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GEMDOS on the Lisa can be built again!

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guibrush

Member
Ok, I just tried your image.... And this is fantastic :)  All run fine, "GEMVDI" bring me the desktop, I can launch the "hello world" app and the sketch app. Trying to access the floppy issue a instant reboot. The rest looks promising. Maybe I will try later some Atari apps, who know, with luck some basic apps could run.

Thank you verry much for this work, this is awesome. 

Do I understand right that this setup was used by Atari and Digital people to write the GEM / TOS for the ST?

Here some pictures of my setup:

https://imgur.com/a/oH68z2D

 
Last edited by a moderator:
C

cheesestraws

Well-known member
guibrush said:
Ok, I just tried your image.... And this is fantastic :)  All run fine, "GEMVDI" bring me the desktop, I can launch the "hello world" app and the sketch app.
Click to expand...


Excellent news :) .  I know that First Word roughly runs, and some very early Atari software ought to.  If you play, I'd be fascinated to hear what you find out.

guibrush said:
Trying to access the floppy issue a instant reboot
Click to expand...


There is basically no error handling at all in this version of GEMDOS, and the filesystem handling is... fragile.  What discs are you using with this?  Transferring files via floppy is a right pain because the physical format of the floppies has to be GCR, but the filesystem has to be FAT12.  So you can't just use Atari or PC floppy discs.

An anonymous person (who I wish would turn up so I could thank them, I couldn't have got this working without them) built a tool to make floppy images in DiskCopy 4.2 format that you can copy onto floppies with an old mac, or use with something like the Floppy Emu.  It's here: http://www.alternative-system.com/en/revive-gemdos-for-lisa/ but note that in order to get different files onto the disc you actually have to edit main.c.  Trying to turn this into a more useful file transfer tool is something I wanted to do but failed to.

There are some extra utilities available for this version; the compiler suite, for example, and a port of kermit.  I haven't put those onto floppies or transferred them to my Lisa, so they're not on the card image I sent you, because dealing with floppies is a massive pain and I'm lazy.  They're available in the porting kit anyway - the rest of the kit can be downloaded from Ben Jemmett's website here: http://www.deltasoft.com/downloads-gemworld.htm

guibrush said:
Do I understand right that this setup was used by Atari and Digital people to write the GEM / TOS for the ST?
Click to expand...


The original Lisa port was part of a porting kit which was provided to companies that wanted to port GEM to their hardware.  It consisted of a build of GEMDOS and GEM for Lisa (binaries only), the source code to the hardware-specific bits of GEMDOS for the Lisa, the source code to the screen driver for the Lisa, and the necessary compiler and build system to build GEMDOS from these parts (plus various binary blobs).  So essentially, it was a 'port GEM to your 68k hardware, just add a Lisa' kit.

I don't know if that kit was exactly what Atari got to start their porting efforts, but it would have been pretty close to it.

Unfortunately, as I said, there were only binaries for most of GEMDOS in that kit; DR weren't about to give away all their source code with it.  And the source code for that precise version of GEMDOS seems to have been lost.  Also, its hard disc driver appears not to work, at least on my 2/10.  Perhaps it works on a 2/5 under certain conditions, but I don't know that anyone has ever demonstrated that it does work.  So I took a later version of GEMDOS, code for which has survived and is open source, compiled it against the hardware-specific bits from the porting kit, and added @stepleton's hard disc driver as a replacement for the original.  Also some utility functions had to be reconstructed on the basis of other versions of GEMDOS or the 68k port of CP/M.

So the precise setup you have there is probably as near as you can reasonably get to the setup that customers of DR would have received, but is not precisely it.  It's a composite of surviving code from the correct period and a little bit of modern code.

Hope this all makes sense!

 
G

guibrush

Member
Hi

I managed to make a workflow to write disk on a mac for the Lisa, here is my setup with Diskcopy 4.2 on the TAM:

https://imgur.com/STP9QFK 

but you are right: add files on the disk is a pain in the ass :)  

Now, I took a little time to answer to this thread, but there is a reason:

I showed your work to Vincent Rivière. Vincent is one of the maker and maintainer of EmuTOS, the free TOS replacement for the ATARI line based on GEM free sources. And Vincent wanted to try something cool. Pushed by the fact that I have a working setup for testing, he started that:

https://imgur.com/vzszN7C

:)

 
C

cheesestraws

Well-known member
guibrush said:
but you are right: add files on the disk is a pain in the ass :)  
Click to expand...
It is a bit :/ are you using that tool I linked to above, or have you found a more flexible way of doing it?

guibrush said:
And Vincent wanted to try something cool
Click to expand...


That is incredibly cool and something I've been wanting to see for ages.  I did post the "historical" GEMDOS to the EmuTOS mailing list when I first got it working, but mostly as a historical curiosity and I've been lurking ever since.  Does Vincent have any plans to make this more available?  I would love to have EmuTOS booting on the Lisa and I am sure I'm not alone...

 
G

guibrush

Member
no, I didn't find a more flexible way to transfert datas.

For EmuTOS, of course it will be available :)

For now, we have a booting desktop, Vincent have to improve the interupts and bring the media support to life, then we will have something usable for sure.

I come back to you when I know more. 

 
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