I wonder how much of an advantage it was for #Apple that the #m68k #Macintosh had a bunch of its operating system in a separate ROM chip.
#Microsoft #Windows didn't have that. The whole thing had to be loaded from disk into RAM.
Windows 1.0 required no less than 256kB of RAM—twice as much as the first #Mac model had.
I got a working toolchain. Now I just need one of the silver USB GraphLink cables to be able to transfer software to it. (if you have one you don't need let me know)
I became the custodian of this Mac IIcx early October last year. It was in the batch that had the Apple IIe in it, among other machines. It sports a Motorola 68030 CPU at 16Mhz and a whopping 4MB of RAM.
The mainboard suffered some corrosion from capacitor leakage, but thanks to friends at berlinCreators e.V., it is now back to life. Everything minus the soft power-off works. But we'll get there, eventually.
It happily boots to MacOS 7.5.5 from a SCSI2SD v5.
Under the title link you will find a modern web application for writing, executing and learning M68K assembler code, which uses the SvelteKit framework and the Rust programming language. The tool now supports not only 68k, but also MIPS architecture:
A plea for help with the Amiga, fs-uae and joysticks. I wrote a blogpost for detail but TL;DR is that I can't read my joystick in 68k assembler for reasons I don't understand.
Any advice is welcome or boosts for reach. I would ask in https://eab.abime.net/ but my account hasn't been activated there yet :(
See the World in a Grain of Sand.
Motorola 68000 die shot by Pauli Rautakorpi. #m68K
I also participated in very useless size/speedcoding competitions - some of them are still accessible from this old web page: https://amycoders.org/compo/
Note that some of the HTML is a bit broken, for example https://amycoders.org/compo/circlecompo.html - you can view source to see the full routine
Yes, I know, I could have 3D printed something, but I really lack the space for a 3D printer, and I have too many tools I barely use anyway. Plus I don't have experience in designing these kind of things - although would be very interested, but not having a printer is kinda demotivating. This was just way faster and simpler - for now.
On a related note and looking sharp - used the white-on-black labels to add some other matching labels here and there.
Still wrapping up some small projects after the holidays. This time, I put the X68000 USB mouse adapter I built previously into a case.
The small plastic box I bought for this is slightly too big, but I padded it with some foam I had at hand. Proper zip-tie engineering results in good enough stress reliefs. Add some white-on-black labels to make it look... SHARP. (Sorry...)
Not too bad for a first try and it still works - the Arduino survived the surgery.
I still have a wonderful collection of aminet CDs. The module section on them is still valuable even to this day
@skrzyp "That other guy who did Mapparium" - and AmiFox, and a number of other bigger and smaller apps - is my partner-in-crime Marcus "ALB42" Sackrow. He is also hosting the main #m68k build servers for FPC, where we build all FPC 68k targets for every change in Git "main" and "fixes" branches, and fix breakages ASAP. This includes Atari ST too.
There's at least a 3rd person 
who wrote a major app in FPC/Amiga: http://3doc.i3dconverter.com/ at least the Amiga version of this tool uses FPC.
I've seen @chainq work on #FreePascal for #Amiga and the software he makes (Viaduct makes my mind blown and moves the A3000+486 on top of my wishlist)
But he's probably the only person doing that, except maybe this other guy who did Mapparium and similar
Sadly, the #AtariST port of FPC seems to be pretty much abandoned
Both are just #m68k, but the exec format different (Hunk is so comples, while TOS is simplistic, there is even ELF->TOS converter to use with regular m68k GCC)
Does this CPU get your vote for “best CPU ever”?
It’s certainly up there for me. #m68k
Did you know that #NetBSD #m68k can compile itself from scratch?
How long would you imagine it might take to compile NetBSD 10 from source on real m68k hardware? Earlier this year I wanted to find out, so I set up a Macintosh to try it.
The toolchain, OS and installation sets started on 16-March and finished on 10-May:
build.sh started: Sat Mar 16 17:04:20 UTC 2024
build.sh ended: Fri May 10 00:35:54 UTC 2024
4692724.22 real 3810544.56 user 700310.18 sysThat’s 1303 and a half hours, or almost eight weeks, or 54 days.
Installing the OS using build.sh took another four hours (4:08:39).
The kernel took another almost 21 hours (20:55).
That’s a lot of time, but it worked without issues, and the system runs happily!
What feels like an eternity ago, I started building an Arduino-based USB mouse adapter for my Sharp X68000. I managed to get it working today.
It's based on Zuofu's Mouse and Keyboard Adapter, but modified to support the mouse port, as I do have an original keyboard. But even if I hoard an original mouse later, I'll probably prefer a modern optical mouse. A black Raspberry Pi mouse works just fine.
First time I can use the Human 68k Visual Shell! cc: @spook
„Was? Die ›ST-Computer‹ gibt es immer noch? Gedruckt?“
Ja. Und grade sind von der aktuellen Ausgabe noch ein paar wenige Exemplare zu kaufen:
https://forum.atari-home.de/index.php/topic,17980.msg270939.html#msg270939
Themen:
- Taskbar 5 vs. Motosu
- MiSTeryNano
- Shotgun (Spiel)
- Hardware: Atari 2600+
u.a.
