Consulair 68K MDS 2.0 complete in box

[Crutch]

In my never ending quest to accumulate obscure vintage dev tools, I’m pretty proud of this one arrived yesterday - a complete boxed copy of 68K MDS 2.0 in the Consulair branded box. I’ve never seen this anywhere before personally. What’s a “Toolbox Interface Reference Package”? Can’t wait to see if the five 400k disks work. (Not pictured but also included - the staple-bound v2.0 manual supplement.)

 

[cheesestraws]

oooooooooooh. Very nice.

 

[olePigeon]

These are specifically for developing on the 128k, correct? I seem to recall you originally had to use a Lisa.

 

[Crutch]

Right, the original 68K MDS was the first (I think?) full featured compiler for the Mac. However this version 2.0, at least, required 512k.

 

[Juror22]

I'm so incredibly envious! Nice acquisition - I also hope that your disks all work. There is no real reason to expect that they shouldn't, it looks very well cared for.

 

[olePigeon]

@Juror22 I sure hope so. My BMUG disk collection came with extra mold. Unrecoverable.

 

[jkheiser]

Did you find out what the “Toolbox Interface Reference Package” is? I wonder if it has assembly-centric documentation for all the Toolbox routines. Inside Macintosh’s documentation is largely Pascal-centric and it often leaves me wondering, “does the argument for this routine go into D0? Or does it go on the stack?!”

I have been hacking around with MDS 2.0 while using my boxed copy of MDS 1.0 for reference about the tools. It appears the manual was unchanged with this later release, but are there addenda in your box?

One of these days I’d like to try the Mac-to-Mac debugger, MacDB. Looks kinda fun.

 

[jkheiser]

It appears the manual was unchanged with this later release, but are there addenda in your box?

Damn my middle-aged reading comprehension; somehow I missed your last sentence about “the staple-bound v2.0 manual supplement”.

How long is it? Is it something you can scan and share?

 

[elbaroni]

Nice. I managed to get my hands on the Apple branded one last year — have had an eye out for this. I probably don’t really need both.

I’ve been trying to learn it using Dan Weston’s book — volume I of this guy: https://vintageapple.org/macprogram...embly_Language_Programming_Volume_ll_1987.pdf

 

[jkheiser]

I bought a physical copy of Vol. 1 last summer so I could read it on vacation. Dan’s practical examples really helped me get started with my own project. Stack frames with LINK would still be an inexplicable mystery to me without his 13-page tutorial.

MDS is a delightful sandbox to play in, especially on a modern computer. You can have multiple copies of Inside Macintosh open in Preview.app, find anything in a fraction of a second, while MDS builds your project in the same fractional amount of time with Mini vMac. It’s instant gratification. Doing this on real hardware with real books 37 years ago must have taken a lot of patience!

I might start a topic in the Hacks & Development forum about working with MDS.

 

[cheesestraws]

I might start a topic in the Hacks & Development forum about working with MDS.

I'd encourage this, would love to hear what it's like to use and what you get up to with it!

 

[Andy]

I would be interested as well. I've played a little around with MDS, but i'm lacking any documentation and the build system isn't very intuitive.

 

[elbaroni]

Really good idea. I use original hardware for the most part, but Inside Macintosh on iPad.

 

[Crutch]

@jkheiser where’d you get that physical copy of MacASM? Been looking for that one. Saw one on eBay a couple years ago for like $400 and passed. Nothing since that I can recall.

 

[jkheiser]

@Crutch It was an eBay find from March 2019, almost four years ago. The seller was asking $150, but took an offer for $90.

I was briefly infatuated with MacASM because of its unified editing and execution environment, but its kooky keyboard-centric interface proved to be too frustrating. All the old Mac assembly books teach with MDS, so that’s where I do my tinkering now.

Still, MacASM is pretty neat. Last month I used it to assemble Yves Lempereur’s Spinning 3D Mac demo application and uploaded it to the Macintosh Garden. It’s a tiny marvel I’ve studied while working on my own project.

 

[elbaroni]

Does anyone know if the source code disks to any of the early assembly books are preserved anywhere?

 

[jkheiser]

Does anyone know if the source code disks to any of the early assembly books are preserved anywhere?

I have not found the code that went with Dan Weston’s books, but MDS comes with a couple of beginner programs to get you started. I recommend “Sample.asm” on the second disk of MDS 2.0. It shows how to do a variety of common GUI tasks with the Toolbox, and every line of code is annotated with informative comments by the author, Bud Tribble, who still works at Apple.

 

[Crutch]

( I love that Tribble is there, though not to quibble, I would say he again works at Apple. He worked elsewhere in the ‘80s and ‘90s I am pretty sure. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2002...ple-as-Vice-President-of-Software-Technology/ )

 

[Crutch]

Finally got around to imaging these disks and taking a look at what’s on there — this self-identifies as “version 2.1” of Consulair MDS, so I wonder if it’s materially different than the Apple-branded 2.0 that I’ve seen before (and uploaded to the Garden a few years ago).

Unexcitingly, those two “Toolbox Reference v2.0” disks really appear to include simply MPW Pascal and Assembly equate files as a form of Toolbox ‘documentation’ described as “more accurate than Inside Macintosh” (see screenshot). I uploaded to the Garden here for anyone interested.

Consulair 68000 Development System (v2.1) - Macintosh Garden

This is version 2.1 of the Consulair Development System (earlier versions marketed as Apple's 68000 Macintosh Development System), the assembly language version (no C compiler).

macintoshgarden.org

 

[Andy]

I just did a comparison between 2.0 and 2.1 with ResCompare and diff and found very few changes:

The only program that is changed is Edit. 7 CODE resources are different, most being around 100 bytes longer. The DITL resource for the About box says version 2.1. Finally, the STRG resource is different. STRG appears to be a packed string resource that contains the menu items in the app. (the actual MENU resource only contains the Transfer menu) However, looking inside the app I couldn't see any difference in the menus between the versions. All other programs are the same.

QuickEqu.D and QuickEqu.TXT have the "QuickDraw private global variables" section changed from defining every private variable by memory location to being defined relative to one another. For example

    wideData        EQU  $FFFFFF76   ; Fake Region
    rgnBuf          EQU  $FFFFFF6C   ; PointsHandle

is changed to

    wideData        EQU     wideMaster-10   ;Fake Region
    rgnBuf          EQU     wideData-4      ;PointsHandle

TimeEqu.D and TimeEqu.TXT have one line changed

    NTicks          EQU    780      ; 780 ticks per msec

is changed to

    NTicks          EQU    783      ; 783 ticks per msec

Lastly, Nub programs are removed. MacIIBug1MB MacIIBug2MB MacIIBug5MB MacIIBug8MB are added. That's the only evidence of Mac II support.

@Crutch any chance you could scan the v2.0 supplement? I found the original user guide on archive.org https://archive.org/details/macintosh-68k-dev but haven't been able to find the supplement yet.