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Desk Accessories running in ...Mac OS X?

gingerbeardman

gingerbeardman

6502
Following on from my recent post about remaking Stapler https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/stapler-i-remade-a-32-year-old-classic-macintosh-app.48093/

It did the rounds at Hacker News, and I received this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213242

mistrial9:
"Tic-tac-toe desk accessory with the minimal DA support in system 10.4 .. running right now.. that binary is close to 40 years old if I am not mistaken."
Click to expand...

Can anybody shed any light?

I assumed they were running the DA in Classic environment in OS X in a bit of Matryoshka doll fashion, but they assure me they aren't.

mistrial9:
"no it is not "classic" nor Matryoshka .. there is a bit of wrapper code that was introduced in the OS 9 transition, and that code still executes under OSX.."
Click to expand...

No reply since.

Any ideas?
matt
 
DRVR is the resource type for a Desk Accessory I think, so that bit is adding up, but even so, I think it's only Classic Environment that supports this?
 
There is a copy of what seems to be this DA on the Macintosh Repository. The DA there contains the same two resources with the same ids, but the "alis" has different strings in it. The stuff they posted just seems a hexdump of the DA?
 
If the Desk Accessory was written in Carbon, might it work in Mac OS X 10.0 — 10.5-ish?
Or is it not as simple as that?
 
It's not quite as simple as that but that's along the lines I was wondering too - whether it could be a hybrid. Though, that said, it's probably not worth using too much brainspace on decoding a randomer on hackernews who appears to be giving intentionally obtuse answers.
 
https://github.com/ksherlock/mpw is a project to run mpw commands in Mac OS X. It uses emulation. It doesn't do graphical stuff but I suppose one could implement those A-Traps.

Code: 
~ % mpw commando
Unsupported tool trap: a86f (_OpenPort)
pc: 00f7457c

There is a similarity between desk accessories and MPW commands. They are code meant to run in the context of an existing application. So for Mac OS X, you just need to setup that context (along with the 68K emulation).
 
The mpw runner Is fascinating, it even implements some basic toolbox stuff! What mpw commands are out there that would be usable with this?
 
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