matthiaswm

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

Making the NTK so insanely expensive killed my enthusiasm pretty quickly. I was working as a SW engineer in L.A., so even if it would have been only a small game, I would have had the ability to at least add something to the pool.

Even the Palm SDK was commercial in the beginning. But a free toolchain was put together by some hacker after a year or so, which subsequently convinced Palm to lower their price and eventually give it away for free IIRC. Then again, even VisualC 6 cost 400$ or so back then.

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to ask you question. I ported and continued Einstein for a while, trying to make it run well on e-ink displays ATM. I also wrote a little emulator so that MPW tools can run on macOS, Linux, etc. . I bought one of the early MPs, hoping to be able to write apps, but the cost of NTK was just too much, and the resulting lack of software made me abandon the platform quite quickly.

As a novelty, I like to have Einstein running NewtonOS on my Samsung Note 10 which is now really fast and quite impressive for a machine from the 90's.

Apple has refused Einstein for iOS at least once. They don't allow emulators, especially not Apple product emulators, and they don't like the idea of downloading ROMs. Do you have any suggestion on how we could get EInstein into the app store nevertheless? Or how to get around the ROM issue?

Maybe related, I wish we could bring NewtonScript into the 64bit world, surrounded by an updated NewtonOS. There is already half of the ROM rewritten as newton-framework on GitHub. Do you think it is possible to rewrite the rest? To get a truly native framework going? How would we do that?

Anyway, I wanted to thank you for creating this huge Sudoku puzzle for us. I have a great time tracing your steps and understanding NewtonScript and how it works inside NewtonOS. I have manually disassembled thousands of lines of ROM code, and it's just great fun to see smart code.