Hi everyone. This is a reproduction of my post to the CDG5 mailing list. I have written the easy ROM-hacking command line toolkit that I promised recently. Anyone who wants to peer inside their favourite Mac OS ROM, and maybe modify it a bit, should give this a go! Questions and ideas welcome. I hope to follow up with a built-in library of tested patches that can be applied to any image.
Hi all,
My pure-Python ROM toolkit is ready!
https://pypi.org/project/tbxi/Install with: 'python3 -m pip install tbxi' Invoke with: 'python3 -m tbxi' or just 'tbxi'
Documentation to come, plus some support for tbxi resource forks.
The 'tbxi' script can strip a NewWorld ROM image (or an OldWorld one) down to the level of ROM resources, then build it back up again.
You can place an executable patch in the source tree to have it applied to a given file before that file is used for a build. The patch acts as a simple stdin/stdout filter. It should have a base name that glob-matches the target file, and the extension '.patch' or '.patch.*' (e.g. 'Configfile.patch.sh'). (Before a patch is executed, you are prompted for a 'y' at the command prompt; work around this with 'yes | tbxi').
Rudimentary Macintosh metadata is attached to the output to make it bootable, either via an '.idump' file or in a BinHex blob.
My hope is to unleash the tinkering instincts of our forumgoing friends.
Best,
Elliot