The Mac ROMS (at least the older ones) are non-standard between models
unlike the PC BIOS which is set in stone in each PC - I'm sure that booting
gets the various Mac's in a consistent state.

Don Woodward


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rafael Diniz" <rafael2k@terra.com.br>
To: <port-mac68k@netbsd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 22:28
Subject: Re: why we need MacOS to boot NetBSD? (FAQ)


Why Apple doesn't open the MacOS 7.x source code?
Has anyone sent an email to Apple?

Bye,
Rafael Diniz

> It should be possible to write a booter that runs right out of the boot
> sector of a floppy or an HFS partition on a hard disk. In fact, if you
> search the mailing list archives you'll see that somebody was actually
> working on this and made some reasonable progress. However, writing such
> a boot loader is a non-trivial activity because there is little
> documentation on how to write bootable software to the Mac ROMs.
>
> So basically, it seems to be ust a matter of "somebody hasn't gotten
> around to it yet". :-)

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Engenharia da Computação  --  Unicamp
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Usuário do sistema operacional GNU/Linux
"Acreditar num conhecimento que pode ser vendido e
comprado é uma forma sutil (e cruel) de perpetuar a ignorância."
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