this is fantastic Sonic, i was wondering about any progress on this project a few days ago. Thanks for the status report. You truly rock !

Sonic: Do you think it might be possible to run MacOS X without emulation some time (no need to be soon)...
This could be great news, so I could some programs that are not availible (yet) in PPC linux.

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Mario Andrés Muñoz A., M.E.
Lecturer - Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia)

Not soon of course, this is a spare-time research project for now, but this has high chances to happen. There are a lot of obstacles but all of them are overridable.

One would have to wonder if it's even worth supporting Mac OS X considering that Apple's made the switch to Intel. I'm sure after some years they'll drop support for PPC, meaning it would be limited to running an (then) older version of Mac OS X. I don't know how this would be beneficial to the Genesi systems or any other PPC system for that matter.

few years ? worth it then ! you are right when you say that Apple will stop ppc support in a few years but you'll probably drop your pegasos too by that time and use somehting else (still from Genesi i hope)

I guess you're right, even if for other operating systems on the Genesi machines and other PPC machines (if they crop up). But the days of Mac OS X PPC are numbered even if it is a long ways off.

Maybe for legacy PPC support of what would then be older versions of OS X in order to run those PPC-based OS X apps? Just speculation on my part.

I think somebody has already suggested, but could it be possible to make a linux enviroment (not MOL) that runs MacOS X programs (Like Wine)?

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Mario Andrés Muñoz A., M.E.
Lecturer - Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia)

Thanks to Neko, now i have all the information and the development goes on. At the moment i've written direct hardware VGA 320x200x8 framebuffer driver and i am debugging it. This will be used for Pegasos-1 and early Pegasos-2 firmware (if someone still has it). As soon as it works i'll write a new VESA framebuffer driver which will work on firmware 1.2 and support up to 1024x768x32. I hope to see some words from the kernel after this.

2 andremun: in theory it's possible, however look at Wine. This is the same kind of task and they still run not more than 1% of Windows software. In fact this is comparable to OS rewrite from scratch. It is very hard to to this in a somehow reasonable period of time.

excelent Sonic!

You're a master guy !

I dream about something like bootX for a long time.
Reporting it begins to work now is a very good news.

Thank you.

I wouldn't waste your time on those users. Anyone running Pegasos II firmware 1.1 isn't using it for anything interesting.

Pegasos I, even with April, I would not consider a useful platform for even testing the boot loader.

Just use the VESA stuff, and save some time.

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Matt Sealey

especially if the firmware upgrade for Pegasos1 is made public one day.

Neko is right, don't waste your time on it !

Well, i've almost finished it. It switches the mode, but the display goes off instead of showing a new picture. I've messed up something with the synchronization. I will finish it at least as my personal exercise with hardware. I've already learned interesting things while playing with it.

2 Neko: about VESA etc. There are also some words starting with fb8. I've found the description of them, they are standard words for operating 8 bit graphical framebuffer. According to the specs it is also able to work as a console. So - does it already work in 8bpp?

They won't work as the vesa functions are fairly low level and don't interact with the current console.

1.3 has a real framebuffer mode built on top of those vesa functions. At that point, the fb8 stuff will work.

It is actually faster to code the stuff yourself and CPU blit/line draw to the framebuffer than to use the fb8 code, because of the OF client interface overhead. Your problem would be with palette, but you can fix that pretty easily; use a 32bit mode

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Matt Sealey

Do you mean that i won't be able to upload a palette in VESA mode? Well there are workarounds:
1) Just upload it to the DAC via already existing direct-hardware code.
2) I also deeply doubt that someone will have a card which doesn't support 800x600x32bpp. So you're right here, i can omit all sophisticated tests and just force 800x600x32bpp mode. Anyway it's just initial boot screen for two purposes: displaying happy (or sad ) Mac's face and dumping kernel crashes.

Sonic if you make it (making my peg booting OSX natively), i swear i'll send you a bottle of the finest french wine !
go go go !