eharmon
Well-known member
I discovered something interesting while I was looking at the software for the Magellan 040 from this post: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/na-2021-ebay-finds-thread.37524/page-179#post-556420
A fair amount of older software was incompatible with the 040's caches. Traditionally this was solved with Cache Switch to disable it globally, or INITs that looked for specific software running and automatically disabled it selectively.
Curiously the Magellan 040 came with "Fixit 040", which appears to scan application binaries for 040 incompatibilities and patch them. That's a radically different technique, I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen anything like that. It doesn't require a Magellan to run, and implies it patches the software directly, instead of adding a Magellan-specific hook.
Does it wrap sections with cache disabling instructions? Does it actually try to patch the instruction stream? No idea how or how well it works yet, but might be neat to play with.
A fair amount of older software was incompatible with the 040's caches. Traditionally this was solved with Cache Switch to disable it globally, or INITs that looked for specific software running and automatically disabled it selectively.
Curiously the Magellan 040 came with "Fixit 040", which appears to scan application binaries for 040 incompatibilities and patch them. That's a radically different technique, I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen anything like that. It doesn't require a Magellan to run, and implies it patches the software directly, instead of adding a Magellan-specific hook.
Does it wrap sections with cache disabling instructions? Does it actually try to patch the instruction stream? No idea how or how well it works yet, but might be neat to play with.
