cheesestraws
Well-known member
GEM and GEMDOS, which are perhaps best known from the Atari ST series, were also ported to the Lisa. Both were designed to be portable, and DRI sent the source for the Lisa port to OEMs that were considering porting GEM as their 'example implementation'. When Caldera/SCO open sourced GEM, part of the random dump of stuff they threw at the folks requesting it was this porting kit. The FreeGEM folks were mostly interested in PC GEM (I was on the periphery of this, fiddling with programming language bindings), and Atari GEM had gone its own way anyway. Bits of it did end up in EmuTOS, though.
The practical upshots of this, though, are: the code for Lisa is out there, and so is the original toolchain to build Atari GEMDOS. And @gilles already did a bunch of work to get GEMDOS booting on the Lisa.
My "discovery" of the last few days is: not only can you use an Atari emulator and the GEMDOS-on-Atari toolchain to build application code for GEMDOS on Lisa (in fact, for at least my simple applications so far, there's not even a need to recompile), but you can use it to build the OS itself (after a little mucking about - one component was completely missing and I had to hack a replacement together from a combination of Atari GEMDOS and CP/M code). I'll write up instructions for building it soon, but if anyone wants the files let me know.
This is a photo of GEMDOS running on my Lisa. You'll have to take my word for it that it's a new build of the code, rather than the GEMDOSFI.SYS that DRI shipped.
Now, this is supremely useless, except for historical interest. But I'm kind of tempted to see if I can get GEM itself to run and whether, if so, I can try to run some old Atari software on it, or backport some of the FreeGEM goodies to it. Can anyone else think of fun things to do?
The practical upshots of this, though, are: the code for Lisa is out there, and so is the original toolchain to build Atari GEMDOS. And @gilles already did a bunch of work to get GEMDOS booting on the Lisa.
My "discovery" of the last few days is: not only can you use an Atari emulator and the GEMDOS-on-Atari toolchain to build application code for GEMDOS on Lisa (in fact, for at least my simple applications so far, there's not even a need to recompile), but you can use it to build the OS itself (after a little mucking about - one component was completely missing and I had to hack a replacement together from a combination of Atari GEMDOS and CP/M code). I'll write up instructions for building it soon, but if anyone wants the files let me know.
This is a photo of GEMDOS running on my Lisa. You'll have to take my word for it that it's a new build of the code, rather than the GEMDOSFI.SYS that DRI shipped.
Now, this is supremely useless, except for historical interest. But I'm kind of tempted to see if I can get GEM itself to run and whether, if so, I can try to run some old Atari software on it, or backport some of the FreeGEM goodies to it. Can anyone else think of fun things to do?