Re:The Newton Application Architecture (1994) [pdf]
by matthiaswm on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @12:42PM
(#22415246)
The MPW emulator is here: https://github.com/MatthiasWM/dynee5/blob/master/Alienate/mo...
It uses a m68k CPU emulator and implements a bunch of Classic traps, just enough to run most (all) the Newton tools like they were a regular command line app.
I love the seamless integration of the HWR into the OS. And the ability to draw and write anywhere. Todays devices all go a different path.
Yeah, the C code translates quite well back and forth to the ARM code. I have tried to understand optimized Intel assembler, but failed miserably ;-D
IIRC, the current iOS app rules don’t prohibit emulation, just downloadable code. There are games running Lua scripts inside, right? Or am I confused? (That happens.) But that does make the ROM a conundrum.
I can’t think of any theoretical reason you can’t make a new native version of Newton OS that runs old apps — it’s more or less like making a new browser that runs websites. Of course, you’d need to reimplement some fairly hard things in the undocumented native part of the toolkit, like handwriting recognition.
One nice thing about working on the ARM4 to ARM6 was how clean the assembly code is. We didn’t have a source-level debugger, so I spent many many hours debugging C code in an assembly view, and it really wasn’t too bad.