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Carry a compact Mac in your pocket
- Thread starter Quadraman
- Start date
I thought somebody got Mini vMac working on like a TI-84 or something when I saw that link 
that actually gave me an idea. What if someone were to develop a vMac like virtual machine for the TI 68ks (TI-89, TI089 titanium, TI-92, TI-92 Plus, and voyage 200 I think)? so no binary emulation would be required? I bet it would be speedy. Hell, they ship them with enough memory nowadays for a stripped system 7 I bet...I thought somebody got Mini vMac working on like a TI-84 or something when I saw that link
too bad I am too poor to afford a 68k Ti. best I have is a TI-83 PLus, and I got that thing used.
-digital
Even though the CPU is native, you would still have to emulate the rest of the hardware. I just don't know if that is going to happen on a CPU that is only 25% faster (by clock speed). The only loophole that I can think of is by patching parts of the OS so that TI hardware looks like yet another Mac to it. But I really don't know how well that would work.
like I said, no BINARY emulation, but you would have to emulate some hardware, like make the flash look like a hard drive, and map the keyboard and arrows to a keyboard and mouse. Would take some work, but it sounds dooable. Of course, anything's possible in theory.
anyways, I can't program outside of basic and assembly, so I dunno if it could even be coded in those languages.
-digital
anyways, I can't program outside of basic and assembly, so I dunno if it could even be coded in those languages.
-digital
I have a feeling I have seen Mac OS running on a TI calculator before, but I can't remember where. There's a friend of mine who lives in Edinburgh who does all that kind of stuff, it might be him. Certainly he once had Lemmings running on (I think) a TI-81. I'll try and give him a shout at some point.
Actually, that would reduce to binary emulation because you would need the program to monitor hardware access down to the level of accessing memory. (Example: are we MOVEing data into the framebuffer.) You would also have to concern yourself with things like the contents of registers, because you have two OSes trying to control the CPU. The other reason is that I'm not sure if the 68000 is designed for virtualization. I've seen the difference between virtualization on older x86 machines and the PowerPC, and the difference made the x86's virtualization feel like emulation because critical parts of the processor had to be emulated.
In a lot of cases, you wouldn't have to worry about translating instructions but there would be a lot of exceptions to the rule. Which is why I would still consider it emulation. Now I'm not saying that the whole thing is impossible, but I am saying to expect enough of a speed drop to make the emulated machine feel slower than the original machine.
Oh, and I wouldn't say that anything is possible in theory. After all, some things aren't computable.
In a lot of cases, you wouldn't have to worry about translating instructions but there would be a lot of exceptions to the rule. Which is why I would still consider it emulation. Now I'm not saying that the whole thing is impossible, but I am saying to expect enough of a speed drop to make the emulated machine feel slower than the original machine.
Oh, and I wouldn't say that anything is possible in theory. After all, some things aren't computable.
I followed up the TI thing with Bell in Edinburgh and he replied as follows:
"Hmm, i've thought about it, but i can't say i've tried. I've got an 89, so i'll have a look into it.
One problem is that the memory you're restricted to is 188k. Maybe this could be gotten round if you paged data in and out of the flash memory, which is 2.7 megs. However, this would probably be difficult. You'd probably be able to get away with running OS's up to System 3.3, as this is what the Mac 128K supported.
Another (and probably much bigger problem) is getting it to use the video hardware of the calculator. I have no idea how you'd get it to do this, especially as it isn't open source like Linux. Btw, that reminds me: if you were thinking maybe Linux might work on a TI calc, think again. There's almost certainly no way to do this. That said, I'm thinking of implementing a TCP/IP stack on my 89 so I can use it as a web server. Might even work
Also, you'd have to mess around with the kernel to tell it where load main storage from. This isn't as tricky as it sounds though. Maybe the best thing to do would be to find a copy of System 3.3 and try to disassemble it."
"Hmm, i've thought about it, but i can't say i've tried. I've got an 89, so i'll have a look into it.
One problem is that the memory you're restricted to is 188k. Maybe this could be gotten round if you paged data in and out of the flash memory, which is 2.7 megs. However, this would probably be difficult. You'd probably be able to get away with running OS's up to System 3.3, as this is what the Mac 128K supported.
Another (and probably much bigger problem) is getting it to use the video hardware of the calculator. I have no idea how you'd get it to do this, especially as it isn't open source like Linux. Btw, that reminds me: if you were thinking maybe Linux might work on a TI calc, think again. There's almost certainly no way to do this. That said, I'm thinking of implementing a TCP/IP stack on my 89 so I can use it as a web server. Might even work
Also, you'd have to mess around with the kernel to tell it where load main storage from. This isn't as tricky as it sounds though. Maybe the best thing to do would be to find a copy of System 3.3 and try to disassemble it."
But that is not really having a Mac in your pocket, thats like having a drive in your pocket.
I installed the Mac emulator on my phone and since my phone has a higher resolution than a Compact I can see it full screen!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9ortjbhawo
Now THAT is a mac in your pocket
I installed the Mac emulator on my phone and since my phone has a higher resolution than a Compact I can see it full screen!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9ortjbhawo
Now THAT is a mac in your pocket
A Mac emulator for the iPhone would be awesome. You couldn't do it using that Safari/Fake program crap, but if you could get the real SDK then you could do it natively.
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