Category Archives: MiNT

Making MacMiNT self hosting

Posted on by
8
Compiled in 2015!

Compiled in 2015!

One thing that always bothered me about MacMiNT is that I never could compile JET or MacMint itself.  It requires the headers from MPW 3.2, or better known as the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop, along with a single library again from MPW 3.2

MPW 3.3 won’t work, which is the only version I’ve had when I bought an extraordinarily heavy FORTRAN compiler for the MAC, Language Systems FORTRAN.  I tried to get dungeon to work with that, but no dice.

But thanks to macgui, they have links to the 3.2 headers & libraries!

It took me a little longer than I’d like to figure out how to build the cross libraries, as I kept running the script from the script directory, not from /mint as I should have (is there any documentation?!).  But I finally built the libmac16.olb and libmac.olb needed for MiNT programs to call the MacOS toolbox!

So now I’m able to compile Hoshi’s 1999 JET and MacMiNT!

For anyone interested, I’ve built a disk image here, that includes everything all ready to go.  It runs great on my latest build of Cockatrice, although I haven’t made any Win32 builds just yet….  I suspect it’ll run on emaculation’s build of Basilisk II it really should only need a 68000 with 8MB of RAM or so.  The disk image is 8MB, and uncompressed onto a hard disk takes up 35MB of space.

I’ve also made a small (100MB) mirror of the umich MiNT & MacMiNT install archives I could find right here.

Also, it runs dungeon,and with a lot of finagling, it’ll even run f2c dungeon! (needs a 68030 or higher).

For those who insist on running this on SheepShaver / Or PowerPC based machines, I’ve found that System 7 and an OldWorld ROM run it best.  System 8.0 and System 8.1 can run it (assuming they were installed as a PowerPC install), but System 8.5 and higher are not very cooperative when it comes to MacMiNT.

MacMiNT on SheepShaver MacOS 8.1

MacMiNT on SheepShaver MacOS 8.1

I suspect it must be the re-write of the nanokernel that PowerPC MacOS is based on.

More fun with MiNT

Posted on by
Reply

So I was building a simple program, and I noticed that -lm (linking in the math library) doesn’t work. Well it appears that MiNT doesn’t have a normal math library, it’s called pml. I guess it’s a “portable math library”?

At any rate simply copying the /usr/lib/pml.olb to /usr/lib/m.olb allows you to keep on trucking.
More fun later.

MacMiNT

Posted on by
3
MacMint

MacMint

Recently I came across a Power Macintosh 5400/120 at a garage sale for the bargain price of $12! I couldn’t believe my luck, for under $20 I had a fully working computer!

Except that it won’t run OS X 1.0
And it only has 8Mb of ram.

Because of its memory restrictions it can only run Mac OS 7.6

What to do….

MacMINT!

MINT back in the day for AtariST’s was a UNIX like layer that ran on top of TOS (The Atari MS-DOS like OS) and provided basic Unix services. With the program aptly called JET (Just Enough TOS), the Macintosh 68000’s can setup a TOS compatible interrupt vector table, and run TOS procedure emulation to run the MINT binaries under MacOS!

So, it’s UNIX!

Sort of.

First you need to disable Virtual Memory… That’s bad.
Next it doesn’t support TCP/IP so it’s like being on Unix v6. But it’s fun at any rate.

You can find the binaries at my mirror of sra.co.jp here.

It includes gcc 2.5.8, and a somewhat basic environment. It does have lots of potential, but the biggest gripe is that 8Mb of ram just isn’t enough to do any serious compiling, and yes it will crash with virtual memory enabled. Also since it is 68000 programs it is running under emulation.. I have to admit that I am tempted to buy some kind of 68000 based Macintosh to run MacMiNT.

I know this may not be terribly useful to people, but then again someone has to do something fun/weird on a $12 machine. I fully expect to either get a ‘bigger’ 68000 box, or more ram and run something like simh on it. I can only wonder how usable the PDP11 or the Interdata32 are.

And for anyone, like me wants a ‘clear’ program, just because, here is a simple one, just remember to link with -ltermcap.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <termcap.h>

void main()

{

char buf[1024];
char buf2[30];
char *ap;
char *clearstr;

ap=buf2;
tgetent(buf,getenv(“TERM”));
clearstr=tgetstr(“cl”,&ap);
fputs(clearstr,stdout);

}