NeXT ROM's?
Jason Stevens
boots up at address 0x00000000, so logically that is where the rom
should be right? Or even saving that, does anyone have any image
files of the roms? I'm interested in interfacing them with TME, as
I've read that several SUN engineers once said that the next was a
glorified sun-1.... Which means that a sun-2/3 emulator ought to be
able to somewhat run it... Or I'm completly insane.
anyone?
Pascal Bourguignon
> Or how to dump them.. From what I gather about the 68000 is that it
> boots up at address 0x00000000, so logically that is where the rom
> should be right?
Not necessarily. Address space between 0xffff0000 and 0x0000ffff is
very dear because it allows for the faster half-word (16-bit)
addressing modes. Moreover, the interrupt vectors are in this range,
and you want to let the operating system modify them, so the boards
are designed to not address the ROM at these adresses in normal mode.
But when the machine is doing a cold boot or a cold reset, the
hardware may be set up to map the ROM there, and let the OS (or BIOS)
copy the interrupt vectors to a RAM page to be remapped to these
addresses. Once the machine has booted, the ROM may be visible, but
at some other address.
> Or even saving that, does anyone have any image
> files of the roms? I'm interested in interfacing them with TME, as
> I've read that several SUN engineers once said that the next was a
> glorified sun-1.... Which means that a sun-2/3 emulator ought to be
> able to somewhat run it... Or I'm completly insane.
Yes, you're completely insane.
On the other hand, OPENSTEP (4.0, 4.1, and 4.2) ran on Sparc
processors. If you have a Sun emulator, it might be a better bet to
buy an OPENSTEP CD to boot it on your Sun.
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
NOTE: The most fundamental particles in this product are held
together by a "gluing" force about which little is currently known
and whose adhesive power can therefore not be permanently
guaranteed.
Pascal Bourguignon
> Jason Stevens <neo...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Or how to dump them.. From what I gather about the 68000 is that it
>> boots up at address 0x00000000, so logically that is where the rom
>> should be right?
Moreover, the ROMs of a NeXTcube or NeXTstation are not useful at all
to run NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP. They only contain a small monitor and a
boot loader. Have a look at the various HOWTO boot NeXTSTEP on vmware.
David Evans
Jason Stevens <neo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I'm interested in interfacing them with TME, as
>I've read that several SUN engineers once said that the next was a
>glorified sun-1.... Which means that a sun-2/3 emulator ought to be
>able to somewhat run it... Or I'm completly insane.
>
Sounds like insanity. The DMA hardware and other things in NeXT
hardware wouldn't look much like what's in a Sun-1. Wouldn't surprise
me if they had no more in common than any reasonable 68k-based boxes.
--
David Evans dfe...@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
Research Associate http://bbcr.uwaterloo.ca/~dfevans/
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge