it puts up the little console window and says that it's
starting up before it chokes then we might be able to get it working
inside of a week. If it sadmacs before putting up that window then
it's definately broken for Universal ROM machines, and we'll need to
work on finding a better way to fake out the Resource Manager. Or
find a way to not have to initialize the Resource Manager in the
first place... That might be plausible if we could find the ROM
resource directory reliably... I'll have to think about this...

> Louis

--Alastair