Darkmatter on NeXT hardware

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neozeed
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Darkmatter on NeXT hardware

Post by neozeed »

Image

And it runs on Previous too!

It'll emulate a LC II, so you won't be booting up into MacOS 8 anytime soon, but it is another emulator of sorts. It runs directly on the NeXT hardware, and intercepts the drivers in much the same way that BasiliskII does. It has no SCSI emulation, instead it's diskfiles AKA big floppies on a UFS disk.

I got it to run SoftPC, to stress it out, and it works. It's cycle exact to a 68040 @ 25Mhz so something like Wolf3d on this is out of the question.

And the NeXT Cubes were 4bit displays, the color stuff didn't render correct, but as always it's a work in progress.

You can follow their project here on nextcomputers.org
don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow.
Jorpho
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Re: Darkmatter on NeXT hardware

Post by Jorpho »

Neat! I suppose it still requires an installation of Mac OS as well as a BIOS ROM? (For that matter, does Previous also require NeXTSTEP and some kind of BIOS?)
neozeed
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Re: Darkmatter on NeXT hardware

Post by neozeed »

Currently the [Previous] emulator has the NeXT ROMS in the source dumps.

Darkmatter is a self contained kernel, so it doesn't actually need NeXTSTEP to run. But it does need a UFS disk to operate, and as far as the Mac ROM, it's currently embedded in the Darkmatter binary, so no ROM boxes or anything hokey like that.

You will need to bulid the latest source from [SVN] though.

And I put up a simple 'test disk' here that is all set... you'll have to read the 404 message to get the auto-generated password to download it though. sorry. :???:
don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow.
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adespoton
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Re: Darkmatter on NeXT hardware

Post by adespoton »

Since some of the links are dead, I'm adding Neozeed's own writeup here, so people can find what they need:
https://virtuallyfun.com/2015/08/07/darkmatter/
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