[HECnet] Ersatz-11 PDP-11 emulator V7.0

[Clem Cole]

below


On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 2:10 PM, John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> wrote:
From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>

>Much as as I like *BSD, I'd rather see OSx ;-)

Even if I weren't afraid of Apple because of their "app store" monopolistic
grabbiness (they used to be so nice in the old days),
Yup - any developers just ignore them and don't both with their stilly app store.    Many I know flip off Apple on that.    Jobs was always bad about that actually, he had to leave and come back for the gates to open.    Remember, the OSX stuff, darwin, etc - really was before Jobs.   


  
I wasn't able to find a reasonable way to get Mach-O executables from OMF-386 .OBJ files.
Let me talk to the compiler guys next time I'm in my NH office [I usually work from home].    The guy that was the brains behind the VMS linker is a very good friend of mine. [Paul Winalski]   He had to deal with Microsoft OMF crap when the DEC GEM compilers started to generate Winders code.    Since the Intel compilers are all native on the OSX,   have to do something for the Mac, I just don't know what it is.    I fear its something like a special tree walker that generates macho files from the internal form.    But they may have some tools.    You never know - you're not the first guy that has had to deal with this.    Paul might have some suggestions.

[I also know he loathes the Microsoft format].

  
Writing a new linker seems like a great way not to have fun!
Right - again you would like there would be a reason way to do this.    The GNU guys were actually no very helpful here.   They defined their own crap and the  confer everything to that.     

As I argue at Intel, when you build a tool for a specific environment, you need to be "socially compliant" with the target.    That means you need to deal with native formats, native installers, etc.    It's ok to use an interface library, but if you don't make it socially compatible, you are dead.



>On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Steve Davidson <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:
>
>> Then how about NetBSD on x86???

I really would like to attack the *BSDs ...
Well if you have linux already - *BSD   should be easy.    Again maybe I can help you here.    *BSD is really my native tongue, I use Mac OS because its   is really BSD under the covers.

  
I investigate periodically but I just can't decide which I'd regret more:   conditionalizing the
hell out of 11K lines of Linux-specific support code, or editing a copy
into ~11K lines of BSD-specific code that's easy reading but needs to
be maintained in parallel.   Um, or I could do both?   Nah.   It would be fun to get working though.
Yuk.    I would think that a OS interface library might help here.    Linux, Mac OS and *BSD are all pretty much the same for the basic I/O and all three support most of the basic low level OS stuff from open/close/read/write to mmap/semphores etc..    Where they differ is in UI and specifically GUI.    I wonder if you considered something like QT for everything but DOS, I would like the amount of OS specific code you had to deal with I would hope would drop  substantially.     

That said, since you said the DOS version is the native version, I fear it might be huge  surgery to get there and not worth the effort.
But I agree, would be fun to have.

Let me know if I can help you.   No sure I can, but you  never know.

Clem