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Apple Lisa OS and application source code

stepleton

Well-known member
Exciting news: over on LisaList, Al Kossow of the Computer History Museum has announced that Apple is reviewing the source code for the Lisa Office System to see what they can release publicly. Stay tuned for more in 2018...

 

Dog Cow

Well-known member
Exciting indeed! Thanks for posting.

Let's hope this benefits emulator development as well.

 
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aplmak

Well-known member
I'd like to get a date fix (hint, hint)... :) Perhaps someone will take it on after getting the code...

 

luckybob

Well-known member
Pardon my ignorance, but just how is the source code different than a decompiled copy?  Is it just the inclusion of notes and other similar tidbits?  

 

Dog Cow

Well-known member
Pardon my ignorance, but just how is the source code different than a decompiled copy?  Is it just the inclusion of notes and other similar tidbits?  
Basically, you just said it. It saves someone the trouble of disassembly. Plus you get all the source comments and symbols too. The comments sometimes are more valuable than the code.

 

jack

Well-known member
Anyone know if it will be released under some sort of OSI license? Or is the source code just for viewing?
 

 

CC_333

Well-known member
Not sure. Didn't they make MacPaint GS/OS 6 source public domain a few years back, though? (I may be mis-remembering) They may do the same with this.

I wonder when they'll release the original Mac System Software code? That would be neat!

c

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I believe Apple released either MacPaint or MacDraw, but not both; or MacWrite or the whole system, for that matter.

GS/OS 6 and also some bits of Mac SSW 7 have actually been leaked and have been floating around online for a few years. This wasn't Apple's intentional doing, but a few versions have been released by a group enterprising enough to figure out and replicate the build chain, and Apple has (to my knowledge) yet to do anything.

 

LukeandPatty

New member
I really hope Apple does the right thing and releases everything they have on Lisa. There is a question about the American Heritage dictionary but maybe Apple could go the extra mile and get permission for that. It's not like the company is so poor it can't afford to make this very small effort for computing history and its legacy.

 

werdna

Well-known member
It would be nice if this spurs some further development and enthusiasm for Lisa emulation. LisaEm could really use a nice UI update, as well as working MacWorks emulation. (Not that the LOS source code will help with those issues in particular) Maybe someone will go ahead and fork LisaEm into... Mini LisaEm... or something... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

 

gilles

Well-known member
Oldest versions of my emulator (Idle https://sourceforge.net/projects/idle-lisa-emu) did work with Macworks. But for some reason I get an address error in current version. I suspect a change of behavior in gcc (or maybe I'm firing address errors too frequently).

Idle is not perfect but runs LOS100, LOS200, LOS31, Workshop, Xenix, Uniplus. Currently broken : gemdos and macworks

Macworks source code can be found on bitsavers but probably in lisa workshop disks images, I did not explore those disks yet.

I did not updated Idle for a while but I recently ported to SDL1.2. Now Idle can be compiled on many platforms (tested Win10, Macos 10.6, linux, raspbian Rpi). Binary are available for win and Macos.

The UI is... minimal... (portable Menu system taken from Hatari).

 

werdna

Well-known member
Oh... I'll have to check that one out too.

Oldest versions of my emulator
Yes, I'm aware. IIRC you are emulating the ROM in later versions, or something along those lines. And it is definitely faster that way. I had assumed that might have been one of the reasons MacWorks wasn't working but I'm not the developer so I really don't know...  :p  

 

gilles

Well-known member
Idle does not emulate the rom, rom H (lisa2) or rom C(lisa1) must be present in bios directory (video prom image also for serial number). I wrote in another project an alternative boot rom https://sourceforge.net/projects/idle-boot-rom/ but it's so old and outdated that the cvs repository is read only and needs to be migrated to SVN or something else. It's an interesting bootstrap for a repair rom and may be usefull someday. this alternative rom is 68000 code and may run in the real lisa (maybe some initialisations are missing, for screen contrast for example). [edit] the alternative rom project was not commited on sourceforge at latest version... maybe code is lost forever...

I think ray did emulate the rom for the romless version of lisaem (I suppose romless is optional and lisaem can still run with rom files). I do not know exacly how he did (68000 code or higher level traps in emulator).

For Idle the problem is not in the rom but somewhere else, probably in the 68000 emulation, the memory or the SCC (It's not in floppy emulation, it also fails when booting from a known good profile image). I think it can be fixed in weeks if I find time.

 
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gilles

Well-known member
found the main bug that crashed macworks while booting (version xl3.0).

The opcode ADDA.W (A0)+,A0 was not emulated properly.

It's a weird opcode because you do not know exactly which value of A0 is taken (for the address it is pre incrementation, but for the final result it's post).

The compiled code changed from gcc3 to gcc4+ or maybe it worked by chance if code is optimized

 

mactjaap

Well-known member
Nice to read about Idle. Will definitely try. Now only used to LisaEm, but would love to play around with Xenix too! I have a boot disk which boots fine on my Lisa, but not on LisaEm. 

 
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